A thick and terrible fog has fallen over Silent Hill f’s rural town of Ebisugaoka, trapping high school student Shimizu Hinako and her friend Shu in monster-filled streets. The current plan? Head across town to their friend Rinko’s house. As they cross the town’s rice field, the fog grows even thicker. Strange mask-adorned scarecrows dot the field. Some are monsters in disguise, and if Hinako is going to clear the fog, she’ll need to take a closer look.
Some spoilers for Silent Hill f follow.
This is the frame for Silent Hill f’s finest puzzle. Locked in the rice fields, the only way to proceed is for players to identify certain scarecrows in the field—using hints provided by a “friendly” scarecrow nearby—and remove thorns from their bodies. If the correct scarecrow is chosen, you can proceed to the next group. If not, the one you chose will spring to life and attack you.
Your first clue is as follows: "Can you even imagine how I feel? I'll put on my polite smile for now." The solution is to find the only scarecrow with a smile out of the group. Walk up to it, examine the body for the location of the thorn and pull it. You’ll be able to go on to the next set of scarecrows and the next clue. You might need to look for a scarecrow that is “betrayed” and has a knife in its back. You might need to find another averting their eyes from one of its peers. All the while there are sounds in fog and, although it is rare, you might stumble upon enemies.
I first saw this segment of the game while watching a friend play (I’m not someone who really cares about spoilers), and throughout the experience, they often swung their camera around and wondered if some of the scarecrows were shifting position. The answer is both yes and no: Many of the scarecrows here will not come to life unless you choose an incorrect solution to the puzzle, but there are some enemies who can approach when you’re not looking. Yet for all the sense of danger, the threat is relatively limited. It’s mostly the player themselves filling in the blanks. Did that one there just turn their head to look at me?
I’d venture a guess that many players coming to Silent Hill f, perhaps even a majority, are folks who have some familiarity with the series and genre.These are players confident in their ability to anticipate whatever scare the funhouse has prepared for them. Silent Hill f plays with this impulse: There are enough “living” scarecrows to keep players on their toes, but because most are safe until meddled with, there’s plenty of moments where “smart” players might simply be wrong about what is happening around them. That sense of doubt is important to maintaining an oppressive mood. There are ways to get through this segment with a very minimal amount of violence and few actual monster encounters if you’re careful.
Unless you keep choosing the wrong scarecrow! Which a lot of people seem to be doing!
After my first playthrough of the game, I took to the internet to see some of the most immediate responses. Most of it was the kind of dreck you might imagine—there’s the usual cadre of chuds mad a game starring a young woman focused on women’s issues—but I was surprised to see debate about the quality of the scarecrow puzzle. Clearly, it was memorable and stood out as a set piece, but many players seemed frustrated by its difficulty. Were the clues good enough? Could people solve the puzzle “easily,” or was it an annoying exercise in trial and error, padded out with excess combat if you failed?
“This whole puzzle sucks,” one player wrote on Reddit. “I actually thought the scarecrows were scary at first but that gave way to sheer frustration at how bullshi[t] this puzzle was. I've lost so many resources and durability due to this. I hate it and I want to have never encountered it.”
I can sympathize with this and other players’ struggles, to a point. I don’t think combat in Silent Hill f is particularly good, and the way this puzzle slips combat in as a punishment for making mistakes can be annoying. My sympathy is complicated by the fact that I think this puzzle simply cannot work without the threat of violence. If you were able to rush through without a blood price, there would be no incentive to pause and observe things.
Some players also hit a snag with the question of what they’re observing. Are you supposed to look at the expression on the scarecrow’s mask or the person underneath?
This section isn’t just a little brain-teaser or pace-changer meant to add novelty. This is a puzzle about Hinako’s failure to see her friends for who they really are and accept that their relationships have changed. Like any good high school story, there’s a bit of a romantic tangle here. Hinako and Shu have been close friends for ages, but Rinko has feelings for him as well. Meanwhile, although Silent Hill f is coy about the matter at first, Hinako is in an arranged marriage with a rich suitor. Shu clearly loves Hinako but can’t find the strength to say anything about it. Everyone is leaving something unsaid.
Rinko puts on the face of a supporting peer but would do anything to get Hinako out of the picture so that she could have Shu all to herself. Meanwhile, Shu puts on a bold front for his childhood “partner” and hides his disapproval of Hinako’s arranged marriage. The wrong course to take in this puzzle is to focus on the expressions of the masks. In order to move forward and break free from the fog-filled field, Hinako must look beyond the false faces. She needs to accept that things have changed. And here in the midst of these literal strawmen, Hinako finds herself tasked with the challenge of confronting the uncomfortable group dynamic.
Fog is never simply fog in a Silent Hill game. Whenever those roiling clouds draw in close, whenever a character finds themselves trapped somewhere, it is because they have trapped themselves. In a game like Silent Hill 2, the deep fog throughout the titular town is a symbol of protagonist James Sunderland’s delusions about his role in his wife’s death. The fog-filled field here in Silent Hill f is a place that Hinako wants to remain. These are the fields she played in with Shu as a child, and as long as she stays here, she doesn’t need to confront her relationship with her friends or the terror she feels about her impending marriage. In these fields, if she could remain, it might be possible to pretend everything is fine. But there are no “real” people here. There are only straw mockeries with false faces. Seeing beyond them means getting close.
In order to proceed, particularly as the criteria for identifying the right option grows more and more specific, you need to walk up to a scarecrow and enter an examination view to look closely at them. One of the final scarecrows in particular, who we are told has a “forced smile,” hides her sick smirk underneath a mop of hair that has fallen over her face. In order to see it, you need to really get close and look from the right angle in this view mode.
This feels dangerous and forbidden and uncomfortable. If any of these scarecrows can leap to life, what does it mean to lean in close and take a look? Furthermore, unlike some games, Silent Hill f doesn’t always toss the player into a safe little pocket dimension when examining objects or puzzles. On the off chance that something is moving behind you in the fog, there’s now no way to look behind you. You are completely vulnerable.
This shift to a closer view contains an important kind of intimacy. People don’t often think of games having “intimate” features or qualities, but they can. If a game requires you to delicately trace a path on a map using a stylus, that is an intimate act. Similarly, camera shifts and changes of perspective can be intimate. Here, Hinako gets closer and closer to her friends. Sometimes she is up close to a scarecrow that resembles Shu. Leaning in closer and closer…
Earlier in the game, Hinako makes a point of nervously drawing away from Shu’s physical touch. As the two have gotten older and been unable to resolve the nature of their relationship, a deep discomfort has crept in. In this puzzle, there’s a kind of transgressive closeness at play. Drawing near, you push through certain boundaries. Come here, get closer and take a look at my true face. Close enough for me to kiss you. Close enough for me to kill you.
This intersection of helplessness and sensuality is a centerpiece of the game’s conflict and aesthetics. Even as characters strive to keep their true faces hidden and their feelings at arm’s length, they drift towards each other until they touch. The nature of the resulting touch differs. Once Hinako and Shu reach Rinko’s house, the most significant act of touch that will occur is Rinko shoving Hinako down the stairs. She lashes out dangerously like one of the scarecrow monsters in the field, using her false friendship to poise herself for the kill.
This violent touch contrasts with other moments of connection we have seen in the game until this point. Chiefly, between segments where Hinako explores the town, she is drawn into strange dream sequences where she is guided along by a soft-spoken man in a fox mask. Astute players cannot help but notice he is able to engage in the soft and intimate touches that Shu is not allowed. We come close to emulating as we examine his straw doppelgangers. This theme of touch and sensuality, of both the danger and excitement that comes from physical proximity, is found throughout the scarecrow puzzle. Pretty loaded for a brain-teaser!
That mixture of holistic storytelling and player-driven paranoia turns this puzzle into a truly fantastic sequence. There’s anxiety and bloody failure, but astute players will be drawn into the portrait it paints of Rinko and her simmering hatred for Hinako. Through it all, as their observation skills are tested, the threat of failure looms heavily. One mistake could lead into a battle that leaves them under-equipped for a future fight. If players sit and really consider Hinako’s situation, the reward is relatively brisk progress. If you’re a less than ideal friend? The price is blood and steel and potentially even more vulnerability later on.
Silent Hill f is not always a contemplative game in spite of the genre space it is working in. The back half of the game in particular is packed with intense combat gauntlets. The pace slows here in the early hours in order to make that chaos sing louder in the climax. But even in this field of self-delusion, you can’t delay too long. Something is closing in from the fog, and some of these scarecrows are primed to strike. But you’re a good friend, right? You’re observant and clear-headed, yes? If so, then you really have nothing to fear.
