What exactly defines the Silent Hill series? Is it an unassuming town blanketed in fog, a place where horrors are hidden just out of sight? Is it the survival gameplay and cryptic puzzles? Or is it the sound of an air raid siren, and Pyramid Head dragging his bloody cleaver across concrete?
The most straightforward answer is that these are psychological horror games which are about something: unforgivable crimes, abusive childhoods, systemic misogyny. Compared to its peers, Silent Hill has always stood out for its heavy themes and persistent symbolism, with every monster carrying a double meaning.
The latest entry in the series, Silent Hill: Townfall, hits all these points. Its setting, a Scottish fishing village, is so evocative that you can practically smell the sea salt. Its creatures double as metaphors, with scares that carry deeper meaning. And of course, there’s the fog, rolling in off the ocean to hide horrible deeds.
However, there’s another important element of Silent Hill that Townfall struggles to capture: presentation. At their best, these games use surreal imagery to take us through self-constructed underworlds of rusted metal and squelching flesh. At first, the Otherworld comes across like a nonsensical, half-remembered nightmare, but peel away enough layers, and you’ll reveal the truth like a raw wound beneath a scab. The omnipresent fog isn’t only there to obfuscate monsters and create tension; it’s there to hide the full picture. The best Silent Hill games unravel like a compelling mystery.
Silent Hill: Townfall has some heady ideas, but the delivery lacks punch. There isn’t much of the enigmatic ambiance the series is known for or the little moments that defy reason or clear meaning: tortured bodies in steel cages; a shrill scream that belongs to no one; the industrial churn of Akira Yamaoka’s score. In Townfall, piecing together macabre events doesn’t make you feel like an occult detective driven on by a dark curiosity, as much as a passive participant reading what’s plainly spelled out. Whether it’s the lackluster stealth gameplay or the unadorned metaphors, this horror game is a bit too on the nose.
The story begins as Simon Ordell climbs out of St. Amelia’s harbor. He’s dazed, confused, and has an IV in his arm connected to a strange black fluid. Simon wanders into the town square where he finds a recently constructed memorial to an undefined tragedy. “A CRIME ON OUR COMMUNITY,” a protest sign reads. After a voice reaches out to Simon through a handheld CRT device, he sets out to find a man named Richard who promises him answers.
A familiar trip into hell
As for how our protagonist goes about discovering the truth, Townfall follows a familiar structure to other Silent Hill games. You explore small but somewhat open-ended areas of St. Amelia, while finding keys, passcodes, and tools to journey deeper. Overall, most of the puzzles and enigmas you’ll find are solidly designed, offering enough friction to require a pencil, notepad, and a bit of brainpower. While there are a few frustrating cases where things get a bit too obtuse (like in one nightmarish late-game puzzle involving pictograms), that’s probably a better outcome than being overly guided by Detective Vision and yellow paint splatters. This is all pretty familiar, but Townfall has one big change compared to its predecessors: this is the first Silent Hill game in first person.
Developer Screen Burn Interactive takes full advantage of this perspective, placing the player in this space with an uncomfortable intimacy and forcing them to witness St. Amelia’s horrors up close. This town has a great deal of personality, from colorful architecture to loose flyers that establish a specific time and place. The sound design is so eerie and crisp that it’s easy to get scared of your own footsteps, while Pilotpriest’s unsettling score creates a persistent dread. And then the monsters show up.
Showing too much of the monster
If it wasn’t clear from being hooked up to an IV like he was just discharged from an emergency room, Simon is very frail. Especially early on, if he gets spotted by an unsightly creature, he’s probably not going to make it. Because of this, stealth is a necessity for most of the game, and while you’ll find glass bottles to distract enemies, wooden planks to fight back, and a bullet every now and again, these resources can dry up pretty quickly.
Early on, running into these prowling monsters feels tense and dynamic, as you peek around corners and use Simon’s handheld CRT to spot their spasming forms through walls. These creatures are fast and persistent, chasing you through streets and into buildings. At one point after being spotted, I ran into a vacant home, barely finding a closet to hide in before the creature burst through the door and searched the place room by room. Unfortunately, the magic of the game’s unnerving first few hours doesn’t last forever, because repeated exposure to familiar creeps eventually dulls the tension.
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Image: Konami, Screen Burn Interactive -
Image: Konami, Screen Burn Interactive -
Image: Konami, Screen Burn Interactive
The mechanical underpinnings of it all are eventually exposed as you’re forced to memorize creature movement patterns, like Solid Snake planning out a route past easily duped guards. These situations start scary, before turning workmanlike and eventually flat-out dull, as you wait for slow-moving creatures to reach their destination. There are clever scares, and the introductions to each new type of hellspawn are universally frightening, but eventually, everything falls into a repetitive rhythm. Even worse is when these levels try to switch things up by introducing a Nemesis-like foe that doesn’t follow set patterns, resulting in frustration as the unkillable monster repeatedly ends you in a single hit. Horror games tend to evoke strong emotions, but I can’t remember one that left me this annoyed.
Finding answers in the fog
Silent Hill: Townfall’s general atmosphere and storytelling fare much better than its gameplay. The narrative tackles worthwhile topics, delving into corporate evils and undercurrents of British imperialism as a parasitic company town replaces local flavor. The scenic skyline warps, as metal pipes stretch into the distance under a blood-red sky. There are echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic in overworked nurses and callous establishment responses to mass suffering. The suffocating din is at its strongest when Simon is suddenly whisked into this St. Amelia’s equivalent of the Otherworld, all concrete slabs and cold steel.
Townfall is a much smarter and more original game than some of the mediocre Silent Hill titles that came after Team Silent’s stewardship, but it can also be a bit too rational, bordering on academic. The overarching themes are spelled out plainly and unsubtly. At one point, a man blamed for the death of local workers literally fights off monsters called Widows. While Silent Hill 2’s Nurses and Lying Figures have been picked apart to death, there are multiple ways to interpret many of them, even Pyramid Head.
Compared to the recent Silent Hill f, which conveyed its message in a thousand clever little cuts while using flower-themed symbolism to convey a metaphorical death, you never have to work particularly hard to figure out what Townfall is about; it’s sort of there in the name.
There are a few satisfying story reveals, but there’s little surprise, either in finally understanding what these ambiguous horrors represent or in piecing together the literal machinations of the plot. While it’s possible the other four endings I didn’t see (out of five total) would have made the narrative land with more oomph, the one I got had enough finality that I wasn’t tempted to seek the others out.
Silent Hill: Townfall is a bit odd. On the one hand, Screen Burn Interactive and writer/director Jon McKellan clearly comprehend what makes Silent Hill interesting, especially compared to the bad sequels that came in the dark years after Konami dismantled Team Silent (don’t worry, it doesn’t dredge up past villains out of cheap nostalgia). This is a solid horror game that, at its best, creates genuine tension through its grounded perspective and well-realized setting.
But by laying out its greater meaning so plainly, Silent Hill: Townfall lacks the spiraling dread of games like Silent Hill 2, where sudden truths clanged like a steel pipe smashing a skull. Townfall understands this series, but it doesn’t know how to fully convey that understanding through a grotesque language of self-made hells, fleshy monstrosities, and corroded metal. Maybe it’s not fair to compare this game to some of the greatest works of horror ever made, but that’s the burden that comes with approaching Silent Hill.
Silent Hill: Townfall is out on Sept. 24 for PlayStation and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a prerelease download code provided by Konami. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
