Horror stories make the invisible visible. The horror in the story of Silent Hill f flowers from shame, silence and the stories women are told not to tell.

The identity conflict confronting protagonist Hinako Shimizu is rarely so visible in games. At 15, Hinako is a track star, her athleticism a quiet assertion of autonomy within a culture that valorizes restraint. Silent Hill f situates her in 1960s Japan, a nation poised between recovery and reinvention, where postwar uncertainty unsettled inherited hierarchies of class and conduct. Hinako emerges as both product and protest of that moment: a young woman whose burgeoning selfhood strains against the patriarchal logic that has long equated endurance with success and virtue.

Released in September on PlayStation 5, Xbox and PC platforms, publisher Konami and developer NeoBards Entertainment sought a new writer for the long-standing series that’s struggled recently for relevance. They enlisted the Japanese writer known as Ryukishi07, a former social worker who uses that experience to write harrowing, emotional visual novels like the When They Cry series. As he noted in an interview, past Silent Hill games put female characters through “a great deal of suffering.” His sensibility shaped Hinako’s journey beyond being a mere victim or vessel. He identified horror not in the spectacle of harm but in the quiet persistence of those who endure and survive it.

Previous Silent Hill entries have unfolded within the eponymous town, a fog-shrouded purgatory where inner torment takes physical form. I was skeptical whether the concept could work as a road show in different towns, but Ryukishi07’s writing paired with director Al Yang’s instincts restore a sense of purpose to the series, making Silent Hill f one of its most confident and resonant installments.

It opens with Hinako fleeing her parents’ argument about her future, descending upon the fictional harbor town of Ebisugaoka just as the fog begins to settle. There, she reunites with friends, only for their gathering to dissolve into panic when they are hunted by bloodied, flower-covered creatures and a barely glimpsed figure moving through the mist. What follows is a descent through Hinako’s own psyche, as she confronts the tangled bonds that define her - an estranged childhood companion, the girls who question her femininity and a family whose love feels indistinguishable from control.

Because this is a Silent Hill game, we help Hinako physically fight these externalized fears, using melee weapons like knives and crowbars in crunchy, counter-heavy combat. It’s no accident that the humble kitchen knife, one of the few deadly tools women are allowed to wield in domestic life, is the strongest weapon in the game. The game also has Hinako navigate both the real world - her school, with puzzles drawn from math and secret notes passed between students - and a ghostly “other world,” rendered here as a dark, ritualized corridor of marriage.

To read a Silent Hill story literally is to miss the point. Every event unfolds like a displaced memory - fragmented, refracted through time - and f is no exception. Characters mysteriously drift in and out of being, offering just enough to keep Hinako moving through the haze of her own confusion. It’s a work so dense with metaphor it takes replaying at least three times to fully understand the story. Every replay reshapes the narrative, revealing new motives, new fractures and truths glimpsed only in retrospect.

Because so much of this game involves women’s fears, I thought I should ask a therapist who works with those subjects. Michele Quiles, 31, practices relational psychotherapy with Triska Psychotherapy, a New York-based practice specializing in identity. Quiles finished the game twice, and as a therapist, she said she finds the game series “impressive in the way they represent aspects of the psyche, unconscious elements, repressed elements.”

“One thing I think about is ‘disavowal’ as a psychoanalytic concept,” Quiles said. “I think for ‘f,’ it shows the gravitational pull of societal pressures on the psyche. It was interesting to see flowers and beauty used as almost the enemy in the game initially. You can see that Hinako has to disavow aspects of herself to fit this idea of womanhood.” In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Quiles said, the imagined self struggles against social order, among other factors. “The self is an interplay of those things. But Hinako is refusing to accept many of these things.”

Hinako’s pressure to fulfill traditional roles in a domesticated household resonates universally, even beyond the game’s 1960s Japanese setting. As a Korean, I also experienced pressure from men in my family to chase certain jobs, get married by a certain age, or enjoy certain hobbies. I didn’t enjoy sports, much to the chagrin of my own father. Quiles identifies similar issues across many clients.

“It is quite present for people who go to therapy,” she said. “As someone raised in a Catholic background from both Italian and Puerto Rican descent, the pressure to be a girl is there and the themes about marriage are present, even if they’re not as overt or oppressive. We’re saturated in this stuff culturally as women.”

Still, Quiles and I were both struck by the game’s hesitance to outright villainize gender roles. At first glance, one might read it as a critique of masculinity, but the game instead shows men caught in the same currents, struggling to understand their place, their beliefs and behavior shaped by systems larger than themselves.

“Despite the fact that Hinako’s femininity is clumsy … she has a girl doll throughout the game warning her, even telling her she doesn’t have to disavow girlhood in the way that she thinks she does. The metaphors are interesting!” Quiles said. “You can sense Hinako wants to fit into womanhood and throw out the binary altogether. On one of the playthroughs, she exclaims, ‘I had no trouble being a girl, I’m fine with being a girl, it’s just that I don’t want to be told how to be a girl.’”

Like any good fantasy story, Silent Hill f turns the private into an epic saga. The world teeters on the edge, because for Hinako, her fears, her choices, and her claim to her own girlhood are the whole world. To surrender her sense of self, or her past, is a death.

All of this unfolds across repeated playthroughs, as the player builds Hinako’s power through combat mastery and growing confidence in navigating puzzles. The late game falters when it adds mandatory combat arenas, shifting the experience from meditation to a monster mosh. The Silent Hill series has always wrestled with balancing the thrills of combative gameplay (residue from its rivalry with the more Hollywood-like Resident Evil series) against a literary narrative. Silent Hill f largely succeeds, though not always consistently.

Even the game’s mechanics echo Hinako’s ritual-like push and pull between expectation and self-definition. Items repeat, tucked into the same corners, as if the world keeps handing her the same choices in new disguises - pills, bandages, sugary snacks, all fragments of care and decay. Combat, too, becomes ritualistic, almost wearying in its sameness as Hinako endures the repetition of being told who she must become.

What does the f in the title stand for? It’s a clever way to envelop all the game’s themes, like feminism, fears, family or friendship. It could easily stand for five, as this game is easily among the best in the series and meets the standard to be grouped among the first four entries.

Ryukishi07’s Silent Hill f traces invisible pressures and fears that shape a young woman’s life. Through gameplay and story, it externalizes the labor of selfhood, how each encounter, each item picked up or left behind, is another negotiation of identity, another refusal to surrender to the script written for her. Here, true horror isn’t in the fog, the blood or the monsters, but the shedding and rebuilding of the self until you no longer recognize who remains.

Platforms: PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5

Online: www.konami.com/games/silenthill/f/us/en