If you were to cut the Silent Hill 2 remake by about a third, make it first-person, and set it in Scotland, you’d be most of the way to Silent Hill: Townfall.
The latest game in the survival horror series is more of a traditional experience compared to last year’s Silent Hill F, returning to the sort of environments, puzzles, and gameplay you’d expect from the mainline entries.
A fog has engulfed the quiet fishing village of St. Amelia, trapping its residents inside. Simon Ordell answers a calling to return to the coastal spot to work out what’s going on and his own connection to the place, all from a first-person view — the first big entry to do so in Silent Hill’s 27-year history.
With that new setting and perspective, the more bite-sized take on the franchise crafts something entirely its own. Silent Hill: Townfall is another solid take on the franchise that does its own thing while retaining all the hallmarks of what made it a classic.
It executes on the vision well, but the more you play, the less important its most distinctive features become.
The game is most familiar in its structure: as Simon, the story takes you from one location to the next, each one presenting an overall goal to achieve while secrets, optional puzzles, collectibles, and combat provide intrigue off to the side. You’ll see St. Amelia along its beachfront, inland at a new housing estate, and far beyond.
Every scenario contains challenges of both the physical and mental kind, and the CRTV is at the heart of it all. This is a handheld device that can be tuned to display plot-centric videos, guidance clues, and the locations of nearby enemies.
In tandem with the map, you use the CRTV to get a sense of what you’re meant to be doing, then tune it to specific frequencies to gain context clues for puzzles. At that point, you’re let loose on an area and free to explore. This structural setup carries the experience through roughly 10 hours of terror, with shorter sequences and narrative reveals in between the main locales.
If you’ve played Silent Hill 2, you’ll already be well accustomed to the kind of situations at hand — they’re just on a smaller scale.
What sets Silent Hill: Townfall apart from its many predecessors, though, is the 1990s Scottish setting. Developer Screen Burn (formerly No Code of Observation fame) has embraced its home country and delivered a backdrop that honours both it and the time period.
It’s at its best at the very start: as you walk the deserted streets into the main square, you’ll pass local shops, telephone boxes, and decor of the decade. Some of the stores can be entered as you push the objective forward, revealing more of the everyday Scotsman from the 1990s.
Townfall then goes one step further — particularly as the story progresses to new parts of St. Amelia — as it opens up people’s homes for exploration. As if everyone had disappeared the day before, these lived-in houses ooze atmosphere and suspense, with all the furniture and household items still in place.
You almost feel bad rummaging through their cupboards and kitchen drawers to steal healing items and puzzle pieces — the homes don’t feel abandoned; it’s like the owners have just nipped to the corner shop.
One aspect I especially enjoyed was the use of old-school technology in many of the puzzles. Floppy disks are often the source of critical data and clues and printers issue paper instructions for machinery — just like the good old days!
I’m not Scottish, but I’m aware of “leckie cards” and how they were top-up cards used to run electricity boxes in people’s houses, so to see this minutiae brought to life was particularly cool. I grew up just before iPhones and the Internet were standard across every household, so interacting with diskettes again was a fun trip down memory lane.
This also speaks to the authenticity of Silent Hill: Townfall’s brain teasers: Screen Burn hasn’t gone down the route of making bizarre puzzles to gate your progress. Instead, you’re using a computer to fix a valve, you’re going to someone’s house because a set of keys was left there with a friend.
Things become a little more eccentric as you enter the Otherworld, but for the most part, the team’s commitment to keeping things grounded and centred around daily life pays off. I’ve never been so happy to find the right cassette tape in someone’s garage.
Combat, unfortunately, lets the title down.
With a first-person camera, Simon isn’t nearly as up for a fight as James from Silent Hill 2 or Hinako in Silent Hill F. A large aspect of Silent Hill: Townfall’s combat is avoiding it altogether — you’ll want to make progress while keeping out of a monster’s way. The CRTV helps here, as you can tune it to frequencies that track an enemy’s movements.
It is at least a step above an Outlast experience: Simon can use wooden planks and pipes to defeat enemies, and there are a few guns in the game, though ammo for them is extremely rare in the first half of the campaign.
Should a monster spot you, the clash will revolve around blocking and attacking. Enemies are extremely limited in their attack patterns, with only a few moves to call on to beat you down. Blocking them is easy, and then you simply swing your wooden plank to kill them.
I could count the number of enemy types on one hand, and I wouldn’t need all my fingers to do it, so the sort of battles you’re having at the start of the game are the exact same as the ones at the end.
While those encounters in the opening hours are indeed tense and dangerous, once you’ve learnt how the combat system works, all its stakes very quickly vanish. It’s so simple to master that enemies soon become mere annoyances rather than threats.
You’re supposed to remain hidden, create distractions by throwing bottles and bricks, and go about your task quietly. With a combat system so straightforward and harmless, you just don’t need to. It becomes stale all too quickly and a pillar of the Silent Hill experience is lost.
The same can be said of the CRTV, which becomes increasingly less important as your playthrough progresses. When enemies don’t pose any challenge, you ignore the frequency pings to track their movements. Then, most of the puzzle and direction-sensitive clues seem to dry up the more you play.
As one of the instalment’s defining features, it’s disappointing how useless it becomes as you reach the second half of the campaign. It’ll still play video clips related to the story, but as a gameplay mechanic, its usefulness only decreases.
Because of this, Silent Hill: Townfall becomes far more of an experience traditional to the series than it was probably intending. I used the map and Simon’s scribbles on it to progress along with searching the environments and applying common sense. Very rarely was I reaching for the CRTV to figure out what to do next.
Interwoven with all the environments, puzzles, and sequences is a story of Simon’s personal and complex attachment to the setting. There are very, very few characters in the game, but their actions affect the entire town of St. Amelia.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t fully understand all the events of the narrative by the time the credits rolled. This is the sort of plot you’ll need a YouTube breakdown to fully wrap your head around as it’s far from simple, especially with multiple endings to unlock. I enjoyed the journey it took me on, though, with many emotional sequences and gripping cutscenes exploring the underbelly of St. Amelia.
Altogether, it’s another solid Silent Hill experience that’s more familiar than it probably wanted to be. The Scottish setting is the highlight, and the conventional gameplay loop of a Silent Hill title means it still has plenty of tension and fun to offer.
Stunning, realistic visuals then give the town life where there wasn’t any before. Its streets and homes may be deserted, but searching them is a graphical treat. By default, the game is displayed with black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. These can be turned off during gameplay, and I did so for a full-screen experience. They still appear in cutscenes, though they make a lot more sense during cinematics.
I opted for the Quality Mode on PS5 Pro, which targets 30 frames-per-second. There’s also a Performance Mode offering a 60fps target, but I wanted to push the graphics as much as possible for this slower-paced experience. Despite the lower frame rate, I didn’t encounter any performance issues and enjoyed a smooth playthrough. To the naked eye, the title runs well.
