Konami says Silent Hill f has more “thrilling,” action-heavy combat because younger players are attracted to “challenging action games.”
In a recent interview with Game*Spark, transcribed by Automaton, and picked up by IGN, Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto and Silent Hill f director Al Yang opened up about the decision to give Silent Hill f a greater focus on melee combat, suggesting it was based at least in part on industry trends.
“Inserting more entertaining and thrilling action into Silent Hill f was an idea I had ever since the early phases of the development,” Okamoto said.
“And, since NeoBards 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 the developers,” he added.
This increased emphasis on combat was highlighted during the Silent Hill f showcase at the June 2025 Sony State of Play, at which time Okamoto said the game will have “a heavier focus on melee and be more action-oriented compared to last year’s Silent Hill 2.”
“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.”
Full disclosure: Dark Souls has never been my jam. I won’t wade into the discourse there; I just don’t have fun playing them, so I usually don’t. That said, I’ve felt some sense of petty vindication in recent years as the topic of Soulslike fatigue becomes more and more prevalent. I have nothing against these games and understand why some people like them, but it’s good to see a growing chorus of people in general agreement that, hey, maybe there are enough Soulslikes.
When I first heard Silent Hill f would be more combat heavy, I wasn’t worried at all. I like combat! I just don’t vibe with the Soulslike rhythm of dodging, parrying, and dealing poke damage as a big weird thing lumbers around a confined combat zone for 45 minutes. That’s why, when GamesRadar’s Oscar Taylor-Kent went hands-on with Silent Hill f and said he’s “anxious about the parry-heavy combat,” which he explicitly compared to the Dark Souls series, I was like, shit.
He wasn’t the only one either. After various previews from other media outlets mentioned this vague FromSoftness of the combat, a spirited online discussion was spurred into motion, with many expressing a similar trepidation to Oscar’s and my own.
Alas, Yang said, “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.”
I know, I know, I’m getting way ahead of myself here. With adjustable difficulty options and virtually nothing connecting it to Dark Souls beyond some vague similarities in combat, Silent Hill f isn’t a Soulslike by any stretch of the imagination. It’s just that Yang and Okamoto seemed to imply that Silent Hill f’s combat was designed to chase an industry trend that sounds a lot like Dark Souls that rubs me the wrong way.
In fairness, the quotes I’m interpreting were translated from Japanese, and there’s an inherent murkiness to intent that happens when you cross language borders like that. They may not have had Dark Souls or Soulslikes on their minds at all when they said that, so this could very well all be a whole lot of scuttlebutt over nothing. Here’s hoping, anyway.
Silent Hill f’s writer views the series as a “pie crust” that hides “its true colors beneath a layer of horror and fog,” and I say let him cook
