One of my biggest frustrations with the emerging eastern games industry is its lack of variety. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely happy that creatives from countries like China and Korea are able to share their art with the rest of the world, but it feels like their output has consisted mainly of samey soulslike action games that reuse assets and cultural aesthetics.

Kaku: Ancient Seal provides a breath of fresh air in this respect. While it also seeks to emulate a popular design formula (that of the Breath of the Wild-style open world), Bingobell Games is able to inject enough charm into the project to make it stand on its own.

You play as the titular Kaku, thrust into a grand adventure where you’ll have to travel to different areas, fight enemies, and conquer bosses. Much like its Zelda inspirations, the story won’t be shoved down your throat. Cutscenes are few and far between, which is unfortunate given that they’re a great opportunity to showcase the Pixar-style visuals. Most dialogue and plot beats are handled with still images and text, which can sometimes read a bit stilted, though this is likely due to challenges with localizing the script.

Narrative shortcomings are easy to wave off when you have a game world as lush as Ancient Seal. The map is made up of multiple biomes, each representing a different element, and you’ll have plenty of collectibles to find and resources to gather. Exploring will reveal your standard towers that, once activated, can act as fast travel points. You’ll need to solve a sliding block puzzle in order to add the tower to your map, which serves as a fun change of pace. 

Much of your moment-to-moment gameplay will be dominated by combat, with enemies littering most locations. Although it starts out as very button-mashy, your attack options expand significantly after the tutorial. You’ll be able to spend resources earned during traversal on new techniques, ensuring that skirmishes always stay fresh.

Your offensive abilities aren’t the only parts of Kaku’s kit you can upgrade; almost every single gameplay system can be improved in some way. Cooking can be made more potent, item capacity increased, and your health pool expanded. In order to make any changes to Kaku, you’ll need to teleport to the Ruins Realm, which you can do anytime you like without penalty. 

After arriving, you can exchange materials gathered in the overworld for enhancements, and there are a lot to unlock. The opening of the game doesn’t do an amazing job of explaining everything you’re able to do in the Ruins Realm, instead introducing a bunch of powers you can use at a rapid pace. It’s a lot to wrap your head around, but once you understand what’s on offer, you’ll return often to buff Kaku, facilitating a sense of progression regardless of where you are in the story.

Ancient Seal is an Unreal Engine title, and that presents the usual set of challenges. Environments are packed with detail and the lighting is excellent, helping the animated art style pop, but there are performance drawbacks. Enclosed areas feel locked at 60 frames per second, but the moment you step into the open world, there is a notable hit. It seems to be operating above 30, but with inconsistent frame pacing, leading to regular stuttering. It’s not like the visuals are particularly taxing either; image quality is quite fuzzy, which only exacerbates the other technical issues.

Kaku: Ancient Seal is clearly aimed at kid gamers, perhaps those looking for a Zelda-like experience on their console of choice. I imagine that younger audiences will be very satisfied with Bingobell’s work, and older players may also find themselves hooked on the game’s various modes of progression or inviting visual design. Be prepared for some nagging performance problems, though if those don’t bother you, this is a great adventure to jump into.

From its first fog-shrouded moments, Silent Hill f plunges you into a haunting landscape of dread and melancholia. I was absolutely hooked. The way the game weaves theme, setting and presentation is nothing short of mesmerising: a rural 1960s Japanese town consumed by fog, a young protagonist dealing with trauma and transformation, and an Otherworld that seeps into reality so gradually you don’t even notice the shift until you’re already deep in it. This is horror done right.

A theme Silent Hill is known for

The world is spectacular: the rural Japanese town, the creeping fog, the quiet interiors of houses haunted by more than ghosts, the Otherworld sequences that feel alien yet intimately connected to what came before. This is horror nails atmosphere, where tension builds gradually and the visuals and audio carry so much of the weight.

The theme at hand is one of identity, shame, growth, and the shift from innocence to something darker: you feel the weight of the past, the pressure of expectation, the things you are becoming. And the game presents that theme flawlessly, through broken relationships, oppressive domestic scenes, school corridors dripping with subtle dread, and the monstrous manifestations that feel less like “jump-scares” and more like extensions of the psyche. The atmosphere is nearly perfect: the fog, the distant echoes, the melancholy soundtrack and environmental queues all combine to create a single, unified sensation of being lost. Being watched.

Presentation-wise there’s a masterclass in mood. Every frame feels composed to evoke unease. The lighting, the sound design, the monster design, they all serve the tone. The game doesn’t just tell you you’re in a nightmare, it makes you feel it: the subtle ambiguities of the world, the haze of memory and fear, the way familiar spaces twist into unfamiliar dread. As a long-time horror fan, as well as someone who loves immersive, solitary exploration experiences, this is exactly the kind I wanted in time for Halloween

The good and the bad

At its core, Silent Hill f tells a deeply personal and haunting story set in 1960s rural Japan. You play as a young woman grappling with alienation, guilt, and the suffocating expectations of her community, all while a mysterious, almost floral plague begins consuming the town and its inhabitants in grotesquely beautiful ways. In classic Silent Hill fashion, the protagonist seems pretty chill about what’s going down. The narrative unfolds slowly, blending psychological horror with social commentary, and constantly blurring the line between the real and the surreal. Rather than relying on exposition, the story reveals itself through atmosphere, symbolism, and implication, leaving you piecing together meaning as much from what isn’t said as from what is. By the end of the first playthrough you will have your speculations with the final cutscene confirming your predictions. With the final cutscene done, you are ready for playthrough number 2, with 5 different endings and new story elements.

I however… found myself impeded by the combat. It’s one of those odd things: on paper, the system has all the ambitions of the best modern horror-action hybrids: there are perfect dodges, parries, a stamina or concentration system, weapons with weight and feel. In fact, the combat system reminds me a lot of the recent Silent Hill 2 Remake, but with perhaps more possibilities for perfect dodges or parries. Weapons are not simply stronger re-skins of the previous, they have different move sets on top their pros and cons.

And yet, I struggled to get a handle on it at all, and so instead I found myself brute-forcing or simply running past many encounters just to get on with the story. Perhaps I just didn’t invest enough time in mastering the timing or systems, but the disconnect between “this is a horror game where each fight should matter” and “I don’t want to fight this again” left me frustrated. But a lot of the frustration was because I knew the combat should be good and a perfect fit, for some reason it just wasn’t.

My conclusion

Overall, Silent Hill f is one of the more memorable horror games of late. The presentation; the visuals, the sound, the atmosphere is exceptional. I absolutely loved the theme and how it’s delivered through every layer of the game. The sense of dread, the uncanny familiarity of the town, the way memories twist. It’s horror that stays with you.