Silent Hill: Townfall game review – Hauntingly familiar
Almost three decades on, the series visits a deserted Scottish fishing town for a deeply unsettling adventure
Konami took a real punt when they tasked Glaswegian developer Screen Burn (responsible for interesting indie games Stories Untold and Observation) with creating a new entry in their prestigious Silent Hill series. The publisher’s recent strategy has been to branch the franchise away from the titular fictional US town, first to 1960s rural Japan with Silent Hill f and now to a Scottish island based on the quaint fishing village of St Monans. That risky decision has now paid off twice: Silent Hill has never really been about its formative location, but about broken people drifting through mysterious places, their deepest personal traumas manifesting as otherworldly horror.
In Townfall, Simon finds himself wandering the deserted, misty streets of St Amelia in 1996. It’s a beautifully realised, eerie facsimile of so many Scottish coastal resorts, replete with authentic street furniture, detailed shop fronts and lovingly crafted community noticeboards. But there’s something very wrong with the place, and it’s not long before Simon encounters patrolling monsters whose movements can be monitored using a handheld TV in a system reminiscent of the motion tracker from Alien: Isolation, itself one of the game’s biggest influences (alongside the John Wyndham-esque Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture).
As the town of St Amelia gradually reveals itself, the game layers in puzzles and enemy encounters that escalate in difficulty, making progress increasingly fraught (and frequently terrifying) as numerous disparate story threads coalesce. Townfall is a deeply unsettling experience that proves Silent Hill can thrive wherever its damaged inhabitants happen to wash up.
Silent Hill: Townfall is out on Thursday 24 September on PC and PS5.