“Silent Hill f” is a survival-horror game which is set in the Japanese town of Ebisugaoka during the 1960s. When a local teenager Shimizu Hinako discovers that a fog has enveloped the town which has become filled with monstrosities, she must find a way to overcome the malevolent beings and uncover the dark secrets surrounding them.
The game is rated M18 for strong violence and gore.
Played from a third-person perspective, the protagonist will explore dark and dilapidated environments to complete a series of objectives. Gameplay involves finding clues, solving puzzles and confronting or fleeing from adversaries. Claw attacks and weapons like a metal pipe, sledgehammer, axe, sickle, bat, crowbar and knife can be used to strike and kill enemies, while capsules, bandages, first-aid kits, divine water and offerings restore health and sanity. Cinematic scenes (including flashbacks) and collected documents expand the narrative.
Corpses, mutilated body parts, bloodstains and carcasses can be encountered during exploration, alongside frequent depictions of horror and a sustained sense of threat in dark settings. There are some depictions of graphic violence where characters can be slashed, impaled or dismembered, resulting in copious blood splattering and staining surrounding surfaces. Other scenes depict violence and gore, such as a character severing her own arm and having part of her face sliced off as part of a ritual without explicit details shown, ghastly-looking characters with hollowed-out faces and exposed bloodied entrails, and a character whose face peels off to reveal raw gory facial details. Under the M18 Classification Guidelines, “depictions of realistic violence, such as killing, maiming or causing other serious injury to humanoid characters” are permitted.
There are some sexual references without details, such as a character who is described to have ripped a page out of an adult magazine and taped a photo of a classmate’s head over a poster of a swimsuit model.