Konatsu Kato – the voice, face and motion actress behind Silent Hill f’s steely schoolgirl protagonist Hinako Shimizu – has been in the spotlight for a number of feats lately. Not only was she nominated for “Best Performance” at The Game Awards 2025, but she also became an overnight YouTube legend, attracting millions of viewers with her extremely chaotic live playthroughs of Silent Hill f.
Talking to Game*Spark in a recent interview, Kato says that after her first stream (which has now been viewed over 5 million times) she “seriously thought it would end with an apology press conference.” However, her expectations were positively betrayed by the positive response she received.
For context, after creating a channel very dryly named “The person from Silent Hill f plays the game,” Kato dove into the game as a complete beginner to both livestreaming and gaming, on a rented PS5 she had never touched in her life. This made for a clumsy yet incredibly charming stream, as the actress struggled to find the DualSense’s touch pad from right under her nose and unintentionally threw the funniest shade at both Sony and Konami’s design choices.
At one point, she accidentally referred to the tens of thousands of viewers in her stream as “my affirmative bots” and started apologizing profusely after realizing the implications. Far from being offended, the people loved it, and went “You know what, yes, we are your bots,” which soon got established as something of a meme in the Japanese side of the fandom. She also severely underestimated the scope of modern games, assuming that she’d finished one full playthrough of Silent Hill f after finishing the game’s first chapter (Ebisugaoka).
But despite her struggles to read a map and figure out Silent Hill f’s puzzles, Kato showed really fast growth – especially when it came to beating down enemies with her beloved iron pipe and dodging attacks. Getting to see this improvement in real-time is probably part of what has made her streams so popular, next to her extremely screenshot-worthy facial expressions.
Thankfully, the actress sems happy she decided to stream Silent Hill f, though she tells Game*Spark that she originally didn’t intend for it to become quite so big. “So many people accepted me positively – I feel saved by the world. I want to shout ARIGATO!”
