I’ve spent a bit of time with NeoBards Entertainment’s Silent Hill F over the last few weeks, mainly out of curiosity for Konami’s strategy in reviving the critically acclaimed horror series. I’ve spent my career observing the Tokyo-based publisher from a distance, having not extensively played the Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania, or Silent Hill franchises.
What’s made me curious about this revival effort (first announced in 2023) was its strategy to farm out development to multiple game studios without a unifying visual identity. The remake of Silent Hill 2 was able to ride on the bloody coattails of the original’s iconic monsters—but you couldn’t tell Silent Hill f is from the same series at first glance.
But maybe that lack of “iconic” creatures is a boon, not a bane, for Silent Hill f—and it tells us something about the process of reviving and nurturing game franchises.
Why aren’t any of Silent Hill f‘s monsters ‘iconic?’
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but scanning the internet, I don’t see any signs the Japanese folklore-inspired monsters of Silent Hill f have made as big an impact as their predecessors. I’d chalk this up to one key factor: the wide availability of high-quality 3D visuals.
The creature’s designs are still strong, and means NeoBard’s vision of rural Japense horror resonated with players without any gimmicky creatures shoehorned in. The scarecrow-like Ayakakashi’s stuttering movement plays excellently in the game’s open areas and the “Spawning Monster,” a beast with dozens of pregnant bellies, spews out enemies in a not-so-subtle manifestation of the protagonist’s dread over a forced marriage.
Meanwhile The Shiromuku’s bridal-inspired design continues that trend, while a mysterious individual known as “Fox Mask” takes a more demure approach, appearing as a handsome young man gazing at the player through a Fox mask, made more horrifying by his calm demeanor and how he guides the protagonist into dangerous situations claiming he’s helping her—but seems perfectly content to let her harm herself to complete mysterious mystical rituals.
Image via NeoBards Entertainment/Konami.
Again these are all strong designs (and like all Silent Hill monsters they are deeply anchored to the protagonist’s psychological turmoil) but they don’t ascend to “iconic” status. That’s probably because they exist in a world where games that aren’t even in the horror genre have their own roster of gory monstrous creatures rendered in high graphical detail. They’re competing with the ominous beasts of Elden Ring or freshly French-inspired designs of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Those games aren’t even horror games. The monsters aren’t meant to scare, they’re meant to grab the eye. Most aren’t even what you’d call “iconic.” Only Elden Ring‘s tragic armored knight Melania and Clair Obscur‘s ally characters Monoco and Esquie seem to have made any impact. That’s not to slight any of these designs. It just shows the technology available to developers has raised the bar exceptionally high.
In 2001 PlayStation 2’s hardware was so limited that Team Silent famously used the town’s ominous fog to lower the required rendering distance in a desperate bid to squeeze as much memory and performance power as they could.
It’s in this context that Pyramid Head emerged: a product of strong art direction, game design, and writing that seemed especially monstrous, especially in a period where horror games were drifting towards becoming more action-oriented titles. Someone laser-focused on marketable characters that could drive future Silent Hill titles might be disappointed these creatures don’t make the mark.
But Konami’s trust in NeoBards’ vision—combined with its multi-pronged release strategy—may be instructive for how other developers can revive dormant franchises and keep ongoing ones fresh.
Konami can have its cake and eat it too
Series and franchises are important to the game business because they both breed familiarity for players and can provide stable ground for developers to work on, not having to reinvent all the wheels with every new game (just a few of them, sometimes).
By kicking off its Silent Hill revival with Silent Hill 2 and not Silent Hill, Konami quickly rushed the most “iconic” game in the series back in the spotlight. That game’s success reacclimated players to the horror franchise, and the fast follow-up of Silent Hill f came not as a surprise diversion, but an organic introduction to the “next chapter” of Silent Hill.
When a series stumbles—as Silent Hill did in the 2000s before going dormant for a decade—it’s painful for all involved. The art direction of Silent Hill f shows us one way developers can re-energize franchises without just replaying the hits: diversifying the types of releases and distributing “familiarity” versus “experimentation” between different games and possibly different developers.
And with the next chapter laid out—and over a million copies sold just a week after launching—Konami’s laid out a vision for Silent Hill that’s bigger than one monster or series: carefully crafted psychological horror where the monsters come from inside the player characters…and show how monstrous they are in turn.
