Hating Silent Hill f: How the Internet Chooses Its Divisive Games

One of the most memorable moments of this gaming year was, for me, the arrival of Masahiro Ito on X. The historical art director of the Silent Hill series, with surprisingly clear English, interacts almost daily with passionate fans of the saga. Alongside dozens of well-deserved compliments, there are also pressing questions, endless requests for clarification, in the hope of extracting even the smallest detail about one of the most cited and reinterpreted series in the horror imagination. The best moments, however, remain those of debunking: complex theories, handed down online as dogmas, are deflated by laconic “no, James is not a rapist”, “no, Pyramid Head is not the franchise mascot”, “no, there was no secret message hidden in the 3D models”. A few lines are enough to generate astonishment, along with an embarrassing number of annoyed replies. Seeing him forced to intervene to remind people that he actually made that game, and that certain interpretations arose more from the desire to possess the lore, was revealing. It wasn't just a simple back-and-forth between nostalgics, but a precise signal: in online debate, the author constantly risks being excluded from the interpretation of his own work. Or at least, this is the reflection I would like to read more often, once the granite immaturity of those who prefer to drag the discussion to other shores has been overcome.

Hating Silent Hill, because it's not for me

With Silent Hill f, the picture repeated itself in a new form. At the time of writing, the game comfortably sits on a Metacritic score of 86 and with a positive user score (you can read our opinion here), yet just by delving into the dedicated subreddit or thematic threads, you'll find a resounding chorus of rejection. Something, however, was off in those comments. The tone, even before the content, brought to mind a sensation I had already smelled in the past. A déjà vu that I only recognized after picking up the controller: these were the same comments I had read at the release of The Last of Us Part II. Not identical in detail, but in format. The same vocabulary, the same rhythm. Phrases that seem copied from a handbook, as if someone had initiated a collective ritual where everyone repeats a slogan. The curious thing is that these phrases almost never truly delve into the merits. There's no discussion of level design, balancing, or technical quality. The objections always get stuck in the same few formulas: “it's not a real Silent Hill”, “it's politically driven”, “it doesn't feel like horror”. Generic phrases, encapsulated in a dry and definitive tone.

Not an argument, but a stamp. Sometimes an isolated image or a fragment of a cutscene is presented as proof, decontextualized and sufficient to support the thesis already decided from the start. It's the exact opposite of criticism: it doesn't start from experience, but from an abstract perception that needs to be confirmed. In this, Silent Hill f represents an interesting case. The game addresses issues of identity and social roles with writing that is rawer than we are used to seeing in a large-scale product. On the very first page of the protagonist's virtual diary, the expression “patriarchal society” is used (perhaps clumsily translated during adaptation, judging by some testimonies of those who played the title in the original language), but it is undeniably the signal of a precise authorial choice. The entire framing of the game is oriented towards a perspective of female growth, constantly keeping the focus on this point without ever reducing it to a slogan or a simple trauma. These are the foundations from which Ryukishi07 develops his vision, openly intertwining those passions for Satoshi Kon's cinema, repeatedly declared and which emerge here in watermark. A close-up in which there is no room to sugarcoat the pill.

It's certainly not the first title to do so, but it's rare for a brand with such a heavy name to choose this perspective. The herd effect doesn't arise so much from what is said, but from the simple fact that the narrative allows itself to say it clearly. It does so unequivocally, asking the player to empathize with an allegory far from everyday life but current in its roots. This is enough to trigger the rejection mechanism. I spent hours reading threads where positive messages - often signed by women - were overwhelmed by a wave of downvotes and aggressive replies. The dynamic is recurrent: once a community's tone stabilizes, every dissenting voice is silenced or ridiculed. It's no longer about the game, but about defending the collective script that says to hate it. It's the logic of assault: there's no need to motivate, just to reiterate the watchword. The game becomes a pretext. It doesn't matter if it works or not, if it's well-written or poorly written. It only matters that it is recognized as “not for me”. And therefore rejected without appeal, branded without any reason as 'divisive'.

Hating Silent Hill, by hearsay

“Divisive” has become the adjective I detest most in recent years. It’s the trick used to pretend to criticize without ever truly practicing it: a subjective feeling is taken and transposed into an objective universal characteristic, skipping every analytical step. It’s no surprise then that the same reflex re-emerges with Silent Hill f and, by extension, with the entire saga. It’s not about establishing who is a “true fan” and who isn’t, but about understanding how the baselessness of many objections arises. The impression, in fact, is that many people talk about Silent Hill online, but that relatively few have actually experienced it controller in hand.

The saga, due to its age and the absence of accessible faithful editions, has become more of a myth than a direct experience. It exists as a constellation of images, quotes, and handed-down phrases, much more than as a text to be traversed. Anyone who has frequented gaming forums or social media knows this phenomenon well: the construction of knowledge “by hearsay”. In the case of Silent Hill, the process has been amplified to the extreme. Video essays on YouTube, isolated clips of famous moments, viral screenshots, memes: from these materials, secondary knowledge arises that passes itself off as immediate. In the comments, it's normal to find users discussing scenes or meanings as if they had played them firsthand, when in reality they have only absorbed them from elsewhere. It's a self-feeding game of telephone: the original message distorts with each pass, but continues to circulate as truth.

The result is that when a new chapter comes out, it doesn't confront the real saga but a caricature of it. The fiercest criticisms of Silent Hill f don't stem from what was experienced, but from its distance from an imaginary canon that never actually existed. The title is accused of not respecting a supposed essence of the series, without considering that the saga has always been mutable, with extremely divergent chapters. People cling to a concept settled in collective memory, and use it as an absolute measure. The same “place of the soul” cited hundreds of times inappropriately, casually disappears when it is no longer convenient. It is a phenomenon that also concerns other historical titles, but in this case it appears more accentuated: just read the threads in which users quote each other, recalling phrases from twenty-year-old reviews or opinions reported in popular essays, as if they were objective data. The discussion fossilizes on ideas that have lost their connection with something assimilated firsthand. Thus Silent Hill f becomes the target of an attack that does not arise from contact with the game, but from the defense of a collective image built over time. The title is not hated for what it does, but for how it cracks the myth.

Hating Myst, because everyone plays it

All of this ties into another recent episode: during the summer that just ended, I finally got a monkey off my back and played Riven for the first time, enjoying it so much that I wondered if I hadn't liked it even more than its predecessor. While looking for an original copy, I stumbled upon a bizarre archive of articles and reviews that framed Myst's reception by contemporaries. I partly found what I expected: an unexpected best-seller, capable of breaking out of niches and invading living rooms, selling millions of copies and bringing video games to a new audience. Not “hardcore,” as the PS360 generation press liked to say, but transversal. It was perhaps the first true mass cultural expansion of the medium, ironically in the same year that Doom arrived on PC. That success, however, generated a surprising backlash: if today Myst is remembered as a cornerstone, at the time it was not always so respected. And here I must admit I was taken aback: I was unaware of how harsh certain public reactions had been.

The criticisms of the era, recoverable in the depths of the web, did not sting the mechanical functionalities of the game so much as its “social function”. Myst was “too slow”, “not a real video game”, “at most suitable for housewives and cousins”. Labels that, when read today, sound like attempts to delegitimize an experience that did not conform to the dominant model, masking a cultural rather than ludic annoyance. Some contemporary articles described Myst as a contemplative deviation for the medium, an unacceptable betrayal for certain forums.

It's no coincidence that dismissive definitions like “PowerPoint with puzzles” or “graphic adventure for moms” circulated: they didn't attack the game itself, but the audience that had adopted it, looking at it with suspicion and (not even too) veiled annoyance. Myst thus becomes a paradigmatic case: the retroactive hatred built around it served to preserve an exclusive idea of what a “real video game” was. Rereading those reviews and threads today means realizing that the fear of the medium's openness was already present at the dawn of online communities. The parallel with Silent Hill f becomes inevitable: the accusations about the excess of female themes, the marginalization of voices that defend it, the construction of a distorted memory, are nothing more than the updated re-proposition of that old mechanism. The only difference is that today echo chambers have infinitely greater breadth and speed, crystallizing judgments light years away from the works they would like to damage.