\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>s the humidity rises in 35-degree Tokyo, so too do the dead. Ever since the Edo period, Japanese summertime has been associated with the arrival of supernatural forces \u2013 a season defined by malevolent spirits. As the country\u2019s temperatures soar, it\u2019s believed that the barriers separating the world of the living and the dead begin to wane, allowing once contained ghosts to slither into our realm.<\/p>\n It\u2019s under this sweaty backdrop that I find myself wandering Silent Hill f\u2019s fog-laden Japan. Set in the fictional town of Ebisugaoka during the 1960s, players are put into the dust-coated shoes of a misunderstood teenage girl named Hinako. Summer or no, Hinako\u2019s tale begins in suitably bleak fashion. Fleeing her drunk and abusive father, Hinako miserably roams the intricately rendered streets of her rural home town. Failing to live up to the lofty standards set by her impossibly beautiful older sister, Hinako finds herself teased by classmates \u2013 lost, and struggling to understand her place in society.<\/p>\n \u201cGender is a big part of the story,\u201d teases series producer Motoi Okamoto. \u201cWe can\u2019t really elaborate too much but the 1960s was when the women\u2019s rights movements started to take form in Japan \u2026 So this plays a major role in why we decided to go with the time period.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Silent Hill f.<\/span> Photograph: Konami<\/p>\n Despite the town\u2019s inevitably eerie nature, Ebisugaoka is an utterly gorgeous virtual locale. As I roam its near-deserted streets, I can\u2019t help but peer into every cobbled corner, slide open each translucent bamboo door, and examine the lavish detail of every Inari shrine. It\u2019s a refreshing change from the Japan usually depicted in games \u2013 either a neon-drenched Tokyo or ye olde samurai epic.<\/p>\n \u201cHorror games from Japan \u2013 and based in Japan \u2013 have not seen major releases over the last decade,\u201d says Okamoto. \u201cSilent Hill has always been a marriage between western horror and Japanese-style horror, but as time progressed, we believed that the Japanese essence was starting to wane. So with Silent Hill f, we decided that we wanted to infuse the Japanese themes more strongly.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not long before the town\u2019s unsettling beauty gives way to outright horror. As a plume of fog descends on Ebisugaoka, puppet-esque beings pursue Hinako, strikingly beautiful red plant-like tendrils rising up from the soil. These crimson flowers can attach to your legs during combat, tethering you helplessly to the floor as the mannequin-esque monstrosities judder menacingly towards you.<\/p>\n <\/span>Dust-coated \u2026 Silent Hill f.<\/span> Photograph: Konami<\/p>\n In keeping with the setting, there are no firearms in Silent Hill f. Instead, Hinako defends herself with whatever weapons she can muster \u2013 namely daggers, baseball bats and scythes. Tense melee combat is the order of the day. Perfectly timed dodges and counters replenish Hinako\u2019s stamina, allowing her to land a follow-up attack, resulting in a surprisingly Dark-Souls-esque survival horror.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the first things that I had in mind going into this game was I wanted to incorporate more action,\u201d says Okamoto. \u201cBut of course, since this is a horror game, we can\u2019t lean entirely on the action. We also needed to have those tense moments in between \u2026 I think we\u2019ve managed to strike a fairly delicate balance.\u201d<\/p>\n Initially, I\u2019m not so convinced. For the first hour, combat in Silent Hill F feels gruelling and sluggish. Each dodge and hard-won hit is slow and imprecise, resulting in some baffling early deaths. Yet where early battles frustrate, I slowly warm to the tense melee, eventually clicking with its considered cadence. While the inconsistent difficulty in this preview build could use a pre-release tweak \u2013 one late demo boss saw me suddenly dying upwards of 30 times \u2013 the scrappy combat fits survival horror surprisingly well.<\/p>\n <\/span>Stress built into its systems \u2026 Silent Hill f.<\/span> Photograph: Konami<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people say they really enjoy being scared by horror games, but I think what they actually mean is that they enjoy the tension,\u201d says Al Yang, game director at the studio developing the game with Konami, NeoBards. \u201cThe fear of the unknown is one thing, but jump scares constantly? That\u2019s going to get very old, very fast.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, Silent Hill f has stress built into its every system. In a Lovecraftian touch, players must pay attention to their sanity meter, leaving offerings at shrines to restore Hinako\u2019s mental stability. \u201cYou need to know how close your candle is to going out, to really<\/em> have it feel tense,\u201d adds Yang. \u201cYou can see the durability of your weapons \u2026 you\u2019re very aware of your own limitations, of how close you are to dying \u2013 or running out of resources \u2013 and that<\/em> is what creates tension.\u201d<\/p>\n Where the early hours see you navigating labyrinthine alleyways, tightly knit streets soon give way to foggy rice fields and eerily abandoned farmhouses. Yet for all Ebisugaoka\u2019s horrifying monstrosities, there\u2019s a refreshingly human yarn at Silent Hill f\u2019s heart. As Hinako searches for her friends while the town goes to hell, flashbacks and believable conversations keep you invested in her past, present and future. As with previous entries, there\u2019s a dreamlike quality to every encounter, leaving you unsure which interactions are real, yet the beautifully realised 60s setting consistently grounds things.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cWhen it comes to exploring time periods, if you go too far back, it becomes so detached from our familiar reality that it basically borders on fantasy,\u201d says Silent Hill f\u2019s script writer, Ryukishi07 about the 60s setting. \u201cWhereas the present is too grounded in reality \u2026 so there\u2019s really no room for interpretation. It\u2019s why I\u2019ve always [enjoyed] the possibilities that arise from the period in between the past and present \u2013 that\u2019s<\/em> where fantasy and reality intersect.\u201d<\/p>\n It feels fitting to be playing a new Silent Hill during Japan\u2019s equivalent of Halloween. For years, this was a series that seemed dead and buried \u2013 but now, like the spirits crossing into Japan, Silent Hill lives again.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I became involved with Silent Hill, my plan was that we cannot just have one remake and let that be the end,\u201d says Okamoto. \u201cWe could have just brought the old fans back and had a nostalgic get together \u2013 but I wanted there to be some kind of progression. I think fans can have more faith that Silent Hill has made a comeback \u2026 and that things will keep coming.\u201d<\/p>\n Silent Hill f is released on PC, PS5 and Xbox, 25 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the humidity rises in 35-degree Tokyo, so too do the dead. Ever since the Edo period, Japanese summertime has been associated with the arrival of supernatural forces \u2013 a season defined by malevolent spirits. As the country\u2019s temperatures soar, it\u2019s believed that the barriers separating the world of the living and the dead begin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[9069,7238,9068,378,3222,386,337,8416,3048],"class_list":{"0":"post-15504","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-60s","9":"tag-classic","10":"tag-fogbound","11":"tag-games","12":"tag-hill","13":"tag-horror","14":"tag-life","15":"tag-silent","16":"tag-town"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}