A huge moment of hype in Silent Hill f’s pre-release was when it was announced that none other than ryukishi07 would be writing the script. A marriage made in heaven, and it turns out that the famous horror novelist wasted absolutely no time getting to work with the latest Silent Hill game.
“He is a super fast writer, and he’s a very detailed kind of guy, too,” director Al Yang told PCG’s senior editor Wes Fenlon at GDC. “The final version of the script only went through like three, three and a half full revisions. About 60% of the script stayed the same, but that 60% was kind of the core themes and kind of the key beats. Those never changed.”
The main beats in question are your regular Silent Hill motifs such as the atmosphere and troubled protagonist, but one area left blank was the location. “A lot of locations weren’t set in the original script,” Yang explains. “So for instance, with the school, that’s something we brought up. We had a section of the game where Hinako is talking to Sho and Rinko, they’re together, and they reminisce about school days. It would make sense, because they’re classmates, to have this set in [the school].”
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Silent Hill f developer NeoBards already had something of a template for a school set in a Silent Hill world: Midwich Elementary School is an important location in the OG Silent Hill game, and was also featured briefly in Silent Hill 3. But schools set in the Mid-Atlantic/ Northeastern US aren’t exactly the same as Japanese schools.
“Japanese schools have a very particular layout, or windows and hallways are supposed to be a specific way,” Yang says. “And we actually flipped it around by accident and Konami came back: ‘Okay. Japanese schools do not have this layout, this is something that we need to change’. Lots of checks on all sides, and again, like I said, it’s a collaborative effort.”
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Another check that came during the early stages of development was actually on ryukishi07’s writing. After solidifying all the basics came the process of writing out actual scenes, a task which was made tricky because of the disparity between what can be described on paper and what the devs could actually show in the finished product.
“So a lot of the cut scenes, for instance, we talked about like budget wise, this is really cool, what you’re writing here, but these are just words,” Yang says. “If we actually show this, it’s gonna take three months to build. But we understand the intent. So we’re like, okay, how can we do that in the confines of our space? That’s budgeting and working backwards.”
The end product had some truly spectacular scenes such as the Ebisugaoka in Silence ending boss fight which sees Hinako taking on both the Tsukumogami and the Kyubi on a visually stunning astral plane. This in itself was impressive enough, so I can’t imagine how wild some of the scenes which had to be restricted due to budget and time constraints were.
