Silent Hill is a franchise built upon quiet towns drowning in fog and judgment, and it looks like St. Amelia, the town featured in Silent Hill Townfall, is happy to continue the tradition. The latest entry in publishers Konami and Annapurna Interactive’s psychological horror franchise looks to shake things up.
With a new aspect ratio, a first-person perspective, and more, Silent Hill: Townfall is establishing itself while maintaining the DNA that popularized the series. We were recently invited to play through a few sequences in the upcoming title during a media preview. From what we experienced, developer Screen Burn is crafting a worthy entry in the series.
Get BWT in your inbox!
Get BWT in your inbox!
Players will take the role of Simon, an American, who’s called to the Scottish port town of St. Amelia in 1996, with the ambiguous task of putting things right. True to the horror genre, Simon is immediately imperiled, as he’s forced to pull himself out of the waters around the rundown dock.
He’s unsure how he even ended up in this situation, with his only clues being a hospital wristband on his right wrist and an IV inserted into his left hand. Venturing into the town proper, he finds empty, narrow streets arranged like a maze, and an ominous aura pervading the neighborhood as effectively as the fog. Even after finding a map, it’s hard to find comfort in the cold, dank town.
Silent Hill Townfall evokes Silent Hill’s heart by forging its own path.
This is in part due to the first-person perspective, a first for a full-length game in the series. This, combined with immersive 3D audio, makes it easy to place yourself in Simon’s shoes. Every errant noise becomes another cog in the torture machine that is Silent Hill Townfall, designed to strike fear into players as they’re forced to explore for clues about what’s happened to the town.
Further, the game is displayed in a unique 2.35:1 ratio, mimicking the appearance of a widescreen movie, lending to the cinematic feel of the game, especially during cutscenes. This can be toggled if players find it distracting, but this option only affects the gameplay segments, and not cutscenes.
A short time after reaching the town square, Simon finds a CRTV, a handheld television device that can be tuned to different frequencies. This helpful gadget becomes Simon’s lifeline while he explores St. Amelia, displaying clues for puzzles, the location of nearby enemies, and more. An evolution of the radio from Silent HIll 2, the developers built the CRTV to be a major pillar of gameplay, designing the puzzles and enemy encounters around it.
The first time you’re intended to find enemies with the device, you’re surrounded by them while waiting for an elevator, showing up as several signals on the device’s range of frequencies. Tuning into these signals causes the monsters to appear as silhouettes, though you can only tune into one at a time as the invisible threats slowly close in on you. Thankfully, your elevator arrives just in time, and further enemies encountered in town were both visible to the naked eye and in much smaller numbers, appearing one or two at a time.
Returning to the town square, players are able to use the CRTV to view a repeating cycle of photos, guiding them down one of the many side streets to the home of someone Simon once knew. In order to discover all the clues within the home, however, Simon has to venture to another shop nearby.
What seemed at first to be a simple errand turned into a longer trek, thanks to a locked front door; however, this also marks the first appearance of an enemy in the physical town. Armed with nothing but a wooden board, I opted instead to sneak around it, using a parked car and other obstacles for cover, and using my CRTV to keep an eye on it, even when it wasn’t visible otherwise.
The CRTV is central to Simon’s survival.
Sneaking into the shop, I grabbed what I needed and prepared to head out, unlocking the front door and fighting the enemy that had conveniently decided to start patrolling in front of the shop instead. Melee combat felt heavy and clumsy, but it was that way because of a lack of experience.
A swing or two was met with a swift battering from the creature, teaching me to be ready to block immediately instead of waiting for an exaggerated windup. Admittedly, it was a hard lesson to learn, since every fight ended with Simon much worse off than before, but I’m confident I’ll learn to fight effectively with more practice.
Another important lesson Silent Hill Townfall imparts is that stealth, which was my first instinct, is often the smarter option. It requires much more patience and caution, but you can preserve your healing items and the durability of your melee weapon and ammo later on.
Running and living to fight another day is another way to preserve your resources, though the creatures in St. Amelia may pursue you relentlessly. In one frantic instance, I was caught trying to sneak into the local clinic, looking for information about my friend. As the creature spotted me, I attempted to run into the town square and around the large monument towering in the center.
The creature followed, so I used the opportunity to run for the clinic, struggling to open the door since it required me to look near the handle and interact with it. It put me square in the shoes of every horror movie character fumbling with their keys as a slasher approaches, though thankfully I managed to open the door and shut it behind me, giving me a moment to breathe a big sigh of relief. The moment was short-lived, though, since I didn’t lock the door; the creature pushed its way inside, forcing me to finally beat the monster to death.
In the hard-earned calm, I finally noticed the latch on the door that would have saved me some trouble; though I may have had to fight the monster when attempting to leave the clinic anyway. Either way, the knowledge that doors have locks became deeply ingrained in my mind, coming in handy for the remainder of my time with the game. This moment felt deeply unique to the first-person perspective, making me especially appreciative of the decision.
Every piece of the environment is dripping in dread.
Silent Hill: Townfall wouldn’t feel like it belongs if it didn’t feature the dreaded sirens that plunge the town and Simon into a dark mirror of the world, where the creatures stir in greater numbers and the landscape is dominated by oppressive structures. Even the odd doorway reminds players that something is deeply wrong with St. Amelia.
Simon must use a scalpel to carve into a square of flesh to open them, surely an as-of-now indecipherable clue to Simon’s identity. Gargantuan pipelines appear, blocking off parts of the town that aren’t meant to be explored before stretching impossibly into the sky or further into town.
Most striking about these segments is the lighting, which goes from natural light fighting to peek through the clouds and fog, to a deep and deadly scarlet that washes over anything that isn’t steeped in shadow. The entire setting feels hostile, like touching a guardrail will cut right into Simon’s hand, though in truth the dangers are much more literal. As mentioned, the creatures inhabiting the town appear in greater numbers in these sections, almost requiring players to use stealth to get through, or risk losing their health and weapons fighting their way through.
The second segment I played through introduced a pistol for Simon to use, though it didn’t make me feel any safer. The extremely limited supply of bullets, as well as the threat of summoning more enemies with the sound of gunfire, made using the gun a daunting proposal.
In the final segment of gameplay, I had to ascend an apartment building, then climb scaffolding over to the neighboring set of apartments and descend to exit the front door. Naturally, the pair of buildings is crawling with monsters, so stealth became my go-to strategy, lest I waste my melee weaponry. Of course, using the gun was out of the question.
After almost half an hour of methodical movement, a single error resulted in being cornered by a monster. Of course, it killed me, forcing me to restart the entire segment over. My patience had worn thin, so I went in guns blazing, using the PS5 controller’s motion controls to aim and miss half my shots.
Silent Hill: Townfall’s combat is all about stealth and bouncing back from mistakes.
The other half hit their mark though, taking down the first creature and the follow-up that heard the shots from a floor or two above. Stealth is a perfectly valid option, but if you’re replaying a section and you know where the monsters will be, it occasionally pays off to be more direct. Completing this section rewarded me with a face-to-face encounter with Simon’s friend, though the context for it is lost on me until I play more of the game.
Silent Hill Townfall may not take place in the old familiar town, but St. Amelia is as dreary and depressing as Silent Hill ever seemed. Likewise, though Silent Hill: Townfall is a standalone story, it ties into the series in the ways that matter; with themes of guilt and the unfolding mystery of a ghost town that’s as much a character as Simon.
It gives the sense that, even when things were “normal,” it probably wasn’t a very nice place to live, though the town’s design gives the impression that it was well lived in. Protest signs, parked cars, photos on nightstands; everything about the town’s design gives the impression that everyone living there intended to keep on living there for years to come. Why they’ve all vanished is a mystery we’ll have to wait to unravel, but I can’t wait to be terrified while I unravel it.
Silent Hill: Townfall releases September 24, 2025, on PC and PlayStation 5.
