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It seems like more and more series are leaning harder into the action gameplay genre these days. Square Enix has made no apologies for shifting the Final Fantasy series from turn-based to action combat, and now Konami is doing the same for Silent Hill. The next game in the iconic horror series, Silent Hill f, is making the same jump, both to keep the series from feeling repetitive and to attract younger audiences.

Silent Hill f represents the first mainline game in the Silent Hill series since 2012 and represents some big changes for the series. Not only is it shifting the location from the US to Japan to lean more into Japanese horror tropes, it features more action-focused gameplay. Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto explained that this was always the intention since the game was first conceived and has guided pretty much every choice in its development. “Inserting more entertaining and thrilling action into Silent Hill f was an idea I had ever since the early phases of the development. And, since NeoBards Entertainment is a company that’s tremendously good at making action games, this is also one of the reasons why we decided to choose them as developers.”

“The Silent Hill series isn’t considered a game that has entertaining action per se, but as we’re opening our doors to new players, we began to wonder what it would be like if we added more of those elements into the game,” Okamoto added. “Challenging action games are gaining popularity among younger players nowadays, so I believed that if we implemented such elements into the game, it would resonate well even with people who are new to the series.”

Al Yang, the director of Silent Hill f, also wanted to implement more action into the game to differentiate it from the recent Silent Hill 2 Remake. “We didn’t want to end up recreating Silent Hill 2 over and over again, and we were aware that there was no reason to keep making clones of it. So, in order to avoid repeating what previous major titles did, we decided to make the action stand out more.”

Will the massive change in tone for the game be worth it? We’ll find out when Silent Hill f comes out on September 25, 2025.

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