Regardless of our parents’ intent, they often pass their traumas to us. To conquer these, it’s important to understand them. The world can throw so much chaotic cruelty at a person in the course of their life that it can be difficult to ascertain meaning, which is crucial to the healing process. A marker of adulthood for many is coming to terms with one’s parent’s failings. We needn’t necessarily forgive our parents or those who have wronged us, but to put their actions into a greater context of their social and societal pressures, we can build a causal map that can help us better understand them and ourselves. Silent Hill f is about many things, but this may be its core. To heal is to understand.
The main plot of Silent Hill f is that of teenager Shimuzu Hinako, who is under immense social and societal pressure in small-town Japan in the 1960s. Her father is debt addled and abusive, and her mother seems to constantly enable and acquiesce to his behavior. After a fight with her father, she leaves home to socialize with her friends at the local convenience store. Soon after, a mysterious fog rolls in, along with an army of horrific monsters. One of her friends is instantly killed—her skin overtaken by fungus and red spider lilies, and the rest separated in the deep fog.
Half the narrative is Hinako attempting to reunite with her friends and escape the town. The other is when Hinako occasionally finds herself transported to another world, where she’s guided through horrifying challenges by the mysterious Fox Mask, whose true intentions seem unclear. Among these trials are several monster encounters, the murder of her best friends, and her own self-mutilation. The choices made throughout the game wrap these up into four potential endings (five, if you count the joke UFO ending).
After rolling credits on Silent Hill f, players may not immediately grok how important it is to replay the game at least twice. I’ll be the first to admit: I’m not a huge fan of this narrative device in games. While it can be interesting to take one of games’ greatest strengths (replay value) and weave this into the primary narrative, it often feels like a cheap shortcut to profundity. If this were an actually interesting part of the content, it would not have taken away from the story to be included in the initial playthrough of the game. Of course there are exceptions to this rule (Nier, for example, and somewhat less so route B of Nier: Automata) but I usually find this tests my patience. Despite this, Silent Hill f uses it to great advantage.
Silent Hill f takes the agony of the repetition of decision making and makes it textual. Hinako must fight the monster, kill her past, and suffer over and over again. Start from the beginning, extract shreds of new context, review the decisions that lead her here. Once more from the top. Let’s review. With each new playthrough the structure of the game remains almost the same, but slight alterations in cutscenes, new dialogue in place of the old, new journals to discover – these all lead to a greater understanding of the people in Hinako’s life. Their interiority and their perspective, which lends Hinako and the audience a new narrative understanding. The context constantly shifts, characters become sympathetic and hateable and then sympathetic again. I smiled ear-to-ear as a simple image within the last fifteen minutes of the final run helped the grand point the game was making click into place. It’s a narrative magic trick that’s based, structurally, on the way humans derive meaning from their past.
I used to be really close with my mother. My parents split when I was very young, and constantly swapping between households, I found myself much more comfortable in my mother’s home than my father’s. My mother was an interior designer and made a home of quiet, low light. As I became a teenager, we found ourselves constantly in conflict – my mother entered into an abusive marriage, which transformed that quiet comfort into a violent, paranoid, and unstable home. By the time I left for college, I found myself opting to stay as far from her as possible. When I moved back to my hometown after graduating, I rented a house around the corner from her, and would still go months without speaking to her. I spent many years in therapy discussing this dynamic, trying to untangle why it was that our relationship fell apart. Many a therapist tried to help me be OK with this.
It wasn’t until some months ago I had one of our semi-annual phone conversations in which she lamented her struggles connecting with my nephew.
“He’s such a boy,” she said. “I don’t know how to relate to him. When you were his age, you were so quiet and calm and sweet, but he’s so energetic and loud. He likes to play in mud and he thinks farts are hilarious. Your sister is upset with me because he doesn’t think his grandmother loves him.”
It wasn’t until this moment that I finally understood what drove us apart – by the time I was in my mid teens, I was becoming a man, which she could no longer relate to and no longer liked. I was becoming sexually active and struggling with my masculinity and morphing into something unrecognizable, and perhaps she resented me as I started to resemble this more than the “sweet quiet boy” she had loved. I will spend a significant amount of time, perhaps the rest of my life, trying to decide if I forgive my mother for what became of our home in my teen years, but I do understand her, and recognize her humanity in that understanding. I am hopeful that she does not repeat that same mistake with my nephew.
Silent Hill f understands the process of combing through the memories, searching the same sights, the same pivotal moments, to extract the meaning lingering on the margins. It understands, deftly avoiding the “both sides” pitfalls, the way societal and gender norms endanger and destroy families, friendships, and relationships. Silent Hill f isn’t just a bleak psychological horror, it’s the story of a flawed community trying its best to overcome the boxes they’ve been placed in by forces older than anyone can remember, of questioning tradition and growing as a people, and of mourning the lost opportunities and hoping for a better future.
The true ending to Silent Hill f, which I won’t spoil here, is probably the most positive of any of the series’ endings, as it imagines a true potential for the future of its characters. A world where the societal pressures recede and allow time to breathe, to consider, to contemplate. It’s dreary and sorrowful, but bright and mysterious, like watching the sunrise from the porch of a cabin far away, before the world wakes up and hums with possibility.
p.s. the combat is good, actually