Silent Hill f got snubbed this 2025, and it’s totally undeserved.
The ongoing 2025 video game awards season has done Silent Hill f a disservice; the game has been dealt a monumentally unwarranted snub. It did not get nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2025, for one, and it was nominated in only two categories at the event.
This situation has made it clear once again that the awarding bodies still have yet to see the beauty and cultural power of horror games–a trend as old as time and as commonly seen even in other mediums of entertainment.
Truth be told, Silent Hill f is not the only victim of this perplexing bias. Many amazing horror games, like Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which didn’t get nominated for Game of the Year in 2017, or Alan Wake 2 or Dead Space, which did get nominated but failed to win–fell short of winning the accolades they deserved simply because the wider gaming community (including the judging panels for every award show, for that matter) seem unable to appreciate the intricacies of this genre.
The state of horror
Now, it's true that horror games feel like they’ve grown stale in the past decades. Some of the recent entries in this genre we’ve received are all too focused on scaring an audience half to death, and this is where I can agree that the horror genre has shot itself in the foot. Horror is simplified to loud, discordant sound cues, headphones-breaking jumpscare screams, and blood and guts galore, but it became this way due to distinct shifts in consumer-producer trends.
The genre is summarised by its faults and not its strengths. Producers have leaned towards action-oriented sequences when horror doesn’t fully thrive in that space, opting to flatten a promising story because depth is hard to market. It’s easier to just drown a player in nigh-impossible situations in order to manufacture despair.
Another factor that needs to be considered is that the genre itself is quite polarising. A large chunk of the community stray away from horror because they either can’t take the scares, or are completely incapable of processing the effects of being shocked. It’s understandable, but again, an unfortunate effect of how horror is simplified and watered down.
Simply put, the modern mind now associates horror with disgust and shock. It’s not supposed to be this way.
Beauty in horror, and everything in between with Silent Hill f
Frankly speaking, Silent Hill f still follows the current trends of horror games today. It’s ultra-violent, steeped in blood, and employs fast-paced combat mechanics that the genre is known for. However, in a similar vein to its main title predecessors, Silent Hill f conveys an incredibly rich and nuanced story that’s front and centre. Combat doesn't get in the way of how its story is meant to be perceived. It's a thematically rich narrative that's unforgettable and haunting.
The common tropes of modern horror games do not in fact weigh the story down–instead, the lush body horror, peppered with disgusting visuals that can make your skin crawl, actually elevates the way the story is presented. Every monster is built on cultural and societal sensibilities that the game is set in, transmogrified into grotesque physical manifestations of its ill effects on the protagonist, Hinako, and the people around her.
That’s something I feel is an art that’s slowly dying out–personable horror, the kind where you can see yourself in a similar lens, as if you could be in that same situation, which is what made Silent Hill f shine.
Sure, you can say that my views of Silent Hill f may be heavily influenced because I relate to the pressures and horrors of womanhood, but isn’t it a shared truth that, in a heavily patriarchal society, to be a woman is to anticipate the horror it comes with?
Silent Hill f hones in on the harsh, dark truths of my gender identity: forced expectations of being swallowed up by the husband’s family, erasing myself of my uniqueness to conform to his expectation, killing my childhood self and desires to serve his purpose, living in the prison of his gaze for the rest of my life. These factors are in themselves, incredibly violent in nature, even though they're all metaphysical and intangible.
And the way Silent Hill f gives physicality to these factors–the vomiting pregnant monster, the lumbering, disjointed crawl of the puppets without faces, hidden behind masks with excruciating smiles–breeds a different kind of fear in me. It’s scary because it’s familiar, yet unfamiliar. It’s strange because I'm supposed to know what they mean, but the meaning is too heavy to bear. It hits close to home, and the fact that it does is incredibly terrifying.
The spectacle of violence in Silent Hill f is anything but meaningless. Even the beautiful flowers growing on the ground could not mask the abject terror this game imbibes in you. As the story progressed and Hinako drew closer to her unapologetic truth, I found that I, too, was being swept away. I know what she went through. I know the pressures she faced. And I’m sure those who have had to carry that burden felt the same way.
To me, this is what horror should be: it reflects a lived truth, every single nasty, gory bit of it, in full, unapologetic detail.
The fact that Silent Hill f got snubbed rubs me the wrong way. For a story so gorgeously written even with all of its blood painted on my face, I still can’t fathom how the obvious story beats were ignored simply because it’s, well, horror. How unfair and incredibly disappointing to view this game from a pre-conceived and misguided perspective.
So what do we do? Of course I can’t keep lamenting over spilled milk. The awards season is almost over, but Silent Hill f is still here, and I just hope that its undervalued legacy will receive the recognition it deserves in due time. If it doesn’t, then what will horror come to in the next few years? Aren’t we all sick and tired of playing generic zombie shooters by now?
Horror cannot survive if it is only allowed to exist as spectacle; if it is stripped of its ability to interrogate culture, identity, and the quiet violence we endure every day. Silent Hill f understands this in a way few modern games dare to. It does not ask to be comfortable, palatable, or easily consumed by a demanding audience. It demands to be felt, to be sat with, and to be reckoned with.
Its legacy, award or no award, lies in that refusal. Silent Hill f stands as proof that horror can still be intimate, confrontational, and painfully human; swinging a pipe or a naginata be damned. Maybe that’s why it was overlooked during this awards season. Not because it failed, but because it succeeded too well at holding a mirror up to the truths we’d rather not see.
