Some deals are just arithmetic, and some deals arrive attached to a verdict. The one recorded here, dated Cyber Monday, December 1, 2025, was very much the second kind. Barely two months after Konami released Silent Hill f on September 25, 2025, the newest mainline entry in one of horror’s most storied series was already being offered at $20 off its $69.99 list price — and it was being offered with a review quote hanging over it like fog over a mountain road: GamesRadar had called the experience of unravelling protagonist Hinako’s fears “some of the best horror I’ve ever played.” This page keeps that moment as history. The prices below describe a sale that ran over the Black Friday weekend and into Cyber Monday 2025; they are a record of what the game cost on that date, not a live offer, and nothing here should be read as a price you can still get.
Fog rolling over forested mountains above a small Japanese village. Silent Hill f moves the series to the fictional mountain town of Ebisugaoka in 1960s Japan; this photograph is an atmosphere stand-in, not a screenshot. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The deal, as it stood on Cyber Monday 2025
Start with the numbers, because they were unusually clean. Silent Hill f launched at the standard big-release price of $69.99. By the Black Friday weekend, and still on Cyber Monday, December 1, 2025, the physical console versions had dropped by almost exactly twenty dollars — a cut of roughly 29 percent, arriving just 67 days after launch day. For a well-reviewed horror game in its first holiday season, that is an early and aggressive discount, and the deal coverage of the period treated it as one of the headline gaming offers of the sale.
The sharpest version of the offer sat at Amazon. Deal roundups published for Cyber Monday 2025 listed the game at $49.94 there — $20.05 under list — and Mashable’s coverage, written as Black Friday ended and the Cyber Monday deals began, put the saving in plain terms: “SAVE $20,” at $49.94, for the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X versions. Amazon’s version was the Day One Edition, which bundled the base game with a double-sided poster and a set of digital extras: a White Sailor School Uniform costume for Hinako, a Peony omamori charm, and an item pack containing a Shriveled Abura-age, Divine Water, and a First Aid Kit. Windows Central’s Cyber Monday deal page quoted the same $49.94 Amazon price and the same $69.99 regular price, and a separate Cyber Monday 2025 deals list at FullCleared independently carried the title at $49.94 at Amazon.
Amazon was not the only shelf with the game marked down. GameSpot’s deal reporting, first published November 25, 2025, listed the standard edition at Best Buy at $50, down from $70 — the same twenty-dollar saving expressed in rounder numbers — for the physical PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions. Windows Central’s page, listing alternatives to the Amazon offer, put Best Buy at $49.99 (was $69.99) and recorded Walmart at the same $49.99 point. So whichever retailer a shopper used that weekend, the shape of the deal was identical: a two-month-old, critically praised horror release, on disc, for about fifty dollars instead of seventy.
Two details are worth pinning down for the record. First, the discount applied to the console disc editions; the coverage of record does not support treating the PC version as part of the same $20-off story, so this account does not claim it. Second, the timing did the persuading. A price cut in a game’s first January is routine. A price cut of this size before its first Christmas, while reviews were still fresh and word of mouth was still building, was the sale working as an argument: if the notices had left anyone curious but uncommitted, twenty dollars was the nudge. To understand why that nudge worked, you have to look at what the critics had actually said in September.
“Some of the best horror I’ve ever played”: the consensus behind the cut
Silent Hill f settled at a Metacritic score of 86, a number that placed it among the best-reviewed games of 2025 and, strikingly, level with the reception the Silent Hill 2 remake had earned the year before. But the aggregate only tells half the story. What made the Cyber Monday pitch land was the language individual reviewers had used — language strong enough that a deal headline could borrow a review line as its whole sales pitch, which is exactly what happened with this one.
The borrowed line came from GamesRadar, which scored the game 4 out of 5. Its verdict praised a “terrifying yet beautiful foggy atmosphere,” “truly gnarly monster designs,” and writing it described as smart and gut-wrenching, before arriving at the sentence that followed the game into the sales coverage: “unravelling the fears that haunt Hinako makes for some of the best horror I’ve ever played.” GamesRadar’s one sustained complaint was the combat — gruelling, overengineered in places, and prone to stun-locks — a caveat that recurs across the coverage and deserves its own honest mention below.
GameSpot went further. Reviewer Jessica Cogswell awarded the game 9 out of 10 and concluded that, with its writing, atmosphere, gameplay, and visuals, Silent Hill f “sets a new benchmark for the Silent Hill series” — a remarkable verdict for a first all-new mainline entry in more than a decade, and one GameSpot’s own deal coverage cited while recommending the discounted editions. Eurogamer, in a review headlined as a return to form worth sticking with, was the most conflicted of the major outlets: its critic admitted she would have advised waiting for a sale halfway through, disliked the combat throughout, and still concluded that a “brilliant, delirious” second half outweighed the slog, urging players to stick with it and then stop reading and play it unspoiled. IGN, at 7 out of 10, sat at the cooler end: it praised the fresh Japanese setting, the dark story, the spectacular art design, the imaginative puzzles, and Hinako herself, while finding the melee combat first a chore and later a route to feeling overpowered.
Read together, those four verdicts draw a consistent picture. Nobody of consequence called the game a misfire. The disagreement was narrow — mostly about how much the combat helped or hindered — while the agreement was broad: the setting, the story, the monsters, and the atmosphere were the real thing. That is precisely the profile that makes a Cyber Monday discount dangerous to a wallet. A flawed game at $20 off is a gamble; a near-consensus triumph at $20 off is an appointment.
Red spider lilies — higanbana — blooming in a dark wood. The flowers are one of Silent Hill f’s signature images, spreading through Ebisugaoka as the town’s nightmare takes hold; this is a photograph of the real flowers, not a screenshot. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Hinako, Ebisugaoka, and a series that left town
The boldest thing about Silent Hill f is where it happens — or rather, where it doesn’t. For the first time, a mainline Silent Hill game abandons the fogbound American town of the series’ name and relocates the horror entirely: to Ebisugaoka, a fictional, secluded mountain town in 1960s Japan, where schoolgirl Hinako Shimizu watches a sudden fog consume her home and something floral and wrong begin growing through the streets. Red spider lilies — flowers associated in Japan with death and the afterlife — bloom where they shouldn’t. Friends Shu, Rinko, and Sakuko become part of a story told as much through Hinako’s journal, notes, and shifting relationships as through its monsters.
The creative team explains the confidence. The game was developed by NeoBards Entertainment and published by Konami, with a script by Ryukishi07, the writer behind the When They Cry visual novels, music from series composer Akira Yamaoka alongside Kensuke Inage, and character and creature design by the artist kera. The story’s pressures are period-specific and personal: the expectations placed on a teenage girl in 1960s Japan, family strain, and the fear of being remade into someone else’s idea of who she should be. The game’s own content warning, noted by Eurogamer, lists depictions of gender discrimination, child abuse, bullying, drug-induced hallucinations, torture, and graphic violence — a reminder that, as in the series’ best entries, the monsters are metaphors with teeth.
Structurally, this is also a game built to be replayed. It carries five endings, and its New Game Plus runs change scenes, add story material, and track which cutscenes are new — a design several reviewers singled out, with TechRadar calling its New Game Plus one of the best of the year. Readers who want the creatures themselves catalogued separately will find them in our Silent Hill f monsters list (post 17820).
The twin torii tunnels of Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto. Silent Hill f’s shrine-like otherworld replaces the rust and chain-link of the older games with temples and ritual spaces; this photograph is an atmosphere stand-in, not a screenshot. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The honest caveat: the combat everyone argued about
A record of the praise is incomplete without the reservation that accompanied it almost everywhere, because the reservation is part of why the discount mattered to fence-sitters. Silent Hill f is a melee-focused game: Hinako fights with pipes, bats, and other improvised weapons that degrade and break, governed by stamina, a Focus system that trades sanity for power, and enemies plentiful enough that fighting everything is rarely the right answer. GamesRadar found regular enemies more gruelling than bosses. Eurogamer found attacks phasing through targets and a tiny inventory turning into a second antagonist. IGN’s reviewer wished she had been more enamoured with a system that swung between chore and power trip.
None of that overturned the verdicts — GameSpot, remember, praised the gameplay in a 9-out-of-10 review — but it did give cautious buyers a concrete reason to wait for exactly the kind of price Cyber Monday supplied. At $69.99, divisive combat is a risk you underwrite. At $49.94, it is a quirk you accept in exchange for the atmosphere, writing, and monster design everyone agreed on. The sale did not change the game; it changed which side of the argument a buyer could afford to land on.
After the sale: a fast start that kept going into 2026
The market had delivered its own verdict long before the discount. As we recorded at the time, Silent Hill f sold more than a million copies on its first day, September 25, 2025 — a launch that coverage at the time described as making it the fastest-selling entry in the series’ history. The Cyber Monday cut, then, was not a clearance of a struggling title; it was a bestseller being pushed harder through its first holiday season, which is a very different thing.
And the line kept rising after the sale ended. Konami later announced that the game had reached 2 million copies sold worldwide, a milestone it dated to April 22, 2026, counting physical shipments and digital sales together. By then the game had also begun the afterlife of a hit: an official novelisation in Japan, a manga adaptation with a new ending from Ryukishi07 himself, and continued patches into 2026. The series around it kept moving too, with Konami reporting the wider franchise past 17 million units by March 2026 — a revival in which the million-selling first day and the 86 on Metacritic made f a cornerstone rather than a curiosity.
Which is why this dated little deal is worth keeping on the record. On December 1, 2025, a shopper could buy the year’s most praised horror game — the one a major outlet ranked among the best horror its reviewer had ever played — for twenty dollars less than the people who bought it nine weeks earlier, poster and school uniform included. The fog has long since lifted on that price. The verdict that sold it has not.