After playing Silent Hill f for five hours last month, I walked away excited about the game’s prospects, and looking forward to its Sept. 25 release. But I did have a few questions for Konami and developer NeoBards Entertainment, the least consequential of which was: “Why is it called Silent Hill f?”
I asked Silent Hill producer Motoi Okamoto the question about the meaning of “f” in the game’s title while visiting Konami’s headquarters in Tokyo, but, as expected, he played coy. “We have a lot of different meanings infused into that f,” Okamoto said through a translator, “but that’s something we would like to leave as an open-ended question for players to explore and come to their own conclusions, so I’ll refrain from elaborating on that.”
Al Yang, studio creative director of Silent Hill f, was seated next to Okamoto, and seemed to really enjoy Okamoto’s carefully worded dodging of the question, so I asked him if he’d like to elaborate. Yang punted to Okamoto, who reiterated, “There are multiple different meanings that we have envisioned, so we would like players to take the time and try to find out for themselves.”
In the absence of any kind of official answer to Silent Hill f’s naming decisions, I have some theories that I’ll present, starting with the most obvious.
f for five
The last Silent Hill game to get a number in its title was 2004’s Silent Hill 4: The Room, prequel Silent Hill Origins (released as Silent Hill Zero in Japan) notwithstanding. Konami may be subtly giving fans a hint that this is the fifth mainline Silent Hill game, despite a long list of sequels (Homecoming, Downpour, etc.) coming after Silent Hill 4.
Calling the new entry Silent Hill 5 would come with a lot of weight and expectations, and could potentially turn off newcomers to the sequel who might be worried they’d need to have played “the first four” to understand this one. So f may be a subtle way to signal to fans that, yeah, Konami considers this Silent Hill 5.
f for forte
The f in Silent Hill f is actually stylized as ƒ in its logo, and an italicized, hooked f is used as a direction in music to mean loud or strong. Loud would certainly be a contrast to the “silent” in Silent Hill, and since musician Akira Yamaoka appears closely creatively involved in the development of Silent Hill f, perhaps some of this was his idea.
Silent Hill is frequently about two worlds, and Silent Hill f is no different: Players will explore the “real world” and an otherworld throughout the game, and perhaps the f represents one half of the places we’ll visit.
f for female
You may want to skip this section, if you’re overly concerned about spoilers. But one of the recurring narrative threads in the early hours of Silent Hill f touch on protagonist Hinako Shimizu’s platonic relationship with her classmate Shu, and how she seems unlike other girls in her hometown of Ebisugaoka. We know from the beginning of the game that Hinako’s elder sister Junko is the favored daughter, and that Hinako is often the target of abuse from her father. Does that familial strife and Hinako’s tomboyish nature play into gender roles in Silent Hill f? Does f, shorthand for female, imply questions about her gender identity?
f for mojibake
Let’s return to the character ƒ, as it is stylized in Silent Hill f‘s logo. The character ƒ frequently appears in mojibake, the garbled text that can appear when translating certain character encodings. As someone who used to work adjacent to language localization, I would see mojibake — a Japanese word meaning “character transformation” — a lot when working on Japanese-language websites. This interpretation may feel like a stretch, but the concept of “character transformation” feels too good not to mention.
We’ll probably have a much clearer answer to the f of it all next month, but it might take five playthroughs to understand it all.