Silent Hill f is full of narrative secrets: some are kept hidden until the end of the story, while others are left to the player’s imagination. Boundary Break’s secrets are a different kind. Armed with several fan-made mods and developer expertise, YouTuber Shesez uncovers the different development tricks used in some of your favorite games. It turns out, Silent Hill f also comes with a fair deal of out-of-view surprises.
Note that spoilers follow for Silent Hill f.
Camera mods are the tools most often used in Boundary Break. By unlocking the game’s camera, Shesez can show viewers things that would otherwise remain unseen, i.e. things that the developers never intended for players to come across.
One of Silent Hill f’s off-camera secrets is a tiny doll-like dummy, devoid of any sense of horror or real textures, that appears during Hinako’s first visit to the Dark Shrine. When Hinako closes the door at the exit of this sequence, an unidentified figure rushes toward her and pushes her down. The figure then passes by her as she loses consciousness, blocking a light source and casting an ominous shadow over her figure.
While it is never revealed who the figure is (some think this is the second Hinako that initially appears in the Dark Shrine), the in-game model that casts the shadow belongs to the dummy, whom Shesez astutely compares to the Gingerbread Man from Shrek. They find this detail odd, as modern developers typically use an unanimated model of the actual character as a stand-in for their off-screen counterpart. This makes their silhouette look more believable, as can be seen when Hinako encounters the shadow of her sister, Junko, later in the game.
By contrast, some of Silent Hill’s other off-screen secrets are unexpectedly detailed. One good example is the Ramune drinks, which are used to restore Sanity and to be given as offerings to the Hokora Shrine save points.
Even though players never see the inside of Ramune bottles, the developers went the extra mile and modelled the marble that is typically found at the top of real-life Ramune bottles. While the marble keeps the beverage carbonated in real life, it doesn’t serve any purpose in Silent Hill f, yet it’s still in there.
Boundary Break’s Silent Hill f episode features several secrets: some big, others small, but all are interesting. Considering this is one Silent Hill game where almost everything is explicitly revealed to the player, it couldn’t hurt to know more about Hinako’s strange coming-of-age story.
Silent Hill f is available for the PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X|S.
