The ESRB has submitted their rating for Silent Hill f, and it’s a lot to take in.
Given that Konami very recently gave us a bigger preview of the game in the recent Silent Hill Transmission, there is no surprise about its pending release.
If you watched that trailer, or knew about the prior work of the writer, Ryukishi07, you are probably also unsurprised that it received an M rating from the ESRB. However, what may surprise you is what ESRB’s rating summary reveals about the game.
We’ll just quote ESRB’s rating for this:
“This is a survival-horror action game in which players assume the role of a student confronting supernatural entities in a 1960s Japanese mountain town. From a third-person perspective, players explore the town, solve puzzles, interact with characters, and battle enemy creatures (e.g., humanoid monsters, mutants, mythical creatures).
Players use axes, crowbars, knives, and spears to defend against and kill enemy creatures in melee-style combat. Blood-splatter effects occur frequently as characters are attacked; several areas depict large bloodstains in the environment and near corpses. Some enemy attacks can result in players’ character getting impaled in the neck and/or getting their faces ripped apart.
Cutscenes sometimes depict gore and more intense acts of violence: a character burned alive inside a cage; a woman branded by a hot iron; entrails and sinew displayed on serving platters in fantastical celebration/ceremony; a character sawing off her own arm; a character slicing off portions of a character’s face during a ritual.
Concept art depicts a nude mannequin-like character, with exposed buttocks and partially exposed breasts; the character appears in a creature-like form throughout the game.”
That’s certainly a lot to take in, and we don’t think people will even remember to look for Pyramid Head given the horrors described here. What may also not be captured here is something Ryukishi07 fans are intimately aware of. Because even though his When They Cry visual novel series were also known for being terrifying, he has a penchant for also bringing in moments of comedy and levity in between.
We don’t know if Ryukishi07 will be able to pull off that hat trick in a 3D survival horror game, but if NeoBards simply tries it, it will make Silent Hill f very different from not just the other Silent Hill games, but the genre as a whole.
All this promise of true horrors don’t quite guarantee that we’re getting a horror classic. But at least it should reassure those older fans, that even if this turns out to be a completely different Silent Hill, it could still be one that’s worth experiencing.
