God is in everything, people say. In Silent Hill f, there's a god inside a doll with red apple cheeks. As soon as I met her at the start of Konami's survival horror game, which is sometimes contemptibly being called "Soulslike" because of its calculated but awkward combat, I began to think of my favorite shepherd through the Underworld – the Doll from FromSoftware's 2015 cosmic terror Bloodborne.
In both games, the doll is a guide through each protagonist's nightmare, able to see through artifice because she herself is artificial. I think with her help, Silent Hill f is more admirably Soulslike in its excellent, open-ended narrative.
