Early on in Silent Hill f, as Hinako and friends try to regroup after the fog and its monsters roll into town, our girl finds herself stranded in the middle of a field, surrounded by scarecrows dressed like schoolchildren wielding sickles. Like many moments in f, the way through this challenge involves some puzzle solving and a couple of scuffles. What really makes this moment sing, however, is how it combines the separate elements of Silent Hill f into one: Puzzle solving, paranoid dread, and combat that will punish you for sloppy mistakes.
Read More: Silent Hill f: The Kotaku Review
The scarecrows are, of course, no ordinary scarecrows, and can definitely turn those sickles on you. They don’t attack immediately, however; instead, they remain frozen, waiting for you to pick the right one based on a cryptic riddle, after which the correct scarecrow will point you in the direction of the next challenge and eventually out of the fog. Choose the wrong scarecrow and you’ll get attacked, with few replacement weapons in sight. Oh, and you’ll regularly hear footsteps behind you as you try to figure out which scarecrow is the correct one. Yes, they are following you, but only when you’re not looking. The number of scarecrows and the speed with which they freeze when you turn to look at them is enough to make you question whether or not you’re hearing things, and even those footsteps don’t guarantee an attack every time you hear them. Early on, I wondered if the game was just playing the sound effect to screw with me. Nope! I was eventually attacked by one of these freaks.
The horror of this whole scene isn’t one of blood dripping red in your face, but instead comes from the pressure to figure out the puzzle, which is virtually immune to brute force solutions, in a timely manner. The sheer tension of this situation, sustained in the perpetual gray fog of this endless field, makes it one of f’s best moments.
Most of Silent Hill f’s puzzles resist brute-force solutions due to their sheer number of variables. Many of them are technically solvable by just trying out every possible combination, but it’s all too easy to end up spinning your wheels in frustration for far longer than is necessary instead (ask me how I know). What makes the field puzzle so uniquely resistant to brute force is that it punishes you rather harshly for just trying to spam your way through it.
Each scarecrow segment starts with a riddle like:
Can you even imagine how I feel?
I’ll put on my polite smile for now.
You’ll then need to choose the one that best fits the description from among around half-a-dozen scarecrows. It’s not easy; you’ll have to determine which scarecrow seems to give a “polite smile,” or in another instance, which scarecrow looks like it’s betraying another.
Against your better judgment, you’ll have to get up close and personal with many of the scarecrows, with footsteps playing behind you sporadically, and the chance that one of these freaks is actually ready to jump you at any moment.
During my first playthrough, I screwed up the final puzzle of this whole sequence and had about five or six scarecrows stalking me around the feels as I frantically tore at the remaining ones to find the correct solution.
The puzzle also deals with f’s consistent themes about love, longing, betrayal, and harm; so, not only is the game asking you to survive the dread of the endless gray fog and murderous scarecrows, but you’ll also be trying to figure out how this sequence fits in with f’s cryptic narrative. It’s a nice mixture of traditional survival horror puzzle solving, the threat of the game’s punishing combat, and its looming sense of dread, all without feeling like it’s a bunch of abstract symbol-matching or number crunching.
Source link
