Silent Hill f is the first game in four decades to convince me New Game Plus is worth my time

When it comes to video games, I'm what you might call a one-and-done kind of guy. With a few rare exceptions (hi FromSoftware, and only then if five years have passed since my last playthrough), I never really feel the urge for a replay, no matter how fun I had the first time around. So it probably won't come as much of a surprise to hear the idea of New Game Plus - where you're pretty much compelled to dive back in straight away if you don't want to lose all that vital muscle memory - has never really appealed. Why do it again, when I could be doing something new? But finally it's happened; my forty year no-New-Game-Plus streak has been broken - all thanks to the clever narrative machinations of the excellent Silent Hill f.
To be honest, I'd been a little suspicious about Silent Hill f in the run-up to its release. As a long-time Silent Hill fan who's been burned again and again since original developer Team Silent departed the series so long ago, it was hard to believe last year's stupendous Silent Hill 2 Remake could be anything but a fluke - especially coming from modern-day Konami. The remake, at least, had the advantage of being built on the bones of the greatest game of all time (fight me), but a brand-new Silent Hill from a brand-new team that wasn't even set in Silent Hill? I was more than a little doubtful. And also, it turns out, very, very wrong.
Silent Hill f is an absolute wonder (and thank you to everyone enthusiastically posting about it in What We've Been Playing week after week - you all convinced me, correctly, I was missing out). Yes, it takes a while to acclimatise to f's very different setting - 1960s Japan is clearly a whole other vibe to modern-ish day small-town North America - and, yes, it takes it time to really get going. But those slow opening hours give developer Neobards and writer Ryukishi07 space to establish the nuanced relationships between teenage protagonist Hinako Shimizu and her friends in a way that really make the emotionally gruelling later acts so impactful. It's been a long time since I played something so heavy with dread - as Hinako begins to literally shed who she is and everyone she's ever known - that it made my stomach hurt. And I can vividly recall the moment - when a character is chillingly doomed to an eternity of darkness - that it suddenly all snapped into focus and I thought, ah, yes, this is Silent Hill.
What's particularly interesting about Silent Hill f, though, is the way its story unfolds. Sure, the mechanisms of story telling are familiar enough - you'll watch cutscenes, gather enigmatic notes, and play the old ‘okay so what trauma does this bit of monster design represent?' game - but its story plays out in a way I've not really seen done before. Without straying into major spoiler territory, your first playthrough posits one reality (although 'reality' might not be quite the right word, given the inscrutable machinations of foggy Ebisugaoka/Silent Hill), eventually leading to one specific outcome. You're a teenager preoccupied with teenage things, but every now and then, something incompatible with that truth seems to bleed through. Pay attention and you start to suspect there's more going on than we're immediately privy to, as characters spout blatant contradictions or respond to one another in sentences that don't seem to quite logically flow. By the end of it all, as it wraps in a way that manages to be both wildly inconclusive and unquestionably final, I could sense a very different shape forming beneath the story I'd just been told, and I couldn't let go. Which is where New Game Plus comes in.
Silent Hill f certainly isn't the first game to save major revelations for later playthroughs (Nier: Automata is perhaps one of the most famous modern-day examples, although I've admittedly never played it myself), but the way it's constructed is fascinating. Moments into New Game Plus, a key interaction is completely reframed with a single line of dialogue - and some of my suspicions from playthrough number one immediately seemed to be confirmed. More interesting still, that single line completely recontextualises an awkward bit of early small talk between Hinako and her best friend (and unrequited love?) Shu, even though that conversation plays out identically to how it did before. And really, I'm just scratching the surface. Playthrough number two - and I should point out I'm only a couple of hours into New Game Plus, so this is all very much ‘here are some of the mysteries as I see them now' - also makes Ebisugaoka's history and folklore more explicit, shedding new light on what might (or might not) be going on.
Meanwhile, secondary relationships - barely footnotes in the narrative the first time around - are more significantly foregrounded, and that hazy underlying shape of my initial playthrough starts to take on a more tangible form. Some of the changes are obvious - new side quests, new tools, previously inaccessible areas suddenly opening up (albeit in a way that never breaks the narrative flow) - and some are so subtle they're easily missable; a slight phrase change, perhaps, or a tiny red smear on the staircase where there wasn't one before. And an interesting knock-on effect of all this is I often find myself doubting my own memory - is this new? - and it's like I'm now sharing Hinako's fractured headspace too. Sure, the basic structural beats are the same, but the changes - and their implications - are enough that it all somehow still manages to feel new. And for the first time I can remember, I'm all in on a second playthrough.
Admittedly, I'm skeptical Silent Hill f has enough surprises lined up that it'll manage to sustain my enthusiasm through the four complete playthroughs required to see the "true" ending (yes, I had a spoiler-averse squint at Eurogamer's ending guide), but for now I'm fully onboard. Has all this made me a New Game Plus believer? Probably not, but it's heartening to know there are still big budget games out there willing to do some cool things with the medium's familiar form.