This City Hates You is a feature length tabletop rpg that hearkens back to ps1 survival horror titles. There's some definite Silent Hill notes, but it also puts me in mind of Fear Effect and Shin Megami Tensei. It isn't a game trying to replicate a single other property---rather, it nestles into the same milieu and finds its own niche.
Also, there's a lot of content for its page count. It's *meaty*.
The PDF is 61 pages, with a clean, readable, technical manual style layout intercut with inexpressibly dope chunks of artwork. The Bestiary in particular is really good, with the Beetle and Millipede being standouts not just for the book but for Silent Hill style horror in general.
Writing-wise, the content here can get a little complicated, but the book is very well explained. You could pick this up for your first rpg and learn the rest of the medium from it.
Mechanics-wise, This City is a little strange. Core rolls are attribute + die vs target number, but the size of the die is also determined by the attribute. However, there's a full rpg body built around this core mechanic, and your attributes also determine things like carry capacity, hit points, movement speed, initiative, saves, healing bonus, and body mod slots. There's even a meta attribute, Fortune, that you can add to other rolls Fortune times per session. The dice system *really* wanting you to have a high attribute is balanced out by the vulnerabilities caused by not having an even spread. Taken as a whole, it definitely works.
Character creation moves fast, but involves a lot of little choices and mechanics. Think Savage Worlds or Unisystem. The dense, chewy center of it all is body mods, which work like Shadowrun's cyberware---they play a huge role in determining what you can do, but you can only plug them in up to a limit determined by your Soul stat. You can get them more cheaply by buying them in a sort of werewolf mode, where you have to transform and take damage in order to use them, but there's also some that are quite cheap anyway. You could go werewolf mode to use the body mod that turns you into a camera, but it's only 4 Humanity.
Combat is detailed, well-balanced, and gamey, and revolves around an Action Point meta. Different types of actions have different AP costs. So do different types of weapons and special attacks. Hauling around more gear than your carry capacity is possible, but it affects your AP levels. On top of that, there's status effects, scaling hit chances based on your weapon and attack distance, HP lost and number of times damaged are tracked separately, and you can gain character upgrades by getting KO'd and bouncing back.
For GMs and players, there's tons of visual references and bits of guidance given throughout the book. It's easy to navigate, and the character sheet is dense with information but clean. There's also a full GM's section airgapped from the rest of the book with a "GMs only" warning, preserving some surprises for gameplay. Guidance is even given on how to adjudicate the use of specific body mods---it's really detailed. There's also a long multi-page essay about tackling ableism in games that feels like it doesn't quite work for *this* game, but has good links and calls attention to the issue.
Overall, if you want a game with resource tracking and satisfying medium crunch gameplay, and if you lean towards urban or post-apocalyptic survival horror stories, absolutely check it out. It's pulpy, well-designed, and fun.
Minor Issues:
-Capitalization feels inconsistent in some headings, such as "Creating your character"
-Backgrounds not being able to lower an attribute below its minimum heavily incentivizes players to start with a low attribute to soak the penalty. This could be adjusted by having the penalty overflow to another stat, or force X rolls per session to be Distracted, or something.
