Konami is on a hot streak with the recent Silent Hill revival. The remake of James Sunderland’s seminal story was a hit with critics and fans, and Silent Hill f expanded upon the core concept of the series while exploring womanhood in 1960s rural Japan. Now, Silent Hill: Townfall takes us to the desolate Scottish town of St. Amelia on a disappointingly uneven journey that hits the franchise's highest highs but also sinks into shockingly dull lows.
Developer Screen Burn, formerly No Code Limited, has crafted a visually compelling experience that puts main character Simon Ordell front and center as he tries to make sense of the looming mystery surrounding St. Amelia.
Simon wakes up ashore near the docks of St. Amelia with an IV bag tied to his arm. It’s a bleak town that evokes the same oppressive feeling you get while exploring Silent Hill. It seems to exist in a reality adrift; nothing appears to be wrong at first glance, but the more you explore its quiet streets—surrounded by solemn silence, interrupted only by creaky metal plaques from abandoned establishments swinging in the ocean breeze—the more you’ll start getting the jitters.
It is a Silent Hill game, after all, so something is wrong, but Screen Burn absolutely deserves praise for truly capturing the unique aesthetic of what makes the franchise so special. Now that it seems Konami is moving away from the series' origins as a beacon of occultism and religious cults—leaning instead into its more esoteric aspects—St. Amelia fits like a glove. You’ll get to explore a ton of landmarks within the small town, each telling a piece of the story of what went down there, with several interconnected threads pushing Townfall’s narrative forward in various directions. It’s not just finding out what happened to Simon that drives you to keep going; the town itself is as compelling a character as Simon.
You’ll also meet other people whose destinies are all intertwined. This isn’t a Silent Hill 2 situation in which everyone you bump into has their own personal reasons for experiencing purgatory. Rather, it is the complete opposite: wandering souls are trying to come to terms with St. Amelia’s apparent downfall and their individual roles in it.
Simon’s journey is riddled with mystery—one that might not hook you in the same way as previous stories in the franchise. It did just enough to keep me engaged, but the payoff may not bring the resolution you hoped for. Townfall’s story does go to very interesting places with some narrative twists to spruce up the experience.
It’s hard to talk about the plot without spoiling anything, so all I’ll say is that it stands on its own, but it didn’t move quite in the way I had hoped following the early hours of playtime. Those initial moments set the bar high, but the game doesn't quite stick the landing. It’s a shame Simon is somewhat the least interesting thing the story has going for it, as he is the character we spend the most time with during a playthrough that should give you a solid 12 to 15 hours of game time. I was much more compelled by the narrative beats of the other characters present in the story.
Now let’s talk gameplay, which is also a mixed bag.
Unlike recent entries, Townfall strips away a bit of player agency, emphasizing true survival in survival horror. Silent Hill has never been about becoming a guns-blazing, boulder-punching action hero, but there’s no denying you always had ways to fight back against the unsavory nightmares each protagonist faced. Simon has it much rougher. Using a portable CRT monitor (CRTV), Simon can track enemies in the immediate vicinity, helping you map out a way to avoid confrontations that would otherwise more often than not end with you reloading a previous save.
You still get an assortment of tools to fight back when the occasion warrants it—including low-durability melee weapons and firearms that make quite a bit of noise with incredibly scarce ammo—but these are treated as last resorts rather than an ever-present part of Simon’s inventory. You need to pick and choose your fights carefully. Here lies my main issue with the game: forced stealth is rarely fun, and the design choices around some of Townfall’s encounters make for an extremely frustrating experience.
Screen Burn employs developers with prior experience on Alien: Isolation, and that DNA can be felt all over Townfall. Whereas stealth worked wonderfully in Creative Assembly’s horror masterpiece, here it feels more like a nuisance you have to trudge through just to reach the next major puzzle section.
There will be many times when you’ll simply be overwhelmed by the sheer number of enemies blocking the exact path you need to take. Having to minutely plot my escape route from a dire situation felt neat early on, with that adrenaline rush of not knowing if I was making the right turn fueling my excitement.
However, after a few hours of playing hide-and-seek, it reached a point where I was trying to brute-force my way through set pieces simply because a sense of dullness had set in. The creepy backdrops stopped having an effect because, instead of being properly immersed in the story, I was dreading having to circle back to another building to grab X item just to finish a puzzle and move on.
You’ll eventually come across enemies that are one-shot kills. These moments absolutely drained what little fun I still had trying to crawl through vents and crouch-walk across dimly lit corridors, which felt unfairly claustrophobic—almost intentionally designed to make you fail, forcing an artificial sense of dread because there was no right way out of a pesky situation other than outrunning an enemy and praying you had enough healing items left.
That’s not to say there aren't really good stealth set pieces in the game; I’d highlight one in particular that takes place in a hospital (it wouldn’t be a Silent Hill game without one). But my idea of fun isn't staring at a mini TV while waiting for a grotesque little gremlin to shuffle out of the way.
The CRTV gimmick itself presents some issues that I don’t think were fully solved. Having the ability to know the precise location of every enemy for the vast majority of the game robbed me of the eeriness that comes with entering a new area. The fear of the unknown is almost entirely removed from Townfall’s exploration because every time something is close, a static sound lets you know it’s time to look for a new enemy signal—and just like that, the sense of wonder vanishes.
While the exploration-dampening stealth bogs down the experience, I must say the puzzles are wonderfully crafted—possibly some of the series’ best. They are much more grounded in reality, or at least as close as they can be within the context of the Silent Hill universe.
Quite a few had me scratching my head at how mind-bending they feel, only to realize Screen Burn did an excellent job of making the solutions organic by leveraging the amazingly crafted environments. You have to pay attention to every minute detail: every frame or painting inside a household can hold a clue, a seemingly disposable document can hide vital information, and even small tidbits about Simon can help you out. I’m not ashamed to say more than a couple gave me a hard time, but figuring them out was infinitely more enjoyable than having to engage with what awaited me once I was done.
The only annoying thing regarding puzzles was the fact that Screen Burn felt the need to add a tacked-on motion-control signal-decoding minigame that wasn’t pleasant to interact with. Luckily, you can disable it, which I sadly figured out way too late into my playthrough.
Ultimately, Silent Hill: Townfall is an interesting experiment: both a masterclass in atmospheric dread and environmental puzzle design that gets bogged down by an exhausting, uneven, frustrating gameplay loop. Screen Burn’s St. Amelia is a desolate destination well worth visiting for its sheer aesthetic brilliance. But between the trial-and-error stealth and a narrative that fails to stick its landing, it's an experience that will definitely test your patience. It may not be as flawless as fans had hoped for, but for those willing to endure its frustrating lows, its brilliant highs are well worth it.
A review code was provided by the developer.
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