Getting started in Silent Hill f might seem like a straightforward affair, especially if you’ve played other survival horror games. However, developer NeoBards Entertainment threw in some fresh twists that change how you approach things like combat and puzzle solving, including difficulty options that drastically change how the game unfolds.
Below, we’ve listed seven Silent Hill f beginner tips to help give you a fighting chance at surviving the fog.
Choose your difficulty with care
Once you pick your combat and puzzle difficulty in Silent Hill f, you’re stuck with it for the remainder of the game. We strongly recommend you choose story difficulty for combat in your first playthrough. There’s a lot of it, it can be rather fiddly and annoying, and you’re better positioned to know which fights you can avoid after you’ve been through the game once already. Story difficulty also lets you recover sanity by praying at a hokora, which eases some of the risk management later in the game and lets you focus more on, well, the story.
Silent Hill f explains puzzle difficulty rather poorly. It’s not just that you get more clues on story mode. The entire puzzle is usually different — clues, solutions, the whole thing. Story mode difficulty still presents some noteworthy challenges, so if you’re mostly keen to progress through the story, this is the mode for you.
Check your corners
If you’re approaching a corner, it’s a good idea to pan your camera around first so you can see if something’s waiting to jump out at you on the other side. The enemy won’t notice your presence until you enter its line of sight, and while it’ll still make a ruckus when it leaps out, you’ll be prepared for it. You can’t circumvent all of Silent Hill f‘s jump scares that way — some of them are scripted, and some enemies are hidden inside a building or hidden on a ledge above you — but it’s at least a little relief for your nerves.
Mind matters
Be aware of how many sanity-restoring items you have, and make your plans accordingly. As tedious as it is to wait for an enemy to attack so you can counter, if you’re not near a hokora and are running low on restoratives, it’s better to play it safe than to use focus attacks.
Sanity might not seem important initially, as Silent Hill f‘s combat encounters are sparse, with slow enemies who frequently use moves you can counter. As you leave town and venture further into the spirit world, though, managing your sanity becomes much more important. Not only will you run into monsters whose attacks reduce sanity, but you’ll also start encountering foes who aren’t quite so obliging when it comes to telegraphing and using their attacks that you can counter. You’ll often need to use focus attacks to clear these encounters quickly and safely, but these take a chunk out of Hinako’s sanity. Once that’s depleted, Hinako starts losing health, and it’s a quick downhill tumble from there.
Practice strategic spirituality
Objects like the dried carcass are only meant as offerings at a hokora, and you should enshrine them at the first opportunity. However, you can get a bit of faith — which lets you upgrade your abilities — from enshrining other items as well. You get less faith for it, but sometimes it’s enough to push you over the edge. Whether you should enshrine them depends on your play style. Stamina-restoring items, for example, aren’t worth holding onto if you counter and use focus attacks instead of standard attacks, while you might not need sanity-restoring items if you rarely use focus attacks.
On story difficulty, it’s best to keep the more potent items on hand and enshrine the less useful ones. For example, always keep bandages and first-aid kits, since they restore a large amount of health, but arare isn’t as useful unless you’re consuming several stacks of it at once. That one’s for the shrine.
Turn up the volume
Silent Hill f makes ample use of audio cues to signal something important nearby. Sometimes, the music starts to change if an enemy is close, even before you can hear whatever awful noise it makes. In other cases, there’s no music at all, but the telltale squelching, thumping, slobbering, and chain-rattling noises are a pretty solid indication there’s a creature nearby that you’ll want to either avoid or prepare to fight.
Outside of the spirit world, you’ll also occasionally hear static from a nearby radio. Tracking these down is worth the trouble. Even though you don’t get anything materially useful from them like a new weapon, the thoughts and memories they play shed some light on Hinako’s past and what’s going on in the story. There’s usually a restorative item or two nearby as well.
Explore everywhere, read everything
Third-person action games tend to over-rely on notes and other scribbles for storytelling, like telling you the house you’re looting belonged to Big Timmy the plumber, now sadly deceased — informative, maybe, but inessential. This is not the case in Silent Hill f. You’re expected to find and read as many notes as possible, if not all of them, to better understand what’s happening to Hinako and everyone around her. Some of them prompt new journal entries to appear that won’t show up otherwise. Others put events in better context, such as, for example, explaining why a certain character calls Hinako a traitor at every opportunity. You can get by without knowing all the context, but it’s a much stronger and less confusing narrative if you have it.
Exploring is worth the strain on your nerves for other reasons as well. A dead end may be just a dead end, but equally often, you’ll find a rare offering to use at a hokora, an ema that lets you improve Hinako’s abilities, or, in the best cases, a pouch that expands your inventory. Inventory space is limited, as are upgrades for it, so every little bit helps.
Flee for your life — most of the time
Like most survival horror games, Silent Hill f doesn’t expect you to defeat every enemy you come across. In many cases around town and outside of it, the practical solution isn’t to bludgeon a Freaky Little Thing to death. It’s to dodge past it and run away. Enemies lose interest once you exit their line of sight, so they won’t chase you forever, and some segments, such as the trip across the mountain, have too many enemies to make combat a smart option every time.
That said, in the spirit world, it’s almost always worth just defeating the enemies. You end up having to double back on some routes in more than one scenario, and the ceremonial weapons you pick up here will never break. There’s typically an easily accessible hokora nearby as well, where you can restore Hinako’s sanity for free (in story mode) or for a price (in other modes), so use your focus attacks liberally.
