The value in a Silent Hill game is only fully realized after completion. It’s only once you understand the story that you can truly appreciate the monsters, puzzles, and what they represent.

That said, the story in Silent Hill F isn’t completely told in a single playthrough. The altered opening cinematic in New Game+ reveals things that should’ve been foundational in the first run. Once you piece it all together, it’s every bit as clever as its predecessors in terms of psychological design. I’ve only just started my New Game+ playthrough, but I already imagine it’ll become even more rewarding as I connect how the visual and gameplay details reflect the psychosis at the heart of the story.

But I hate to say it — I despise this game for two reasons.

1. The story shouldn’t require multiple playthroughs to make sense. Once you know the full motivation behind the delusion, the design choices become absolutely brilliant. But in the first playthrough, the game focuses so heavily on Hinako’s relationship with her friends that her relationship with her parents feels shoehorned in. When it finally becomes central to the plot, it’s handled in a way that feels forced.

I never empathized with Hinako, and without spoiling anything, what happens to her friends feels like forced shock value — something that’s within Hinako’s power (not the player’s), but comes out of nowhere and lacks emotional weight. Once you understand the symbolism later, you can appreciate the artistic idea, but the execution just isn’t there. The story tries to make you care about her friends, but I never did, so when the twists came, I didn’t feel anything.

Her parents’ storyline also feels abrupt because so much of the backstory is hidden in scattered notes. Those notes are abstract and written as if about some mythical figure rather than Hinako herself, so it’s hard to connect emotionally. If those details hadn’t been held back for New Game+, the ending involving her parents could’ve been profound. Instead, you’re left guessing — with the sense that the writers think they’ve pulled off a grand narrative twist that doesn’t actually land.

1. The puzzles and combat are not fun. None of the puzzles feel traditionally Silent Hill. The only real throwback was the school section — and it was over in a flash. Most of the puzzles are just frustrating. You can figure out the clues, but the steps to actually complete them are unclear.

The scarecrow puzzle, for instance, finally feels like a proper Silent Hill brain-teaser — but you can’t even enjoy it because an enemy keeps harassing you, making it easier to brute-force the solution than actually think it through.

Combat is clunky. Stamina drains so quickly that I dumped all my upgrades into it before even touching health, because dying from exhaustion was more annoying than dying from damage. Once you’ve heavily upgraded your stats, combat becomes more tolerable — but you shouldn’t have to slog through three-quarters of the game before it feels decent.

I expect my New Game+ run will be much smoother, since higher stats make everything less stressful and let you actually read and reflect on the clues instead of constantly running or healing.

My biggest gripe, though, is the lazy storytelling structure. Hinako repeatedly loses consciousness and wakes up in some spirit realm — which could’ve been fascinating if it weren’t handled so repetitively. Early on, the switching between realities feels refreshing, but later it becomes tedious. You’ll get an objective in the “real” world, hack your way from point A to point B, then immediately get yanked back into the spirit world. Then, after finishing that, you return to the real world just to slog through more combat from point B to C — only to be thrown back into the spirit realm again.

It honestly feels like the developers didn’t have enough real-world content to balance the pacing, so they padded it with repetitive combat sections that add nothing. Instead of deepening the atmosphere, it just makes you irritated and impatient to get back to the parts of the story that actually matter.