Silent Hill: Townfall preview

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There's always a foggy town that instills a certain fear, cryptic puzzles within that tense atmosphere, and an underlying trauma to ground the chilling horror. I had an inkling that Silent Hill: Townfall could nail the Silent Hill series' particular style of horror, and after getting three hours of hands-on time with it, I'm thrilled to say my intuition was spot on. This being in first-person definitely sparked the thought of what P.T. could have been, because my time with Townfall showed that the more intimate interaction with the environment can bring you closer to both the story it's trying to tell and the gameplay elements that give rise to such dread. I came in thinking Townfall would be just another direction the series could explore and came away eager for whatever comes after the end of my preview demo. 

Silent Hill: Townfall is developed by Screen Burn, which was previously known as NoCode, the crew that made the space-thriller Observation and has a direct lineage with Alien Isolation. Director Jon McKellan worked on Alien Isolation (and directed its DLC); it’s a pretty clear inspiration for Townfall in its first-person perspective and in the way it builds tension through vulnerability — you have to rely on stealth before using combat as a last-ditch effort. Townfall is also a Silent Hill release that’s representative of the studio itself. 

Townfall takes place in the 1990s in fictional St. Amelia that closely reflects seaside towns of Scotland, where the Screen Burn team is from. While these ports tend to be quite foggy to begin with, St. Amelia’s density is intensified as you discover how a close-knit community fell apart from what seems to be a disease and mutation that ravaged its people and turned them into monstrous mutants. Playing as Simon Ordell, you’re a fish out of water as an American mysteriously washed ashore in a Scottish town. He’s got an IV hooked up to his hand, and he’s searching for a nurse named Zoe Ellis who lives in St. Amelia. She reaches out to him through an essential radio device called the CRTV that guides him through vague, desperate voice lines — and when you get to Zoe’s house, you see a portrait of Simon in her upstairs hallway. Something weird is going on here. 

When I asked McKellan about this dynamic of having an American lead character, he said there’s a good reason for it. While he couldn’t give more away because of spoilers, he said it’ll help players connect to him as you’re both outsiders exploring the town unraveling a mysterious plot. 

Analog Boy in a Digital World

The CRTV is the main crux of Townfall’s gameplay — every Silent Hill uses a radio as a key item, and Townfall follows suit, but there are key differences here that bring you closer to the world itself. First, it’s your visual guide for where to go. You can pull it up at any time and after tuning it for your next objective, the CRTV screen shows short, disconnected clips of the buildings or alleyways you should see on your path to progress. The CRTV pushed me to really pay attention to the environment in a way that objective markers or a mini-map could never really do. Simon also has a physical map of the town you can access that he will automatically mark up based on story progress and clues in lieu of a traditional quest log. I already felt like I had a deeper connection with the cobblestone streets and narrow alleys of St. Amelia just from the demo. 

My favorite thing about the CRTV, however, is the way it’s used to solve puzzles. I remember the pharmacy section so distinctly because it felt like a riddle and scavenger hunt that you’re eager to solve because you think you already know how to get to the solution. I had to devise the four-number combination to open a lock for a key item — seems like pretty standard stuff, right? After having to color-tune the CRTV, it kept showing a series of seemingly unrelated closeups of objects within the pharmacy. Each clip and object represented a number on the lock, and upon closer inspection without explanation or hand-holding, I was able to determine what these clues were communicating. It’s that level of trust Townfall has that you can figure out what it’s trying to tell you. 

There’s an escape room-esqe puzzle in an earlier section that tees up this idea: you have to look at photos on the wall, journal entries, and markings on a calendar to unlock the door and get out. This particular style of puzzle design lends itself extremely well to the first-person perspective because it’s able to let the subtleties in the environment be part of the solution. Something McKellan also emphasized that the puzzles themselves are designed to be part of the story too; the clues and solutions tell you about the characters or what happened in the town to help develop your understanding without having to say things out loud. 

Now, Townfall wouldn’t be much of a horror game if the lingering dread wasn’t backed by a creeping threat. In this early chapter, I only had 2x4 planks and a super-loud revolver with limited ammo to defend myself from the mutated monsters sprinkled throughout the streets. So stealth is the main weapon, really. And that’s where the CRTV comes in again. Enemies show up as radio signals and you have to manually tune to mark them on the CRTV; this lets you see them on the screen and through walls when pointing it in their direction. Once the signals are marked, you can cycle through them quickly without having to manually tune again, but keeping track of which enemy was which on the frequency bar became a bit of a pain when four or five of them were within range. However, I found this to be a sensible way to even the playing field with stealth, letting me monitor patrol patterns from safety before making a dash for it. If you think this makes things sound too easy, well, it isn’t — instead, it eases the sort of trial-and-error nature of stealth-focused games while still challenging you. You can take calculated risks or plan a course of action without having to bang your head against the wall as often. 

The CRTV is all the more important because combat isn’t exactly Townfall’s strength. Not that I expected it to be, but it’s a last resort for a reason. You have a basic attack and block with melee weapons, which aren’t quite as responsive as I’d hoped, and enemy attacks are a little tough to read. First-person melee combat is hard to get right, and the revolver Simon finds early on only has so many rounds (and it’s loud as hell, alerting everything in range) — but as long as Townfall keeps the balance I saw in the demo, I don’t think it’ll be a problem. There are also several closets and sheds throughout town you can run and hide in, so getting caught and chased doesn’t always have to result in combat. This isn’t meant to be Resident Evil, after all, and thanks to Simon being just a regular guy who has no idea what’s going on, it makes sense in the grand scheme. 

A Small-Town Connection

The aforementioned pharmacy section is connected to a series of puzzles scattered around town that’ll have you pulling up your map pretty frequently to make sure you’re making the correct turns at every street. As inconvenient as it is, I enjoy that finding a house with an address you got from a note is part of what you do here. It may get confusing knowing where exactly to go and if that leads to mistakenly backtracking, the pacing can drag, making it all the more important to pay attention to what Simon marks on the map. 

When the sky inexplicably turns a deep red and the mutated beings come out in droves, however, navigating the town’s backyards and apartment complex and making it to the hospital is more of a zombie-riddled maze. Bobbing and weaving between monsters, creating distractions and trying to land desperate shots become your primary focus. This is not necessarily my favorite part of Townfall, but the activity balances out the more unnerving quiet that preceded it. It’s intense and can be exhausting, but in a good way. 

Any horror game worth its salt is going to drain you, and I came away from Townfall with that feeling. But it’s that broader message tucked underneath the horrors that I’m looking forward to most. The story’s opening with abandoned signs protesting “the CEG” makes it pretty clear that this small town was overrun by corporate interests, and it led to something catastrophic that mutated its people. 

I explored more about Zoe Ellis in this demo — her mental breakdown, how she feels about letting down her colleagues at the hospital and clinic, and her regrets over not being able to save her people. I discovered more about Zoe’s relationships to the townsfolk in the emails, notes, and letters left behind, and more about her perceived failures in the main puzzle solution in the section I played. These kinds of motifs have been what made Silent Hill strong in the past. I’m quite fond of the direction Silent Hill has been going in recently, leaning into the idea of being an anthology series where different parts of the world get to tell their kinds of stories wrapped in a consistent theme and style of horror. The Silent Hill 2 remake deftly modernized a classic, and most recently Silent Hill explored the struggles of womanhood in Japan in the 1960s. There’s certainly more to unravel, including how Simon relates to everything happening in Townfall, and I can’t wait to see how it all comes together and fits into the series. 

The terrifying contrast between the bloodstained, rusted corridors of a hospital and the deeply unsettling fog of the original Silent Hill on PS1: those are images that still stick with me to this day. It’s probably the most horrifying experience I’ve ever had in a game — well, I was a kid at the time, but it paved the way for what I now find terrifying. Townfall provides a confluence of psychological and analog horror that evokes things like number stations or the video series Local 58 for me. Few games deliver that foreboding, lingering dread quite like a good Silent Hill does, and it seems Screen Burn has understood the assignment. 

We’ll be able to find out the truth about St. Amelia, if we can survive it, when Silent Hill: Townfall launches on September 24 for PlayStation 5 and PC.