43.8 million player votes later, the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards have been announced, with Hollow Knight: Silksong securing top prize, Game of the Year.
It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
As is tradition by now, Valve hosted the annual Steam Awards, which ran for a couple months near the end of last year. Entirely player-based, the Awards are granted by Steam users alone, who, believe it or not, did not pick the undisputed king of gaming, Expedition 33.
Instead, the ultimate Game of the Year among Steam users was none other than Hollow Knight: Silksong, a game so wildly popular it crashed the platform upon its launch. Enjoyed by millions and highly-anticipated, it's no surprise Silksong won, given just how long players had waited for its release since the first game in the series blew everyone away back in early 2017.
That isn't to say that Expedition 33 won nothing. It, indeed, did carry home one award, the one for Best Soundtrack, and I wholeheartedly believe it deserved it. We can argue about how much E33 deserved the many awards it got, especially in some categories at the TGA (cough, Best Direction over Death Stranding 2, cough), but the soundtrack is so phenomenal and outstanding that no number of awards would do it justice.
Silksong also won the Best Game You Suck At Award, again no surprise due to its overall difficulty, as is only natural for a Soulslike title.
Dispatch, too, was awarded here even if it was snubbed at last year's award shows, primarily because its episodes started coming out after most shows had cemented their nominees. We should see Dispatch considered in the 2026 window, though, but it's nice to see the Steam community recognize the game on such short notice, and in a category as prestigious as they come: Outstanding Story-Rich Game.
Other categories and winners include:
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Last year, after a bit of a wait, Silent Hill was released, and with it came some changes to the series. The combat was a lot more actiony, the format for multiple endings was drastically different, but the most obvious change was its setting. We're not in Silent Hill anymore, Toto! We're in Ebisugaoka, Japan, also a fictional town, though clearly not a fictional country. And that's because Silent Hill, the place, is now also Silent Hill, the "phenomenon."
Silent Hill F is not only the first brand new survival horror game in the franchise in a long time, but also the series' first spin-off, bringing the action to new locales and situations. We leave the horrors of America for a trip to 1960s Japan. While the game presents a fresh take on the series, its gameplay feels like it's being pulled between two horrors.
The story follows Hinako, a teenage girl in a rural mountain town. One day, a fog rolls in that seems to cause everyone to disappear, and the town is now full of strange monsters out to get her. She not only needs to navigate the town with the remaining survivors, but a strange man haunts her nightmares.
The story is great, and the game avoids retreading the themes and plot of prior games in the series. Hinako is portrayed as a tomboy and someone who does not like that women are seen as nothing more than a traditional housewife to a man. This upsets her father, who views her as less than her older, married sister. The girls of the village treat her as an outsider and a freak because she doesn't act like the other girls, and because her best childhood friend is a boy. The impact of misogyny and how it can be inflicted by both men and women is on display here.
While the story may be different, you're still going to wander around seemingly normal environments, getting into fights and puzzle-solving. Silent Hill F, however, does things a bit differently with both.
The combat system here feels like an attempt to mirror the more personal and methodical fighting of a Soulslike. You'll pick up weapons from the environment in the everyday world, while the nightmare world has stock weapons. The everyday weapons have durability and can break after being overused, but tool kits can be found to enact repairs. Inventory management is a big deal, as you start with limited inventory slots and will want to fill them up with the various recovery items that heal or provide other bonuses. You can find inventory upgrades that are definitely worth seeking.
Sanity is a new resource that works with the advanced techniques for fighting. You have a light and heavy attack, which both drain stamina on use. By holding down the focus button, you'll consume sanity to either charge for a strong attack or attempt to counter the enemy when they flash to perform a stunning blow. Sanity can also drain if you are hit by certain attacks, and running out means you take increased damage. You can sell certain items for "faith" at the local shrines/save points that can be used to upgrade your stats and equip Omamoris that provide passive boosts.
The enemy design here is great despite the presence of just a few main types. Each one moves and behaves differently, with a lot of idle animations and weird posturing to make it hard to read them. These are not your basic mannequin monsters from the previous games, and that extends to the newly designed boss fights that are far more lively than previous ones. I'll talk about this further down, but the combat feels less about survival horror and more like a slower take on a Soulslike.
For those fearing that a new Silent Hill wouldn't have fiendishly difficult puzzles, I can put those fears to rest. The puzzle design returns to the roots of the series and survival horror, as you must use knowledge both in and outside of the game if you want to solve them.
I played on the highest puzzle difficulty, and it was certainly a challenge. Some of the puzzles require you to understand logic or information without giving you the reference points or material you need, which can lead to frustration. For the very first and last puzzles, I had to look up the solutions, and even knowing it, I had no idea how the clues were supposed to reference the answer. That represents a breakdown in puzzle design – if the clues still don't make sense after you solved it, then the puzzle and/or clues weren't good to begin with.
It's like asking someone to solve a puzzle related to John and Jane's favorite colors, but the game never tells you who John and Jane are and expects you to know who the game developer's friends are as a reference. This feels like a return to the player-unfriendly puzzle design that dominated the adventure genre starting in the 80s.
The one upside is that the puzzles come paired with an excellent journal system, not only keeping track of the characters and monsters, but also providing a collection of all found hints and their relation to each puzzle. This is something I would love to see standardized among adventure games. However, this does come at a cost; there are far fewer puzzles compared to previous entries, and a greater focus on combat, which takes me to my main issues with the game.
Combat has never been the focus of a Silent Hill game, and has functionally been a bit janky at best. This is the first game to have a fully built combat engine; however, "combat engine" and "survival horror" don't really work together.
The aforementioned Soulslike style, on paper, seems like it would work for a survival horror game – Hinako has very long wind-up and recovery animations, so every attack has to be planned out. However, you also have a dodge with I-frames and a punish attack. The game is heavily focused on stunning enemies to deliver more damage, which heavy strikes, focus strikes, and your punish can achieve, and the game is really going to make you use them.
This is by far the most combat-intensive Silent Hill game I've seen yet. The horror of being in a town beset by a curse starts to fade after your umpteenth fight as you rip apart your enemies. What I really didn't like from a horror standpoint is that the game wants you to avoid combat and gives you the option to sneak by enemies in spots...and then it locks you into arenas to fight your way out. At one point, the game practically gives you a devil trigger and asks you to rip and tear until it is done.
Regarding enemy design, I understand the subtext of featuring an enemy that is about the horror of birth in a game about a girl struggling with misogyny. That said, having an enemy that can infinitely respawn other enemies, in a required arena, in a survival horror game, starts to get annoying, not scary.
When you are in those high-action segments, you are still using the very slow, very stilted combat system. While you can upgrade your stamina and sanity, along with the help of the Omamoris, they don't suddenly make the combat faster or provide a new dynamic, such as the auto locks featured in the Callisto Protocol. Sometimes, the enemies just refuse to use any counter-able attack, and you'll need to rely on hopefully getting the stagger off, or you will be attacked easily. There are some Omamori that are really good, but they are tied to the random draw, proving the real psychological horror is gacha. The very fact that there are repeated arena fights in a Silent Hill game makes it tempting for me to give this game an F just on that alone.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that all this was designed around playing the game a minimum of 3 times, with a total of 5 endings. This is the only horror game I could think of that actually adds new challenges and puzzles on repeated playthroughs of the main quest, but it's all built on the same annoying puzzle design and repetitive combat. I do like that the world is different, leading to more information and additional content, but you must go through the entire game again to begin seeing this. The best parts of this game are when you get to wander around looking for clues and investigating, and you can do far more of that on your second playthrough and beyond.
Besides having upgraded stats to decrease the difficulty, just having more inventory space to hold and experiment with the additional items also makes things easier. An item I neglected on my first run that would have helped tremendously is the one that gives you infinite stamina for a few minutes.
However, asking the player to repeat the majority of what they just did so that the story makes sense doesn't really work in my opinion. Either the game needs to feel like a different experience, such as Madhouse mode from Resident Evil 7, offer a brand new experience like the Route A/ Route B setup in Resident Evil 2, or just let the player tear through everything they've already done to get to the new stuff.
For me, Silent Hill F fails when it comes to puzzle and combat; as a survival or action horror game, it just doesn't work. I wonder if the developers saw the success of Resident Evil 7 and its successors, and felt that the solution to bring back Silent Hill was just to add more combat and action. The story and monster designs are great, but focusing so much on combat, even to the game's difficult final boss, feels like a bit of a betrayal of the series. It's hard to be introspective and learn more about yourself and society when you're busy dodging multi-hit combos from all sides while trying to find the punish tell.
(Note: This review was written with the 1.0 version of Silent Hill F. Following the release, the game has had a balance patch that has reduced the difficulty and the amount of encounters, but I have not had a chance to replay it to see the exact changes).
Silent Hill f's success is due, in part, to the "hype" and community discussions surrounding the horror game's release.
My obsessive passion toward the Silent Hill series makes me evaluate the most recent release with excitement and anxiety at the same time. It's not a dread in a horror sense but a dread borne out of the fear of being disappointed. Walking through the Silent Hill foggy streets over a hundred times has and will always leave an imprint. Silent Hill 2 has left a benchmark which I consider so high that I regard it as impossible to touch. The new entries that have been released under the Silent Hill title always bring with them a certain burden. Unfortunately, most of them fail to deliver. The most recent release, Silent Hill f, has not been able to hold on to the Silent Hill name in terms of the setting and the lore, and has turned the entire franchise on its head. This game, Silent Hill f, is something completely new yet familiar, which has been transplanted into new soil.
Your first baffling moment of Silent Hill f is how the game world has ditched the Maine fog-inspired smalltown America for the rural Japan of the 1960s. This is the greatest challenge for me, yet the most interesting decision, as a lifetime Silent Hill addict. The diners, motels, rusting steelworks, crumbling hospitals, and mild Protestantism of my Silent Hill have been drenched in Americana. To replace that with Shinto shrines, paper sliding doors, and tatami mats is to risk desecrating the very essence of the franchise.
What other use does it serve aside from as a tool to flesh out the foundations of the game world? The village appears to have much history and to have suffered over the years, even without any of the game’s narrative to explain it. However, it appears history is a bit more complex and more imagined than history as a tool to disguise suffering, tradition, and unfulfilled. The genre of Japanese folklore ghost stories is more like integrating it with the Silent Hill form of psychological abuse/violence.
The game is also dipped with a metaphor, where snow is ash, like falling. The obstructed and rotting bloom showers the entire region with a debris of corruption, more so, delicate petals which almost seem out of place, comely to the counterpart of a horror. It is this factor of beauty within decay, or perhaps grace within the contempt, that lends the world of Silent Hill F a certain critic as some of the most skilled.
Hinako Shimizu, too, appears to lack all the marks of mystique at rest. However, there is also much more than that. Silent Hill f has mastered the art of visual representation of the turmoil, abuse, and contempt which has been deeply implanted within. The protagonist, too, has the ability to slice and extract parts of themselves, helping at the same time to reinforce the fragments of the whole. This inner world of the Hero is weak to the external world in relation to the world, with the characters often appearing as a reflection of the player’s own turmoil and pain.
Silent Hill does capture the personal horrors, and I can think of no better example for that than Hinako’s journey. It is not fighting the inner demons that is of paramount importance, rather, it is the ability to endure what is able to be externalized, that is, what is done to the person during the school, the hallways, the decrepit shrines, the collapsing hopes and the all encompassing expectations that are imposed and which intersect and for which a description would be personal and yet horrific. It is stories which are vague enough and complex enough to ask for analysis and which do not seek to provide ready answers, in which the thinking person is challenged. How much of the pain is internalized and projected, externalized, or suffering?
Silent Hill f captures the essence of the individual’s internal battle to a fine point. It paints the broader iross of beneath which the individual’s pain is hidden, not in a reduced form of the gap between feeling and emotion, but in the elemental formlessness. It walks you through layer after layer, and what you always find is the pulse of the game.
Every horror game lives and dies by atmosphere, and Silent Hill f resonates with that deeply. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, environments are not only gorgeous but also infused with astonishing strokes of artistry and reality. The wood that creaks and cracks underfoot bends and crackles in old Japanese houses. Light from a flickering lantern casts shadows on walls that draw your attention, only to make you cringe. Flowers bloom and die such that their remnants, bathed in the sadness of withering, spin dreads that are spine-chillingly uncomfortable without direct bloodshed.
Even though he did not compose the soundtrack, the sound design does make an effort to honor the legacy. Yamaoka’s contribution, on the other hand, remains priceless, the very soul of the Silent Hill series, and Yamaoka's work on Silent Hill f attests to that principle. The sound in this game is not background; it is pure, distilled tension. The long silences are filled with whispers that you question the reality of. Sad strings retire to low grumbling that gnaws at your inner self and sinks you deeper into despair and tension. These details are very important to me, and no Shadow of the Colossus is weighted at thirty percent, I do recognize that Silent Hill f is capable of doing the same in order to maintain the tension.
For me personally, an ever-present burden to carry represents the game’s biggest flaw. Why the developers decided to do away with ranged warfare is a mystery I will never understand. A greater emphasis has been placed on melee sorties. You would logically assume that this should make skirmishes more personal and scary. Your character light attacks with the left click and heavy swings with the right, dodges, and, if the fates align, can use focus mode to counter.
Monsters in Silent Hill f are associated with sight mechanics, which means you can completely ignore them if you want to. And honestly, that is what I suggest you do. Fighting is far more bothersome than rewarding, as most players who buy cheap PS4 games know from the previous games of the series. Enemies drop nothing of value, they respawn, and the weight of every blow is super exaggerated and breaks immersion. Silent Hill 2’s combat, in all its ease, achieved a grandmaster balance—every interaction felt meaningful, yet nothing was overly suffocating. Silent Hill f chose to ignore that. Instead, the game has overly complicated combat, all the while making it meaningless.
The experience becomes jarring as a result of this. The biggest horror comes from the inability to tame something, not from annoyance with mechanics that seem pointless. For the most genuine experience, turn on Hard Mode, then try to avoid combat as much as you can, and let the game do its thing. The tension of monsters lurking in the fog is far more thrilling than the satisfaction of swinging a weapon mindlessly. Where the monsters are unduly left behind, the tension of not knowing where they will emerge next is far more powerful.
Of all the timer surprises in Silent Hill f, the puzzles were the most surprising. On Hard difficulty, the puzzles are well-crafted, logical, and reasonable, and challenging, but do not descend into the abstract. They require a combination of observational skills, memory, logical reasoning, and, in some instances, lateral thinking, which, in turn, tests your patience and is rewarded with the satisfaction of the 'light-bulb' moment. Unlike seasoned players, newcomers to the story are able to immerse themselves in the narrative at their own pace.
The most remarkable feature of all is the most current example of 'Lost in the Fog' mode, which is available only after the first playthrough. In my estimation, this is the hardest of all considered. It presents a narrative puzzle that integrates the rest of the three, simultaneously overshadowed by the dual, Silent Hill ambiguity.
This is one area where Silent Hill f has exceeded my expectations. Modern games, particularly those created using Unreal Engine 5, far too often launch with significant performance issues. Silent Hill f, however, manages to run smoothly and even consistently. The framerate stays stable, loading times are brief, and it’s overall very polished. For once, an early access period didn’t feel like an insult to those who paid more to play it early. It felt like the developers wanted to be paid for something. They owed it to the players to release something stable. In an oversaturated gaming market where so many remakes and reimaginings fall apart due to poor execution, Silent Hill f manages to work.
Every fan who buys PS5 horror games has to deal with the following question one way or another: Is Silent Hill f really Silent Hill? One could argue that it has no American setting, no narrative elements concerning a cult, and lacks the atmosphere that hung over the first four installments. On this basis alone, I would say it could have been a Siren game, or quite easily, an entirely new franchise.
But at its core, Silent Hill was never really about the town itself. It was the trauma and personal suffering that reconfigured one’s reality. It is Silent Hill f that retains the very essence. There is a kind of inner decay, personified in Hinako’s story. Silent Hill, or in its spirit, the withering blossoms, the ghosts of ghosts, the expectations, and the expectations that linger in every corner, the beautiful, oppressive, and suffocating beauty of every corner.
So to answer the question, no, it is neither a revival of the franchise in the orthodox sense. If one looks at it from the lineage I would have wanted, it is certainly not Silent Hill 5.
To enhance your experience, I suggest: forgoing the APK dub and using the Japanese voiceover, as it is more immersive and better captures the atmosphere. Try to keep your room dark, and if possible, use a gamepad instead of a keyboard for better immersion. Above all else, you must play on Hard difficulty. This is the only setting that fully restores tension to fights and ensures that puzzles are interesting and not arbitrary. If you are a fan of the genre, you can return for a second playthrough on "Lost in the Fog" mode.
Unlike the other installments in the Silent Hill franchise, like Silent Hill 2, for example, I do not find Silent Hill f to be a game I replay every year as a form of ritual, nor do I consider it to be part of my childhood. While its identity may stray and its combat may falter, the atmosphere and narrative are the most captivating. Silent Hill players will find it difficult not to have any expectations and see this new version for what it is instead.
Should you approach it expecting the American fog, the cult, the landmarks you are accustomed to, you will not get what you are looking for. However, granting yourself the ability to think about it as a tale of inner sorrow, wrapped in decaying flowers with unfurling, subtle folklore, may open your mind to a greater appreciation for it. Silent Hill f is an excellent and, perhaps, one of the better horror games. Even though it is not a renaissance for the franchise, it is a fitting addition to the series that not only should be played, but also discussed and revisited.
