Silent Hill f remains true to the franchise’s ‘beautiful and horrible’ tone and atmosphere despite 1960s Japan setting, devs say

Silent Hill f is the latest and arguably most unique title in the survival horror franchise, with a new time period and setting not seen before in the series.

Today at gamescom, Destructoid sat down with series producer Motoi Okamoto and game director Al Yang to discuss the upcoming title and how, in spite of the changes, it’s still Silent Hill at its grotesque heart. Here’s how that conversation went down.

Note: Parts of this interview were edited to avoid repetition and allow for better text clarity.

This is the first time that you’re bringing the Silent Hill franchise to Japan. I wanted to ask how the team took the challenge of making a game based in Japan that kept to the themes of being a Silent Hill game without losing its core identity.

Motoi Okamoto (Silent Hill series producer, translated by interpreter Daiki Yamamoto): The scriptwriter that we have for this game, Ryukishi07, is very talented, and he has a very firm grasp on what constitutes a Silent Hill game. One of the core tenets of the game lies in how it focuses on the female struggle of societal expectations and pressures. This game will be focusing on that journey of someone who tries to fight back against such societal norms.

Al Yang (Silent Hill f Director): Now, to add to that a little bit. The thing with classic Silent Hill titles, it’s very different across the board. For [Silent Hill 1] and [Silent Hill 3], you have it focused on the order, for instance. For [Silent Hill 2], it’s one man’s personal kind of trauma. But across every single Silent Hill title, there’s one thing that remains the same, which is this very unique, pervasive, tense, dread atmosphere. No matter where it’s set, one of the main things we really had to capture was that feeling, that out of place, out of time kind of identity.

And with Silent Hill f, because it’s in 1960s Japan, it’s just far enough in the past where things seem familiar to you, like a phone or a car, but, you’re not used to seeing these kinds today, so it’s an extra layer of unfamiliarity. An example I like to use is like we have a school in the game, as you know, there was a lot of school in the first game too. Everybody from every culture knows what a school is, but do you know what a Japanese school in the countryside is like? The layout, the structure, and on top of that, it’s in the ’60s, so a double layer of unfamiliarity there. So for that, it was a core part of the classic Silent Hill titles, we made sure to do that for everything in Silent Hill f also.

You’ve already touched on it with the theme of the game with the female identity and going against the system. I wanted to ask if this theme was very prevalent early on in development and how the team came about creating a story regarding this theme that led to our main protagonist Hinako and the progression of the story overall.

Okamoto (translated by Yamamoto): The concept of female societal pressures is something that was decided on very early on. This was a theme that the script writer wanted to work with. So the early rough drafts for the plot were actually completed very early on and built on from there. And of course, the plot did undergo some additional revisions, so we added more to the plot and that connected to having even more endings than we initially expected, which probably led to a lot of extra work. Yes, but thankfully, Ryukishi07 is a very adept writer and he’s very quick to manifest his ideas in writing. So, I believe that that is something that came about very smoothly. And also, adding to the plot, there’s a pervasive concept in the game about exploring exploring beauty and terror, as we say, finding the beauty in terror. But this is something that we fleshed out as part of a four-way collaboration. It’s not just with the scriptwriter, but also with Kara, the monster character designer, and course our friends at [co-development studio Neobards Entertainment] and ourselves at Konami. We fleshed out that concept of juxtaposing beauty, the beautiful and the horrible, very early on, and we built a path.

With Silent Hill, finding the right balance between player power and player vulnerability is very important. I wanted to talk about the weapon system and also the durability system and how the team pitched this gameplay but also balanced it in a way that felt right for the series.

Okamoto (translated by Yamamoto): It’s definitely a challenge, as you’ve guessed. One of the main things we want to look at is how traditional ranged combat in horror games is very well established, and there’s a lot of things that work out very well for it. For instance, the closer an enemy is to you, the more tense you are, and then when you’re aiming down sights, have to wait for the crosshair to kind of shrink down. Everything is there to kind of slow the pacing down of the game. And for us, a lot of the actions we have like dodging and whatnot, it’s not that action games and horror games can’t have them, it’s that the pace and rate at which you’d be constantly being attacking, it doesn’t feel like a horror game. So, that’s something we really took into account. But again, for horror, a big thing is resource control, limited resources; you need to know exactly how little resources you have in relation to kind of the challenges you face to make you feel tense. So for instance, if I see a monster and I have a hundred bullets in my gun. I’m like, “yeah, you know, I’ll take this guy or whatever.” I have three? You’re going to think about whether you want to fight this guy or not. So, even though we’re fully melee, there’s a lot of analogs from traditional ranged combat. Durability is pretty much ammo. Our focus and sanity system is like aiming down sights, slowing down kind of like your perception and slowing down the focus. And for inspiration of this, we actually, when we started, we looked towards a lot of the older Silent Hill titles. We’re like, “okay, what’s something that’s unique and interesting that might appeal to both older players that might have played this, or also younger players bringing it?” As you know, like, younger players do like action games. So we did go a little bit more that direction, but again, we balanced it. Story mode is something we always like to pitch to classic Silent Hill players, because that’s where you get the classic experience. But at the same time, Silent Hill 4, very mainly focused, very heavy there, so we took inspiration from that and kind of built off of that.

Inspiration definitely feels like something that Silent Hill f is based on—not just the story and the history of the franchise, but other games, other horror games that have elevated the genre in some way. What were your main inspirations not just with gaming but with culture and movies when deciding the gameplay but also the world and the story that it’s based on?

Okamoto (translated by Yamamoto): Ryukishi07, his breadth of knowledge when it comes to Japanese folklore, mythology, culture in general, so I’m sure that he’s taken a lot of inspirations in order to cultivate the overall world building and the lore surrounding the game.

Yang: We actually did a lot of research on one of the prominent filmmakers in that era, prominent media, and basically took a look at how things worked out back then. And you can probably guess without naming names, but also looking at more newer J-Horror, and that slow burn, the way they build tension and hold it there before dropping it. We really wanted to grab that kind classic 60’s Showa era style and atmosphere but also marry it with more modern kind of J-horror tropes. So, that’s kind of one of the directions we took there.

With such a focus on combat with the gameplay, I’m curious to know if combat has become essential to Silent Hill f to complete it and to progress, or in theory if you were skilled enough, could a player go through the entire game without fighting a single enemy?

Okamoto (translated by Yamamoto): Something we find very interesting, and this is not just Silent Hill f or Silent Hill series but just games in general, is if you give someone a weapon, no matter how bad it is, they will fight everything in front of them. With that in mind, Silent Hill f is because we still are trying to emulate the horror game here. And then as you know, classic Silent Hill titles do have a lot of combat in there. But the key thing here is most of the game is designed [in a way] that you don’t actually have to fight everything in your way. That’s your choice. Even some of the stronger boss monsters you might have run across, you don’t have to fight them. There’s lot of opportunities to run away. In terms of the entire game, without giving a very specific number, you can get through most of the game without fighting anyone if you so choose and you’re skilled enough to do so, but we do also have bosses that you will have to fight. There’s no way to circumvent them, there are actual key points in game where fighting is the only option.

Silent Hill f launches on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S on Sept. 25.