When Konami announced their slate of new Silent Hill games four years ago, they had a lot to prove. The series had been dormant for so many years, with the famously cancelled P.T./Silent Hills being its only proof of life. Aside from the extremely rough Silent Hill: Ascension, which most people seem to have thankfully forgotten, they’ve earned audience trust with both Silent Hill 2 Remake and Silent Hill f, which were excellent additions to the franchise in their own unique ways.
But Silent Hill: Townfall, which is slated to finally release this September, has always been the most mysterious.
Screen Burn, the Scottish studio behind Stories Untold and Observation, had never really handled a project of this magnitude, so it remained to be seen how it actually felt in action. This month, Konami invited Bloody Disgusting to get hands-on with the game, along with an interview with members of the development team, and thankfully it convinced me that they are perfectly capable of rising to the occasion.
Like the aforementioned P.T., Silent Hill: Townfall switches from the series traditional third person view to a more claustrophobic and intimate first person perspective. This was my biggest hesitation with the game going into the event. I’ve always been impressed with the way that the early Silent Hill games played with perspective, deftly moving the camera to ensure the shot was framed perfectly for maximum impact. How would the game play from a more limited point of view, and what would it gain to make that transition worth it?
First-Person Horror Enhances the Immersive Experience
The first portion of the demo, which was the beginning of the game, opened with a blast of eerie discordant music, this time provided by Pilotpriest instead of series regular Akira Yamaoka, along with a distorted message asking you to come back to the Scottish town of St. Amelia. As the camera pans over the water and slowly reaches the dock, your character, Simon Ordell, emerges out of the water, coughing. With a hospital band on his wrist and an IV in his hand, he climbs up to the dock and begins his way into the town. In true Silent Hill fashion, none of the weirdness of how he got here or why he has an IV is commented on, making it all the more surreal. After we finish up with the third person cutscene, we’re moved into first person to start exploring.
Right off the bat, I’m struck with how immersive the new perspective makes everything feel. The environment is so detailed and alive, and being up close and personal with it makes it feel that much more real. There’s a really great bit as you leave the docks and enter the town proper where there’s a tarp flapping in the wind on the welcome sign, revealing only an S and the vaguest glimpse of the other letters. For a moment, you think it’s going to say Silent Hill before it blows off and reveals the name St. Amelia.
Despite being a different location in a completely different country, it immediately feels extremely Silent Hill. Townfall’s fog looks incredible, with sound cues and lighting effects doing an excellent job of guiding you without completely holding your hand. It reminded me a bit of the original Silent Hill in this regard, with the abandoned small town feeling with a more open structure that allows you to wander rather than explicitly funnelling you to your destination. The part of the town we were allowed to explore was compact and dense, with specific buildings that acted as focal points for exploration and puzzle solving.
St. Amelia Feels Like Silent Hill
Any worry about Screen Burn being able to achieve the Silent Hill style of surreal, psychological horror was very quickly relieved when I arrived in the town square. I found the first of many phones, which act both as places for narrative and save points (the one in this area even had a grid of red squares nearby like that part near the end of Silent Hill 2). After a strange phone call, the dread of the quiet town turned into outright terror. In a cutscene, Simon turns around and sees a man in the middle of the town square with a tube in his mouth and black goo streaming down his chest. As he follows the tube to its source, he realizes that it’s coming from something strange in the sky. He pulls the tube out, only for an overwhelming sound to start piercing his ears, which slowly morphs into the signature siren.
After things go dark, you wake up in a series of cramped stone hallways bathed in red light. This feels like Townfall’s version of the series’ Otherworld, transforming into a surreal space teeming with monsters. Like the original, it knows that this is best used sparingly and brings you back to the main town, but not before giving you a quick tutorial on the basics of sneaking around enemies.
It’s in this section that you’re introduced to Townfall’s signature addition to the series, the CRTV. Evoking the feel of the static-emitting radio, it’s an amazingly tactile device that serves many purposes, both mechanical and narrative. When you pick it up, it’s used to help you break out of a room by tuning into different channels in order to both hear and see clues to how to escape. It’s a pretty basic interaction, but scanning the channels feels very tangible and adds a clever layer to the puzzles solving.
CRTV Changes Exploration, Puzzles, and Stealth
Not only is it used for progression, it ties into the game’s stealth mechanics in an important way. When creatures are around, notches show up on the CTRV’s frequency band, and scanning to the channel allows you to see a shadowy version of the monster, even through walls. Using this along with the lean button is a perfect combination, feeling like a fully-fledged stealth game in the middle of my Silent Hill. While I was worried having full knowledge of where your enemies were would make things easier, the limitation of only being tuned in to one monster at a time was smart, limiting your information just enough without making it useless. It’s very reminiscent of the feeling of using the motion tracker in Alien: Isolation, which is appropriate given Townfall writer-director Jon McKellan worked on the title.
The CRTV makes the best case for the switch to first person, which is the ability to closely examine objects without having to swap the camera. The puzzles in the demo have the same tactile feeling to them that was enhanced by the perspective, making all your tinkering feel intimate and immediate. Combined with the game’s 1990s time period, I’m excited to see what kind of nostalgic technology I can get my grubby little hands on.
Like the best games in the series, Townfall does a lot of its storytelling through its puzzles, giving your information about characters and the world as you progress. One of my favorites involved trying to turn on a computer in one of the houses you enter, but in order to do so you need to turn on the power to the house by getting a card from the local corner store that gives you access to electricity. The detail about buying a power card adds an air of authentic specificity to the world that you’re exploring, grounding it in a nostalgic realism, which only goes to heighten the surreal moments by contrast.
This store is marked on your map, which is another object that’s examined in your hands, allowing you to plan your route there through the monster-filled streets. While stealth is going to be the best way to deal with enemies, slowly monitoring them with the CRTV, Townfall does give you the ability to fight back as a last resort. There are melee weapons that break after a certain amount of uses, so you need to be careful about when you pick your fights. You are able to block enemy attacks, but given the first person perspective, it always feels dangerous and desperate, making for brutally intense encounters that feel like they pack a real oomph.
Even when they go wrong, you’ve got a bit of a lifeline to help you out. The aforementioned IV in Simon’s hand will act as a quick revive, bringing you back to life right in the place you died. Once it’s expended, you’ll have to find the resources to craft a replacement, or else risk a game over screen.
After a time jump in the demo, I was given access to a pistol, but it in no way made the combat trivial. Since stealth is such a focus, the noise of the weapon made it a last resort option, as any other creatures in the area would come running immediately. In another tense touch, bullets are loaded one and at time, so every shot counts when in the middle of an encounter.
A Modern Take on Classic Psychological Horror Monsters and Level Design
The monsters themselves are fairly typical Silent Hill fare, with weird fleshy humanoids writhing at you and spitting horrible fluids. Without a full sense of the narrative of the game, it’s hard to see if there’s any deeper symbolism like the series is often known for, so time will tell how these designs end up resonating. While they might not be breaking the mold, the wonderful animation sells it, making them look frantic and feral as they stalk up and down the streets trying to hunt you down and rip you apart. The series’ exceptional sound design is another tradition that Townfall continues, and these monsters all make horrible noises to let you know to be on the lookout.
Navigating St. Amelia is a joy, thanks to some really sharp level design decisions. Like the best survival horror games, progressing through areas unlocks clever little shortcuts that makes returning to previous areas with the required items a breeze. This makes the world feel dense and satisfying, rewarding your mastery as you become more familiar with your surroundings. There’s a particularly great sequence where you’re trying to locate a specific address on a street, and it’s crawling with too many monsters to effectively take out. This area is full of lots of little nooks and crannies for you to duck in and out of as you monitor your path with the CRTV, making for an incredibly satisfying and tense stealth sequence.
In addition to great level design, the town itself has tons of character that’s delivered through the locations themselves. After we saw Silent Hill f move the action into an international location in the past, it’s nice to see Townfall do that with its Scottish ’90s setting. The details are all there to put you in the time and place, adding a new layer of unfamiliarity makes you feel off balance and out of place. All the locations feel extremely lived in, with spaces that tell the stories of everyone who lives or works there. It’s a challenge to create a space that feels both realistic and designed for gameplay, and so far Screen Burn has been able to pull it off.
Why Silent Hill: Townfall Could Be the Franchise’s Next Great Entry
It’s clear there’s a lot going on in this seemingly abandoned town of St. Amelia, and there’s an air of mystery to the nature of what exactly happened. Over the CRTV, you’re frequently hearing from a nurse named Zoe, but the current status of your relationship with her feels unclear. Given the series relationship with nurses, I’m very curious to see where this goes, as its ripe for callbacks while still definitely doing its own thing.
Townfall’s narrative vagueness feels in line with the Silent Hill franchise, and shows a level of confidence in its audience that the AAA space is rarely capable of any more. I have some theories about where the plot might be going, so I’m excited to see how it all turns out when I get my hands on the full release.
I was really loving my time with the demo from the start, but there was a specific moment that completely sold me on it, letting me know that the series was in the right hands. While you’re walking around town, there are some doors that look really heavy, with little metal flaps in the center.
At one point while you’re exploring, you collect a scalpel, which oddly came up as an option to be used on one of these doors. I selected the option and Simon pried the panel open with the scalpel, only to reveal what looked like human flesh behind it. He then cut into the flesh, which unlocked the door. This morbid unlocking ritual was repeated at all doors like this, and it got under my skin every time. It’s the exact type of weirdness, where the character underreacts to an absolutely bizarre situation, that I expect from the earlier Silent Hill games, and it made me feel right at home.
That’s the feeling that struck me most during my time with Townfall – familiarity. Not in a bad way where it feels like hitting the same beats as before, but in a way that reminded me of the best entries in the series. Even with the change of perspective and setting, which both feel like they were chosen for all the right reasons, this feels like a modern take on classic Silent Hill. It’s very similar to the way that Resident Evil 7 managed to capture the spirit of the original RE games, despite the completely different setting and first person view, and that series has been riding a wave of success ever since.
If my three hours with the game is any indication, I’ve got the same high hopes for Silent Hill: Townfall.
Developed by Screen Burn and co-published by Annapurna Interactive and Konami, Silent Hill: Townfall will release September 25 for PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.