I'm a Silent Hill fan since the PS1 days. Exploring a dead city and solving it's terrible mysteries is something that fascinates me. I was a bit skeptical when I saw Silent Hill f, since the game doesn't actually takes place in that town. But Ryukishi07 is the writer, and I trust this guy a lot! Higurashi and Umineko are both masterpieces of writing.
Silent Hill f tells the story of Hinako, a young girl that according to herself has nothing of special, except the fact that she is very tall for a girl her age. She has a drunk father and a mother victim of his abuses. One day she flees her house to join her friends trying to escape her suffering. But after meeting them, something weird happens: The town around them gets deserted, flowers sprouts everywhere, and monsters attacking.
Hinako gets separated from their friends, and the horror begins with a lot of mysteries going on. Can she gets back to her normal life...? Or is that what she really wants...?
After starting a new game, we can choose the difficulty of the Action and the Puzzles.
Action: Story > Hard
Puzzles: Story > Hard > Lost in the Fog
From what I saw, it doesn't affect the plot. But playing with Action on Hard will make Hinako more vulnerable to loss of sanity and you will need to do more chores to restore health. Story mode will go easier on you. The puzzles in harder difficulties will give you less hints.
Hinako keeps a Journal where she updates the info about her friends, the town, and the monsters. It also gives you hints for puzzles, but you need to find about them first. For example, there's a puzzle early in the game where you have to memorize a pattern of symbols. Once you find the 3 symbols, Hinako will write them in the Journal, so when you go to the puzzle, you can open it and see the answer. Well, I'm playing on "Hard", I don't know if the "Lost in the Fog" difficulty makes the hints go away.
There are no firearms in the game, so all combat is melee. Your weapons have durability, so you need to find toolkits in order to keep them from breaking. I was playing some time ago, and I was at a place that looks like the rural area from the town. I had two steel pipes. One of them broke, and the other was about to break. At the last moment, I found a toolkit. I don't know if those itens are scarce or if I suck at finding them. But yeah, so far new weapons and toolkits seems to be very limited.
You have a normal attack and a heavy attack that costs more stamina. Heavy attacks stun the enemies, while they don't even react to normal attacks and takes less damage. You can dodge attacks at cost of stamina, and use a focus attack, where Hinako deliver a strong focused blow at the monsters. You need to charge it, though.
Health itens are very easy to find, in fact in those two hours I got a nice stock of them. I don't know if they'll be more rare after some point, but I'm having no problem. You can save at altars, and make offerings to the Gods, by giving them itens. With this you get Faith points that can be exchanged for charms that gives you advantage in battle.
So far so good. I'm having a lot of fun with the plot, and I like the characters already. Silent Hill f seems to be another hit from KONAMI, and I can easily say that this is the best horror game I played this year.
