It’s hard to be new at something, and it’s much harder when 5 million sets of eyes are peering over your shoulder ready to judge your every move. Regardless, Konatsu Kato—the voice actor and motion capture performer who played Silent Hill f protagonist Hinako Shimizu—tried the game for the first time live on YouTube on a channel unceremoniously dubbed “The person from Silent Hill f plays the game.”
While she was nervous that things would go wrong as she considered herself neither a gamer nor a streamer, her expectations were subverted. As she told Game*Spark (translated by Automaton Media), she “seriously thought it would end with an apology press conference,” but added that “so many people accepted me positively—I feel saved by the world. I want to shout ‘ARIGATO!'”
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The streams began in October earlier this year and have continued through 11 episodes so far, with the most recent stream going up two days ago. Each one has hundreds of thousands of views, with the debut stream sitting at 5 million views at time of writing. While I can’t speak Japanese and therefore can’t relay you any stream highlights, the channel description basically sums up the plot of Silent Hill f for you: “I have an iron pipe.”
That Automaton article also recounts an in-joke that developed after a few streams, where Kato calls her viewers “affirmative bots”—first as a joke, then as a term of endearment. As for what she thought of the game itself, she told Game*Spark (according to Google Translate) that it’s “too scary,” “insanely scary,” and “really beautiful.” Sure sounds like Silent Hill.
