Silent Hill: Townfall Game Review

Simon Ordell emerges from the waters on the shore of the small Scottish isle of St. Amelia. After encountering a mysterious man named Richard and Zoe, a secretive nurse who keeps leaving behind fragmented messages about a recent tragedy that befell the town, all Simon knows is that he must “make things right.” The town is abandoned, covered in a thick miasma of fog, and littered with the artifacts of the lives that once filled its streets. Now, there is only decay and emptiness. As Simon works to find any sign of life left in St. Amelia, he will have to face the dark creatures that roam its ruins and the even darker truths that lie buried in the town's history. Only then will Simon uncover the true reason behind his summoning, and whether or not there is any hope for him to escape…

Silent Hill: Townfall is developed by Screen Burn Interactive and published by Konami. The game is available on PC and PlayStation 5, and was reviewed using a base PS5 console.

Simon Ordell emerges from the waters on the shore of the small Scottish isle of St. Amelia. After encountering a mysterious man named Richard and Zoe, a secretive nurse who keeps leaving behind fragmented messages about a recent tragedy that befell the town, all Simon knows is that he must “make things right.” The town is abandoned, covered in a thick miasma of fog, and littered with the artifacts of the lives that once filled its streets. Now, there is only decay and emptiness. As Simon works to find any sign of life left in St. Amelia, he will have to face the dark creatures that roam its ruins and the even darker truths that lie buried in the town's history. Only then will Simon uncover the true reason behind his summoning, and whether or not there is any hope for him to escape…

Silent Hill: Townfall is developed by Screen Burn Interactive and published by Konami. The game is available on PC and PlayStation 5, and was reviewed using a base PS5 console.

The real star of Silent Hill: Townfall is St. Amelia itself. Given its recent resurgence thanks to Bloober Team's masterful Silent Hill 2 remake and the genuinely transcendent Silent Hill f from Neobards Entertainment, there has been plenty of discourse amongst the notoriously defensive community of Silent Hill fans about what actually “qualifies” as a proper entry in the franchise, especially when you have games that don't even take place in the titular town. While there will always be naysayers who reflexively cry foul at anything that doesn't immediately pay direct homage to the first four games from Team Silent that came out almost thirty years ago, I will gladly direct anyone who doubts Townfall's right to bear the Silent Hill name to simply spend a few terrifying minutes exploring St. Amelia as Simon Ordell.

What Screen Burn Interactive has crafted in St. Amelia is nothing short of miraculous. Despite being a fog-enveloped graveyard of dead bodies and dead memories alike, St. Amelia is one of the most authentic and lived-in spaces I have encountered in a video game. The hand-crafted interiors of every home are stuffed with the detritus of the everyday, and no two spaces that you creep and sneak through ever feel stock or half-baked. Outside of cutscenes, the game takes place entirely from a first-person perspective, which makes Townfall the first game in the franchise brave enough to attempt carrying on the legacy left by Hideo Kojima's P.T. demo. So far as immersion goes, Townfall exploits this POV-shift with the cruel, precise craftsmanship of developers intent on scaring the shit out of their players.

I cannot stress enough how much the faded, nostalgic veneer of decay is important to Silent Hill: Townfall's success as a horror game. The game takes place in the 90s, and Screen Burn is clearly having a ball exploiting the roughshod, archaic edge that this gives to their setting. I don't know how else to describe it other than by comparing the overwhelming sense of dread and loss to that feeling that comes from cleaning out the home of an elderly loved one and finding so many artifacts and knick-knacks from decades long past. Except, of course, this house is an entire city, and it also happens to be filled with monstrous creatures and tears into an Otherworld made of jagged concrete and endless corridors of rusted metal.

What makes Townfall such an excellent Silent Hill game is the way that it blends the mundane tragedies of small-town life with the otherworldly trauma that is choking St. Amelia to death. If that wasn't enough to convince you, maybe the excellent creature design and use of body horror will. While I may certainly have some issues with aspects of Townfall's surprisingly stealth-driven gameplay, I have little to complain about when it comes to the design and effect of the deadly creatures that roam St. Amelia's streets. They stalk, writhe, and scream along with the best of the series' most memorable foes, and Townfallmakes especially good use of the way it imbues a lot of its creatures and Otherworld details with the iconography of sterile hospital equipment and brutalist architecture. The score, by Canadian artist Pilotpriest, is also a perfect fit for the franchise. It at once feels immediately identifiable as a Silent Hill OST while setting its own brand of industrial ambiance apart from the famous stylings of Akira Yamaoka.

The best touch, though, comes from the CRTV, which is Townfall's evolution of the classic pocket radio that warns Silent Hill heroes of impending monster attacks. It not only comes with helpful bursts of static audio cues that warn of lurking monsters, but it has a scanning video feature that gives Simon an infrared sensor that can see monsters through walls and help track their movement. When you combine the novel mechanics of the CRTV with some of the best and most thematically rich puzzles to ever stump our Silent Hill protagonists, you get an absolutely ingenious blend of aesthetics, narrative, and gameplay. On paper, at least.

When it comes to the core gameplay of Silent Hill: Townfall, this is where I must pause my effusive praise and address some of the game's real issues. For one, I simply do not know if Screen Burn's approach to blending classic survival-horror combat and more modern run-and-hide thrills completely works. Many of Screen Burn's employees worked on the original Alien: Isolation, which is immediately apparent, but the creatures hunting Simon and Company are a far cry from the meticulously tuned predator that the Xenomorph was in its game. In Alien: Isolation, it made perfect sense to match the film's tense atmosphere with gameplay that emphasized crawling through endless space-station corridors and hiding from its unkillable, genetically-perfected predator.

In Silent Hill: Townfall, the blend of survival combat and tense escape is less seamless. Common enemies like the Sorrowful and the Lungers are just too fast and aggressive to spot the player, and it can be very difficult to track their patterns or know exactly what will qualify as “breaking” stealth, even with the CRTV. The Sorrowful have a long-range syringe attack that feels downright unfair every time it gets you from what feels like a mile away, and there's an enemy called The Weight whose unstoppable nature and endless hounding make later stealth sections an absolute chore to get through.

To Screen Burn's credit, a patch that got released when I was already significantly through my first playthrough seemingly addresses a lot of these issues, but the issues are more deeply rooted than can be addressed by simple A.I. tweaks. Too many of the Otherworld maps are designed as elaborate labyrinth-puzzle boxes meant to trick and ensnare enemies. If you're like me and eventually get so fed up with some of the stealth that you opt to either fight or sprint your way through the enemies, this can make navigation a real pain. It also means that you don't always have the opportunity to linger in the oppressive atmosphere and soak up all of the narrative details created by the impeccable art and environmental design, which I think is paramount for any psychological horror game. While the stealth qualms I have are far from a deal-breaker, they do account for why I think I might actually prefer the combat-heavy take on the formula that Silent Hill f experimented with.

On a narrative level, with one major caveat I will get to, Silent Hill: Townfall makes for one of the strongest entries in the franchise. As we play through the game and learn more about how our protagonists are inextricably linked to the demise of St. Amelia, we get immersed in their complex and deeply human flaws just as much as any of the supernatural mysteries that are afoot, if not more. The layered storytelling is anchored by some excellent voice-acting and writing, with Zovan Adepo, Kezia Burrows, and LOST's Terry O'Quinn all giving great performances throughout the game as Simon, Zoe, and Richard, respectively.

My one wish is that Screen Burn would have trusted the Lynchian instincts of the game it is so clearly the most inspired by, Silent Hill 2, and given the story a bit more wiggle-room to simply be a horror story, rather than a protracted and too-obvious series of metaphors. For goodness sake, Simon bursts out of the waters of St. Amelia with a hospital band on his wrist and an I.V. bag sticking out of his hand. At one point, Zoe must puzzle her way through a nerve-wracking impromptu surgery, and you have a comically rude doctor just shouting all of Zoe's obvious self-doubt and fear over the intercom at her. “You're worthless! These people will die because of you!” I know that Silent Hill has made a reputation for using its horror as metaphor for its characters' guilt and trauma, but it always works best when it is subtext. Townfall occasionally manages to be both too metaphorical and too literal at the same time.

Granted, basically every minor complaint I have about Townfall – the uneven gameplay, the overly blunt and literal nature of some of its story choices – is a charge you could level at even the best classic Silent Hill games. At this point, being ambitious but flawed is practically the defining qualifier for a fan-favorite entry. So, I want to end this review back where I started, by imploring anyone interested in the game to simply consider St. Amelia. It's almost Halloween as I write this review, and Screen Burn has crafted one of the most haunted and atmospheric small towns in all of modern gaming. Won't you take a risk and step into these quiet, almost empty streets? Won't you follow Simon and his companions into the dark fog of their own sins? I promise, if it's rock-solid horror you are looking for, Silent Hill: Townfall has it in spades.

Just, you know, be prepared to spend more time than you might prefer hiding in closets.