Silent Hill: Townfall

Publisher: Konami, Annapurna Interactive

Developer: Screen Burn

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Microsoft Windows

Price: $49.99

Konami, like Capcom, has been on an absolute tear in recent years. The difference is that few publishers have fallen from grace quite like Konami. They famously ousted legendary director Hideo Kojima and placed some of the most mind-bogglingly ridiculous legal restrictions on his every action after the fact. In his absence, they unleashed a terrible follow-up to his iconic Metal Gear series that anyone with a pulse could've told them was a bad idea. And of course, who could forget their out-of-the-blue commitment to creating pachinko machines based on their IPs?

But lately they've been singing a different tune. Realizing their own lack of talent as an in-house development studio, they started granting smaller studios permission to create new games in their many IPs. All with the brunt of their money supporting those smaller studios. 

Nowhere has this change been felt more than in one of horror gaming's flagship franchises: Silent Hill. There was Bloober Team's shockingly good remake of Silent Hill 2, which kickstarted the whole revitalization effort. Then there was last year's Silent Hill f: a somewhat flawed but also shockingly good reinterpretation of the series' core tenets (that also drove me up the wall with its insistence on using a lowercase "f" in the title).

And now, we have Silent Hill: Townfall...which is...also a somewhat flawed but also also shockingly good reinterpretation, but it's one that almost completely throws out the rulebook in favor of something entirely fresh. And in my humble opinion, it's a marked improvement over everything that came before. That's going to be a controversial take, but I stand by it.

There's one problem with this triumphant new venture...a...pretty darned big problem that comes extremely close to ruining the entire experience, in fact. But I was sad to see the credits roll on this one, which is a rare feeling to experience with something that frustrated me so much.

Despite its name, Silent Hill: Townfall doesn't take place in the titular small town of Silent Hill. Instead, it takes place on a remote Scottish fishing island called "St. Amelia." You are Simon Ordell: a man who, according to a detached voice in the intro, is "returning" to St. Amelia by way of washing up on one of its docks. Sputtering for breath as he awakes, Simon finds himself unsure of why he's back. Nor is he sure what the mysterious IV cannula in his arm is or what the fluid within contains. So with mysteries abound (at least for us), Simon ventures into town in search of whatever called him here.

I'm weighing the idea of including a new category in this year's GOTY lists for best introduction. If I decide to commit to that, Townfall is the current frontrunner. This first chapter where all the mysteries get set up is, quite simply, the greatest opening chapter I've experienced in all of 2026. No game has made so strong a first impression. It's like starting up a brand new Bioshock game, and not just because there's a bit of a nautical horror edge to it. 

The strength of the mysteries and the overall narrative remain mostly strong throughout. You're going to start piecing things together a lot sooner than you normally would in a Silent Hill game. It's still the kind of strong story you might expect from one, but just don't expect the usual degree of vagueness or proximity of cards to its chest. 

You also shouldn't expect to see Simon outside of cutscenes, as Townfall ditches the tried and true third-person camera and instead shifts to first-person. I'm not sure how controversial that decision actually was, but I 100% agree with it. Horror simply isn't nearly as effective to me if it isn't first-person. And more than perhaps any other Silent Hill to date, horror was of the upmost importance in Townfall.

This is because of another major shift in the formula: an intense focus on stealth. Like any good survival horror game, you do get weapons...but they come with downsides.

For instance, there are a fair amount of melee weapons lying around, but using those opens you up to taking damage from whatever you're trying to kill. 

There are also a handful of guns. But ammunition is obviously scarce, enemies tend to take a lot of bullets to kill, and the noise will attract other enemies to your position. Needless to say, that defeats the purpose.

Aside from those downsides, killing too many enemies also earns you the bad ending. 

So the best course of action is always to try to reach your objectives unseen. And you're going to need to be inventive to make it happen. Because like in other stealth games, your tools are limited. 

You get two "consumable" items to help you: one slot for a bottle and one slot for a brick. You throw these items to lure enemies to wherever the item lands. Pretty straightforward stuff, but you can only have a single bottle plus a single brick on your person at any given time. So you need to use them wisely. 

There's also the occasional Outlast-style hiding spot (such as a closet) for when you're desperately fleeing from an enemy and need to duck somewhere to give them the slip and avoid fighting them. 

Finally, there's Townfall's main unique mechanic: the CRTV. Simon holds on to a pocket-sized TV that shows him where every nearby enemy is. But it only tracks one enemy per frequency. So if there are 5 enemies in an area, five blips will appear on the frequency scanner. You'll then tune the radio to those frequencies one after another to see a silhouette of each enemy as they move. Things like the movement style will tell you what particular enemy type it is, but the silhouette is against a solid reddish background. So you get no details at all about what might be between you and what you're tracking. With that in mind, you'll end up slowly sneaking through an area, swapping between frequencies based on what enemies appear closer, and plan your movements accordingly. 

Aside from these things, your only hope is to use the environment to your advantage and plan as best you can.

The inherent tension with this system is palpable. Here's an example of how an encounter might go down. You might be hiding behind a car right up against a little garden wall on the left and an open parking lot not too far on the right. Your goal might be aiming to reach an apartment on the opposite side of the road from where you are. You might notice that there's a slow-moving guy on your right, a faster-moving guy on your left, and a fast-moving guy at some point at a medium distance behind you that you snuck past to get here. The enemy on the left has a bigger silhouette, so with deductive reasoning you can tell he's right on the other side of that garden wall. So long as you keep yourself crouched, you can reasonably guess you can make it to that apartment without him knowing. But you don't know if that garden wall ends somewhere along his path. 

And what about the enemy on the right? His silhouette might be slightly smaller, but not enough to tell if he's in the open part of the parking lot or behind one of the rows of cars in that parking lot. Because he moves slowly, piecing that together through observation could take a while.

And you don't have that kind of time, as that guy you snuck past could possibly come back and spot you at any moment. You dedicate yourself to that plan of hugging the garden wall, and upon doing so, you notice the slower guy is out in the open but not facing you. You can't move quickly without drawing attention, but you have no sense of when the slow guy is going to turn around. And before too long he'll be behind you. You can keep track of him with the CRTV, but that'll open you up to detection from the guy on the left if that wall does end. And vice versa. If either of them sees you, you'll have to make a run for it, which will attract the attention of whoever hadn't noticed you before.

Regardless of whether you make it by undetected or have to run for your life, what might happen next is you reach the apartment...only to find it locked with a note on the door saying the key is in one of the buildings beyond the garden wall or something like that. If you're being chased, this means having to face your attackers, make a break for it, and desperately try handles on each building hoping to find the correct one before you get killed. If you made it there undetected, this means having to come up with a new plan from a new direction (while having to try the doors). This is especially concerning if the left or right path has direct line of sight to the apartment. 

This is the horror that rules the roost in Townfall. Jumpscares only happen in one chapter, and they're easily avoidable with visual cues. So the horror comes from the dread of seeing a new enemy somehow appear near you or finding a crucial door locked after you tried so hard to get there. 

Still, being clever can save your life. At one point I'd unlocked a garden fence door with a key only to find a foe in that garden looking away from me, but blocking my exit. In a nearby shed, I saw a radio that could be turned on to lure him away, but there'd be absolutely no way to hide anywhere before he finished turning around and saw me. As I scanned the area trying to think up a plan, I noticed the fence door still had its lock on it. I'd learned the hard way earlier that enemies can open doors, but not if they're locked. Because locking this one was an option, I figured I could throw a bottle through the door from the inside of that aforementioned shed, wait for this guy to waltz outside the garden, then come up behind him, close the door, and lock him out. Distractions don't work for very long, but that wouldn't matter if he couldn't get back into the garden to attack me, right? So I did just that, and the plan completely worked. Using your noggin can be both effective and gratifying when it pays off!

There are, however, two ways in which the horror is cheapened a little bit.

The first is one that I don't have a good answer on how to fix. With a couple exceptions, save points are simply too far from each other. Outside of a few scripted autosaves, saving is done manually with phones you'll find in the world. And there's just too much time in-between phones.

I know how that makes me sound. But the fact of the matter is that stealth gameplay is a slow, slow-moving process. Even if two phones are a mere handful of houses away from each other, making it from a to b can be a ton of progress to lose if you get killed right before b.

Does this make it far more relieving when you finally come up against a new phone?

Absolutely. I wouldn't change that feeling for the world.

But it also means that if you screw up too badly, that can be...say....20 minutes of progress lost? I don't have my exact numbers, but there were times where it genuinely seemed like I'd lost that much time since the last save.

It's hard to have that positive feeling without the fear of losing progress...but it felt like maybe there was too much progress on the line at any given moment. I won't be taking anything off for this, because like I said, I don't have a good answer on how to fix it. But just be aware of this before you go in. It would suck to lose such a gigantic amount of progress because you, I don't know, got insta-killed by something, right?

...right?

Yeah...the second thing that cheapens the horror a bit is Townfall's answer to Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2: a lumbering humanoid colossus called "The Weight." The Weight, like its geometric inspiration, serves as a spooky sword of Damocles hanging over our hero's head. It stalks him in cutscenes from early on, until it finally decides to show its face in gameplay...and makes me feel like putting the game down entirely.

As you no doubt surmised, this monster instantly kills you if it catches you. Furthermore, it can't be killed until a clearly signposted moment. Fair enough, I say. Adding a threat like that is an easy way to increase tension and up the stakes for any step of your plan. The fact that the unskippable cutscene as it kills you takes around 10 seconds is annoying, but I don't have a problem with the insta-killing specifically.

What I DO have a problem with is the fact that this hunchbacked Slenderman-looking bastard cheats. It doesn't have a set path it walks, for example. Nor does it have a set-in-stone walk speed. It'll walk slooooowly and only cover a small amount of distance, then suddenly start sprinting, occasionally turning on a dime to do so. It's also far taller than any other enemy, and as such, it has this remarkable ability to see you where you otherwise wouldn't be seen. Plus, its audio (and only its audio, all other monsters were fine) always played at an incorrect angle on my headphones and at significantly higher volumes than it should have been for its proximity.

So no amount of pattern observation is actually going to save you. You can lay out the start of a plan, but everything after that is going to be a hail Mary. 

I legitimately don't think I ever successfully snuck past The Weight. No matter how carefully I plotted my next move, no matter how tight I thought my timings were from watching its silhouette. So, how did I make it to the end credits?

By abusing Simon's recovery item. By finding resources in the world, Simon can craft an IV bag to attach to his cannula. When he has one attached, he'll revive after death with a small amount of health left. In the two chapters where The Weight makes an appearance, I'd simply equip one of those bags every time I needed to try sneaking past it. I'd fail every single time, and I'd run for my life. Sometimes I'd be lucky enough to make it to a locker or something just barely fast enough to not be seen entering it. But most of the time, I'd end up getting caught and killed. From there, I'd get revived, and during the revival process, my pursuer would have moved a small distance away. This would usually give me what I needed to make it the rest of the way to wherever I was going. If it wasn't, well, I would've just equipped another IV bag anyway!

When you have to abuse a gameplay system in order to progress, that's when things go from being "scary" to being "annoying." And I felt viscerally annoyed every time this big palooka showed its non-face. 

But wait...it gets worse.

The Weight is a creature of little consistency. It has no consistent movement speed. It has no consistent patrol path. It has no consistent sound cues. It has no consistency in whether it has x-ray vision or not.

But it does have one thing that remains constant no matter where it turns up...its minimum distance from you.

See, The Weight is programmed to never be too far from you at any given point. If you do get too far, it starts to follow you despite not having actually "seen" you. Now I want you to try and imagine sneaking away from something like that. What stars would have to align to make things work if, when your plan starts working, it forgets what it was doing and turns its happy ass around in the middle of a step to move to its new position closer to you?

Pure. Luck. Pure luck. That's the only thing that will help you with this monster. And maybe you'll get lucky. I never did, but maybe you will. 99.9% of the time, though, you're going to get spotted. Maybe it'll be because it started sprinting and turned around on a dime. Maybe it'll be because it looked in a direction it hadn't looked at in the five straight minutes you'd been watching it to learn its patterns. Maybe it'll be because the game's logic literally forces it to relocate when you start winning.

Everything the bastard does constitutes cheating. And my first evening going up against it, I legitimately thought I was going to just have to leave the game there and never return. Because it felt...and actually pretty much was...impossible. It was only through remembering I could use the IV bags I hadn't used all game that I was finally able to overcome this obstacle. But it didn't feel like I'd actually done anything. I'd just abused a system to get to the next area every single time.

Thankfully, The Weight only shows up in two chapters. But the second and final of those is the last level, where it's surrounded by other enemies. Up until this point, I'd killed exactly one enemy in combat because I wanted to try and get the good ending. But when I saw The Weight show up, I decided the good ending was no longer worth it. So, I played things pettily. I'd wait for it to get far enough away, kill an enemy, then duck back into a safe area with a phone. I rinsed and repeated this until The Weight was the only one left. Then it was back to the IV trick. Every single time this thing was in the same room, the entire game's fun went down the drain. And I'll never go back to Townfall (a game I'd initially planned to replay) ever again because of it.

Anyway, Silent Hill wouldn't be Silent Hill without horror, but it also wouldn't be the same without puzzles! And in Townfall, they're mostly good. Or at least, I thought so. Opinions on these run the full gamut, sadly. 

For my money, logic puzzles are the best kind. And this is almost all logic puzzles!

There's one that takes place inside a small pharmacy where all of the clues are in plain sight. There's one inside a house that functions as a pseudo time travel affair. And for a final example, there's a trippy one involving medical symptoms and blood types.

They aren't all good, though. The final puzzle in particular forced me to look up a guide. It's the kind of puzzle that can 100% be brute forced, but that would've taken a hell of a long time.

This puzzle features a sort of switchboard with two sets of buttons with minimalist pictures on them (the likes of which you might find on a car dashboard) followed by a numbered keypad. The goal is to select an "action" from the first set of buttons, an "item" (such as "door" or "filter") from the second set, and a special number code for where in the area to make the preceding things happen. So if you pressed the button with a picture that corresponded to "open", the button with a picture corresponding with "door," and entered 1234 into the keypad, the system would attempt to open a door with the label "1234." 

Simple enough, right?

Well, it would be if the pictures made any sense. Some of them do, such as "start" and "open" and "door." But one of the steps in this puzzle involves doing an action to an "auxiliary" something or other. 

You tell me, reader...would you know how "auxiliary" looks? I sure didn't! So there's a lot of guesswork involved in that particular puzzle, but it's the only one I can think of that I'd call "bad".

Given Townfall's impeccable vibes and nigh impenetrable atmosphere, I hoped that it would be a flawless technical experience. Sadly, it isn't. It isn't terrible in that department by a long shot, but there are a couple odd flaws that hold it back from perfection.

Towards the beginning, there was some minor screen tearing in cutscenes. That seemed to peter out as the plot progressed, and I have no idea why. Maybe a patch came out that I don't remember? Either way, it was something I noticed.

Interact prompts are entirely too small and too easy to miss. They're basically a tiny ring. Not a circle. A circle would be filled in. The prompts are just a tiny, thin circular shape with nothing on the inside. As a result, I regularly missed important items like an entire set of keys on a table. I also worked incredibly hard to get to a door, couldn't see the interact prompt on it, got lost for a long time trying to find where else I could possibly be supposed to go, and then finally went back to the door (narrowly avoiding disaster along the way) once a youtube video showed it was, in fact, interactable.

There was also one time where I got stuck in a corner and had to reload a save. It had thankfully only been a minute or two since my last save, but remember how saves are generally way too far away from each other? Can you imagine losing 20ish minutes of progress to something like that?

But I think the most egregious issue I ran up against involved the ending. The ending you get is dependent on factors like the amount of lore documents you found and how few enemies you killed. And once the credits roll, you get a little breakdown of those factors so you can see how you did. I was aware of the enemy kill count aspect before I started, so I made it a point to almost never kill enemies unless it was literally required for the story or otherwise didn't count. 

See, there are some chapters where you don't actually play as Simon. In those chapters, kills don't count. But for a handful of those chapters (playing as side character #1), I didn't know that. So I never killed a single enemy in those.

And in the last one of those chapters (the one chapter where you play as side character #2), combat was literally the focus, so it couldn't have counted anyway. 

But when I got to the breakdown after the credits, my kill count wasn't what I expected.

As Simon, I killed one enemy after the tutorial screen about combat, then didn't kill anyone save for in that final chapter with The Weight. I killed maybe 5 enemies maximum in that chapter. So, as Simon, I killed 6 enemies. 

There are also quicktime event enemies that you have to kill if you accidentally bump into them, and jumpscare enemies that literally have to be killed either through quicktime events or via traditional means. Quick research suggests those kills don't count either. But by my estimations, I killed about 10-15 of those two types. So, let's say 15 for the sake of argument. Adding that to the 6 enemies that count, my total Simon kill count would be 21.

As I already mentioned, I killed nothing in side character #1's chapters. And I have no clue what the kill count in side character #2's chapter was...but I know what it wasn't. There's an achievement for killing 30 of that chapter's unique enemy, and I didn't get that achievement. So, let's say 29 kills in that chapter, despite the fact that they're not supposed to count.

29 + 21 = 50.

The kill count given to me in the end was 64. Even if we assume that the kills that don't count still get harmlessly represented in the statistic, that's still 14 kills too many. And in reality, it's likely even more kills too many than that since the 29 from that one chapter and the 15 from the Simon enemies that don't count are just pessimistic guesses. 

So I got the bad ending. I'd been a veritable master of stealth (until some minor raging at the last moment) specifically to avoid that. But it was still like I'd been on a major killing spree, and I'm inclined to think even the kills that didn't count got counted. My ratio of kills that count to documents found was definitely in favor of the good ending, so I don't know what the problem could've been other than a bug.

There's one last thing in terms of negatives, and it isn't really a negative or even a technical issue. But I couldn't think of anywhere else to put it.

You save your game by interacting with phones and dialing "100." The zeroes are on the bottom of the keypad while the 1 is at the top left. So...why not 111? Saving is the only true functional phone number you can dial, so why not have that just be the simplest possible thing? Like I said, it's not really a negative or a flaw, but it's a thought I had towards the end.

Now, the positives. 

The soundtrack, though understated, works wonders for the atmosphere. The sting that plays when an enemy spots you (almost always from behind or where you can't see) legitimately got my heart racing every time I heard it. The more intense segments come with powerful, rattling droning. The more emotional, revelatory moments are scored with the simplest kinds of piano accompaniments. It's all exactly what it needs to be exactly when it needs to be it.

The color palette and level designs also carry this experience. 

Gray fog clashes up against the muted colors you typically see in humble European domiciles and quaint village shops. And these same architectural themes have this fascinating juxtaposition with the brutalist feel of the corporate mega campus that recently moved into town. And anyone who has ever played one of these knows all too well how things feel when the town succumbs to that classic Silent Hill rust effect. 

Lastly, there weren't any animation glitches, hard or soft crashes, texture pop-ins, etc.

Silent Hill: Townfall is something I would've liked to call an absolute triumph, but I can't. I can tell you right now that it's decisively my favorite in the series, but that doesn't make it objectively the best. How could I possibly claim that? I don't frequently revisit horror games, but I definitely won't with this one because of The Weight. And I can't say it would be worth going back for the other endings, because I can't be sure what I do to get them will actually be considered. 

But at the end of the day, Townfall is an excellent stealth game that takes some legitimately new approaches to the genre. It's also an effective horror experience that relies on dread instead of cheap jumpscares. So while it has a few large missteps, it ultimately accomplishes what it set out to do, to great effect!

One last thing to note...I only alter my scoring process in extreme circumstances. The Weight is an extreme circumstance. So, keep that in mind.

Let us review:

The Weight - 2.0

Technical flaws - 1.0

The final score for Silent Hill: Townfall is...

7.0/10 - Good