*Spoilers for Silent Hill f contained below. This guide used the hard difficulty for puzzles.
As you follow the Fox Masked Man, he eventually guides you to a sealed shrine that has a lock on it with some interesting symbols, with one dial that appears to be missing. Hinako might make a comment that these seem familiar to her, and this is because they should be with the player, having passed several walls of Ema plaques, where you could interact with to see symbols on the back of them. This is the most obvious direction to try to crack the code, so head that way. From the shrine door, heading towards the left opens a faster route, so go that way. Once through, you will see a doll is now placed on the Inari Shrine, which was first seen after passing the Ema plaques.
Interacting with this will reveal a note to the player that reads:
Lightning cast down from the heavens split asunder the decayed tree.
From The Earth Grews Kudzu, the prophet of eternal prosperity.
Before getting to the puzzle, though, a monster will appear and attack you. While we give a more comprehensive guide to dealing with it in our walkthrough, even once dead, it only offers a brief reprieve before it gets back up and chases you again. The best way to deal with it is to exploit counters and attack hard with your knife once you have that opening. Once you have a chance to search, start looking over the walls for tags that seem to fit the clues in the note, which tells you exactly what you are looking for.
In fairness, giving an exact location where the tags are is weird because there should be a few to find. The lightning tag can be found on the top row of the second wall of the right if you are heading from the Inari shrine, but there are a few others. Once found, though, those areas’ tag will lose their luster and no longer be able to be examined. To locate the next wall of Ema plaques, head through the first area of Ema tags heading opposite the Inari shrine, then turn right to find a pathway of wooden planks that leads you there. Here, a decaying tree plaque could be found on two of the rightmost walls.
The final area to check is actually just left of these walls, through another small gate next to the area. Kudzu, the only thing that might be tricky to figure out, is a fast-growing vine typical of Asia. It is found on the first wall after entering the gate on the left, and along with it, you find the missing dial piece. Now that we have everything we need, we can head back to the door and crack that code. Thankfully, the Journal keeps track of the symbols we found, so we do not need to worry upon our return.
Return to the lock, and the third dial will be added with the symbols we need to enter, being a circle with the roman numeral two in the center, under that a circle with a vertical and horizontal line intersecting and curved to the right, and a square with a T shape in it that goes under and has an additional line to the right. Confirm when you have them in the right order, and the lock will come free.
And there we have it. With the lock now gone, Hinako is free to continue her journey in Silent Hill f.
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