Hinako Shimizu is shaping up to be one of the more intriguing protagonists I've encountered in a Silent Hill game. Even after three hours of playing through the beginning of Silent Hill f I still can't quite figure out whether she's as innocent and selfless as she appears. But what is clear is that, like many characters present in Silent Hill games, she's been through a hell of a lot of trauma.
Minor spoilers ahead for Silent Hill f
"The game follows the torments and turmoils of Hinako [Shimizu], who is a repressed young woman," Motoi Okamoto, series producer of Silent Hill, tells me at Gamescom. "Hinako is an individual who's gone through a lot of repression, so there are a lot of things that are applying pressure to her. This is the source of many of her internal conflicts. The focus that we place on the story, and for Hinako, is how she musters the courage to combat that repression."
It's established straight away that Hinako doesn't want to conform to what society views as her role as the subservient wife or daughter. Unlike her older sister, it doesn't seem like she has much interest in marrying, and she has no love left for her abusive father, who seems to either ignore or yell at her depending on his mood.
Hinako's trauma-loaded backstory is largely in line with your average Silent Hill protagonist. Without a massive deposit of unresolved trauma or issues, the game would be too short and there'd be no iconic monsters to hide from.
But Silent Hill f does switch Hinako's story up a bit by turning back the clock. "The reason why we arrived at the 1960s is because this is an era that represents female repression in Japanese society," Okamoto says. "The 1960s were a time when this type of repression was prevalent, but it is also one of the hallmark eras in Japanese history for women's rights movements."
What makes her story all the more interesting isn't simply what Hinako has experienced in her life up until this moment, but her fears of what is to come, and her uncertain place in a world that is undergoing some huge societal changes.
"We divide the tension and the horror into two sections," Al-Yang, game director of Silent Hill f at NeoBards, says. "One is things that have happened to her, or have happened to people in her life. That's a big thing, without going into too much detail. And the next is things that may happen, or basically the dread of things that are about to happen coming to fruition. So these are the two main directions we've placed. So it's very similar to how Heather operates in Silent Hill 3."
I, for one, spend way too much time stressing out about the future, whether that's simply worry that I've accidentally double-booked plans for the upcoming weekend, or the existential dread that nothing I'll ever do will have any kind of meaningful or lasting impact. So I think fears of the future is a very fruitful thing for the Silent Hill entity to latch itself onto and exploit for our morbid entertainment.
But setting Silent Hill f back in the 1960s has another added benefit. "This era was also chosen because it was just far enough in the past that people remember some things," Al-Yang adds. "So you can recognise a telephone, but maybe you haven't actually used a rotary telephone before. It's just at the border of the past and mythology. So, where things start getting a little bit muddy. You will find a lot of familiar things in an unfamiliar format."
