I’ve been a Silent Hill fan since I was way too young to be playing the franchise. I’ve seen its ups, its downs, its further downs — and now, I’m blessed to see its resurgence.

Silent Hill: f is special in that, while it isn’t the first game in the franchise to take place outside of the titular town, it is the first one to take place outside of the country and to have its plot and characters deeply rooted in culture. SH:f blends the strengths of SH2 (ambience and ambiguity) with the strength of SH3 (combat and a coming-of-age story).

The story of SH:f is, much like SH2, left to be pieced together by the player. The game doesn’t hold your hand in this regard, and it’s not only refreshing to see that this staple has remained, but refreshing to see such bold ambiguity in the modern gaming age where everything is either extremely blatant or so extremely subtle that you’re looking at the color codes of characters to extrapolate important plot points.

Combat is something that, quite frankly, has always been strangely divisive among SH fans. Some think that a focus on combat detracts from the subtlety of the story (even though the background of everyone’s favorite title is absolutely drenched in violence). Others point out that even in the PS2 era, SH2 had a combat-heavy trailer that wasn’t really representative of the game. My two cents? We need to stop acting like games outside of SH2 don’t exist. SH3’s entire plot revolves around violence, and the gameplay — and even the endings you get — are a direct reflection of that.

So I was happy and surprised to see how combat-heavy SH:f was. Your weapons break. You can combo enemies. There’s even an RPG mechanic — something horror games have tried before, but never really pulled off. SH:f is very unsettling at the very least and outright scary at best, because despite the emphasis on combat, you rarely feel powerful. And when you do, it’s because something has happened in the plot…and that something is so horrific that you find yourself not wanting to feel powerful because of what it means for our protagonist, Hinako.

The town of Ebisugoaka feels alive in the same way Silent Hill itself does: echoes of a once lively town with rich history, now stripped of the cheer that once made it such a wonderful place and left in an oppressive fog that hides just as many secrets as it hides truths. As a non-Japanese person, the building structure and layout of the town was a bit alien to me. I couldn’t easily identify what might be a store (unless it was made blatantly obvious) vs a house vs a combo of the two, although this was due in part to me constantly running for dear life and not being able to stop moving. This isn’t a criticism at all, but a note that those unfamiliar with rural Japan will find themselves captivated by the environment, but perhaps a little lost in a way the game didn’t intend.

But then again, I have the map-reading skills of Christopher Columbus and can barely make it around my house without getting lost.

The game offers a complex look into a family torn apart by multiple forces, and the price paid for trying to buy your freedom in the most terrible way. It’s meant to be replayed multiple times, with cutscenes changing slightly — or being skipped altogether — on replays, to give more of the story and make replays more time-conscious. While this is a unique and interesting approach, it does come with one very unfortunate problem, which is perhaps the biggest problem for me:

You are locked into a single ending on your first playthrough, even if you technically satisfy the conditions for a different ending.

After learning this, it made it feel as though my attention to potential paths and choices made (not narrative choices, but gameplay) were meaningless. That being said, the twist in SH:f is easily one of the franchise’s best, and I dare say it matches the gravitas of the twist in SH2. I was absolutely floored when the plot revealed the truth to me, and it recontextualized my entire replay.

Speaking of replay…there’s another choice here that I don’t quite like. In previous games, your endings were more organic. In SH3, your ending changed based on how many enemies you killed, playing into not only what Heather (and the player) feel based on its plot twist, but also the lore of the game itself. SH2 boasted roughly a dozen different endings, and some were based upon how often you healed, how you interacted with Marie (whether you let her get hit by enemies or checked on her during specific parts of the game), what items you looked at, etc.

In SH:f, however, the endings are listed in an actual menu, and their requirements are made abundantly clear. There’s no guessing game, no sense of adventure or wonder to be found there. Granted, SH:f is far from a short game. It’s astoundingly long for a survival horror title, so maybe the devs feared people would accidentally get the same ending twice and then not want to play again. Yet at the same time, you must gather specific items for these endings and use them in specific places. I knew the former, but not the latter, and had gotten to a point in the game where I couldn’t return to the area where I needed to use one of the items due to plot. The area was still there, I could see it on the map and skirt around it. But I couldn’t visit it. Without reloading an earlier save, this little stumbling block invalidated my entire replay, because there was no question about me getting anything other than the default ending. The game already told me.

The big question, though, is has Silent Hill pulled a John Wick? Is it back? The series floundered after SH4 (with some saying SH4 was a lukewarm entry), falling into the trap of trying to mimic popular trends rather than staying true to its own roots. Similar to Resident Evil, the town was a Japanese take on an American setting, which gave it a certain charm. But entries such as Homecoming were actually Western, and carried Western sensibilities that made it feel as though I was going through a psychological splatterhouse rather than a dreary, subtle journey through growth and madness.

My take? While yes, you could remove “Silent Hill” from the title, call it something else, and lose nothing — that’s technically true of SH2, as well. While most people think the heart of the franchise is how the town turns your inner demons back on you, it actually isn’t. The heart of the first game is a cult. The town is manifesting a magical girl’s psyche, yes, but because of her ties to the cult. SH3 follows up on this in the most direct way possible, yet quite literally half of the game doesn’t take place in Silent Hill, with SH4 not taking place there at all. The antagonist’s motive has nothing to do with a cult, but what he does and why he does it is because of his ties to the very same cult.

You can’t have Silent Hill unless you have The Order, and yet the most well-received entry only hints at this and has very little, if anything, to do with it. So does that invalidate SH2 as being a “true” SH game? Or does that invalidate The Order as being the heart of the franchise itself, and instead, it’s the titular town? If the latter, does every game need to take place in Silent Hill?

I would say…no. It doesn’t. Because the heart of Silent Hill isn’t the cult, or the psychological themes. The heart of Silent Hill is a character’s relationship to a mystic force that dominates a particular area, and how that shows and affects their psyche. It doesn’t have to be in Silent Hill, and it doesn’t have to be The Order. So long as those two things are there, and the fog persists, then you have a Silent Hill game.

So is Silent Hill back? I didn’t have a good answer for this, but after thinking about it more…yeah, I’m thinkin’ it’s back.