Silent Hill f‘s success is due, in part, to the “hype” and community discussions surrounding the horror game’s release.
That’s according to Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto and writer Ryukishi07, who said in an interview with Dengeki Online (as translated by Automaton), that it was memes, fan-made content, and livestreams that made the game trend online, and especially in Japan.
“Recently, discourse about games is being consumed at a rapid pace,” Okamoto said. “But games that do get talked about even months after release are the ones that are fun to theorise about and analyse, and they usually get a lot of character fan art. From my experience, titles which are able to show us that kind of hype tend to live on for longer.”
Writer Ryukishi07 added that horror games “ultimately boil down to how much the player resonates with them. That’s why protagonists of such games tend to be on the less-talkative side, so players can immerse themselves in the game.
“It’s not something that makes you feel ‘I want them to be my friend’, it’s more of a dark kind of appeal,” he added.
That doesn’t mean we can expect all future Silent Hill instalments to be action-heavy or set in Japan, though. Ryukishi07 suggested that while the latest game shouldn’t necessarily set a blueprint for “the way the series should follow […] if the direction we took with [Silent Hill] f is well-received, hopefully it could become one of the examples of the Silent Hill series’ expressive range.”
I had a good time with Silent Hill f, awarding it four out of five stars, writing that Silent Hill f’s frustrating first-half is outweighed by a brilliant, delirious second that’s well worth the initial slog. Developer Neobards has since implemented an update to make replays a little more enjoyable, and the combat sequences a little less frustrating.
For more Silent Hill, find out why Matt thinks “Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 is exactly what a remake should be” in his feature about what makes a great remake.
