Interview: ‘It’s All About That Unfamiliar Feeling’

Silent Hill F launches this week, and we recommended the game in our PS5 review.

Prior to its release this week, we had the chance to sit down with Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto from Konami and director Al Yang from developer Neobards.

While we only had 10 minutes to chat, we were eager to drill into some of the finer details around the game’s art direction and also explore just how important it is for Silent Hill’s horror to be grounded in a way the average person can relate.

We’ve presented our full conversation below, with light editing for readability.

Push Square: We wanted to start with some art questions. The town feels like a very real place, especially the convenience store at the start of the game. Can you talk specifically about why you selected the Japanese setting and how you made it look so and feel so realistic?

Motoi Okamoto: I think the main reason why is because it’s based on an actual existing location in Japan, the town of Kanayama in Gifu Prefecture. And we also think that it’s because of all of the painstaking effort that the team put into actually realising it.

Al Yang: We sent teams over both from Konami and from the Neobards to reference walk through the town because you get a better sense of feeling when you’re there.

But not only that, we had recording sessions where we went to record the ambience of these places to use as a base for the realism.

As for the convenience store, this is interesting because Silent Hill as a whole is all about that little unfamiliar feeling. It’s like familiar yet unfamiliar. That’s what we try to push everywhere throughout the game.

A good example is the school.

Everyone from every culture knows what a school is, but a Japanese school in the countryside, that’s different. You know what happens there, but you’re not quite sure of the layout; you’re not quite sure how school is conducted, for instance.

But at the same time, it’s set in the 1960s, Showa era. It’s just long enough ago where you see familiar things like, “Oh, I know what a telephone is, I know what a car is, I know what a convenience store is.” I understand what happens there, but I’ve never seen it like this before.

It adds that extra layer of out of time and then out of place.

Neobards is Taiwanese, right? Obviously the game is set in Japan, but we wondered if there was anything you were inspired by locally that made its way into the title?

Yang: A key thing about this is Taiwan and Japan actually have a very strong shared history. So a lot of things are similar in the way they are done, or in the way, like, actually how schools are structured. But specifically for this title, because it’s set in Japan, we didn’t want to bring in any outside influence. It has to feel and look exactly like Japan would be at that point in time.

So, we spent a lot of effort on authenticity.

To give you an example, something that happened during development is we made the windows look really cool. But realistically, these windows should have been on a particular side of the building. And that was actually pointed out to us by Konami. So even these small details are present.

The main character Hinako Shimizu is based on real-life model Konatsu Kato. How hard was it to find a model for the game, and why did you choose her?

Okamoto: So the monster designer for the game, the illustrator Kera, pencilled and sketched a lot of the character designs for the human characters. And so based on that design, both the Konami team and Kera, we made a collaborative effort to look for someone who is best suited to bring those sketches into real life.

We really love the artwork in the game. When you open the in-game journal there are all these beautiful illustrations. Can you talk about the style of those?

Yang: The point of the journal is to kind of chronicle extra information that you might not find just from exposition and cutscenes and just the dialogue. It’s from Hinako’s point of view, so she’s kind screaming and writing her thoughts.

An interesting thing about the notebook is because Silent Hill has always traditionally had an unreliable narrator, Hinako is basically the narrator for the notebook. So as you play through the game, you’ll find some things change throughout.

For observant players, it always pays to kind of flip through. And I think a lot of fans will find some really interesting notes that only appear at specific points.

That’s amazing!

One final question on the art, we wanted to ask about the costume design. Did you make those for real and scan them into the game or are they just digitally rendered?

Okamoto: Many elements of the artwork come from the sketches that Kera, the illustrator, provided. But for some outfits, for some of the garments, we actually have the real robes or the kimonos.

So, somewhere these outfits exist in real-life?

Yang: Oh, we know where they are!

Wow, that’s so cool.

So moving on from the art, Silent Hill has always been brilliant at blending the supernatural with real-life horror — things that can happen to anyone. At the start of the game, you get a sense Hinako is unhappy with her parents; she resents her mother for enabling her violent father.

How important is it for you to ground the game in these real-life issues?

Yang: I think that’s a key part of the Silent Hill series in general. If you go too far, if these struggles are too far from what the average person experiences, then they’re not going to relate to that.

So we’re always very careful, not just from the locations we choose, but from the struggles of our main character, Hinako. Our writer, Ryukishi07, was very good at this.

It’s like, these struggles are universal. These things are universal. It doesn’t matter what culture you’re from. It might not be something that happens to you, but you can understand it.

Silent Hill’s had combat before, but there’s a lot of it here. Can you talk about why you decided to adopt that direction for this specific game?

Yang: Like you said, previous Silent Hill titles have always been combat heavy. But we looked at two things: what type of gameplay have Silent Hill fans historically been interested in? And, because it’s been a long time since a new title came out, what do younger players like right now?

With that in mind, we decided to make it a little bit more action-focused. Everyone’s using guns right now. So what’s something that we can pull from classic Silent Hill that might feel interesting?

Silent Hill 4 was a very big inspiration for us, which is also very melee-focused. But because of this, we wanted to keep the feel of classic Silent Hill, or just classic horror genre in general, and make it tense and slow-paced.

To us, pure action games and action horror actually aren’t too different in what players can do, it’s the pace and rate at which you can do them, and that’s what we’ve been very careful to hit.

We’d like to express our thanks to Motoi Okamoto and Al Yang as well as the wider Konami team for taking the time to answer our questions. Remember, you can read our Silent Hill F PS5 review right now. And the game will release later this week, on 25th September.