Silent Hill: Townfall Review

Spoiler Warning: I will be discussing spoilers to the story in Silent Hill: Townfall during this review

Silent Hill has always been a contentious series, depending on who you ask you’ll be given different answers for the same questions, one of the questions that has sparked debate has always been “What makes a Silent Hill game, a Silent Hill game?”. For some it only needs to take place in the titular fictional town Silent Hill, for others it’s more about the story structure and the themes that it tackles with those typically being the main character atoning or coming to grips with a traumatic experience or accepting themselves after immense guilt from something that they’ve done in their live, this is mainly prevalent in Silent Hill 2, which to many is viewed as the best in the series. I am personally of the second viewpoint, to me the Silent Hill series explores the psychological side of our characters and the toll their actions have taken on those around them and themselves and isn’t necessarily tied to the town itself. This looks to be Konami’s current plan for the series with the previous game Silent Hill f, which was written by Ryukishi07 of Higorashi When They Cry, taking place in 1960’s Japan and now with the recent Silent Hill: Townfall taking place in 1990’s Scotland. Both share the fact that they’ve moved out of the USA and away from Silent Hill just being a town, instead opting to make Silent Hill more of a phenomenon that can take place regardless of the location as long as it has the iconic fog masking the horrors in the distance, both Silent Hill f and Townfall made controversial design choices that had long stay fans of the series slightly worried, Silent Hill f having a greater focus on combat with dodging, parrying and weapons that degraded and broke as you used them, Silent Hill: Townfall actually goes in the opposite direction, combat is disencouraged and instead wants you to focus on stealth, combat is still an option but engaging with it too much will impact the ending you get in the game.

Screen Burn Interactive’s Silent Hill: Townfall follows main character Simon Ordell, an American that has found himself washed up at the docks of the small, quaint Scottish fishing town of St. Amelia that is just on the coast next to the North Sea, with no recollection of how he got here and having a mysterious IV attached to the back of his hand and coiled around his arm that can’t be removed, he explores the now desolate town looking to uncover the reason he’s been called to St. Amelia. Immediately my first thoughts were drawn to the music, it is just great from the get go, being scored by Pilotpriest, it’s ethereal and otherworldly but slightly off and it presents a fantastic creepy feeling to the player that there’s a supernatural force at play that we’ve still to discover but tells us just enough that this isn’t the St. Amelia as we would expect it to be, following on from the eerie introduction we’re greeted with the ever present and oppressive fog that Silent Hill is known for, masking the horrors that you’ll bump into.

I think the game benefits from it being in first person to make it scarier as our controllable view is the face compared to being on the back in a third person view

Continuing on to explore every nook and cranny one thing stuck out to me and it was how real the environments were, the town being recreated from a real Scottish town and all the assets being something that I vividly remember growing up, it really ratched up the charm for me when saving is done through the old payphone boxes that were prevalent in the 90’s and 2000’s, I have vivid memories of phoning my parents from them on the way home from a night out, to see all of these things so lovingly recreated was a joy for me to experience. During this time you’ll become accustomed to the Silent Hill: Townfall‘s controversial design choice, that being the decision to present the game through a first person view, much akin to Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills Playable Teaser, I didn’t have an issue with playing the game in first person, if anything I think the game benefits from it being in first person to make it scarier as our controllable view is the face compared to being on the back in a third person view, I probably would have preferred third person if I had to choose but having looked at the Screen Burn’s previous games this is the view point that they understand how to work with and I don’t fault them for playing it safe.

Along the way you’ll discover a small handheld TV called the CRTV, this will have multiple uses for us. It will be used as a waypoint marker as you will have specific frequencies that you can tune into it and it’ll give you hints of where your next objective is, allowing the game to not feel handholdy but at the same time giving the players a way to navigate the dense fog. Another use of the CRTV is that it can spot enemies, they will also appear as a frequency when close enough to you that you can tune into and view them through walls and other objects. I personally loved this inclusion, as mentioned before Silent Hill: Townfall wants you to avoid the monsters as much as possible so you can now track their movements without being stuck out in the open, you might think that this would make the game way too easy but as soon as there are multiple enemies around you the CRTV can quickly become disorientating as you try and find where the enemies have moved to since you last tracked them. Combining the CRTV with throwable bottles, bricks and triggering car alarms it gives players the freedom to choose how they interact with the enemies that are ultimately roadblocks to us progressing.

While I mentioned that your disincentivised to avoid combat it doesn’t mean that you need to, you will find melee weapons such as planks of wood or metal pipes that you can use to bash monsters which is more inline with the expected combat for a Silent Hill game, you’ll also be given access to firearms in the form of a pistol from the beginning, although you are warned that firing it may alert other enemies of your presence, this expands further with a flare gun and eventually a shotgun to round out the arsenal.

there were times where the enemy AI felt like it had super vision and would see me extremely easily forcing me to either fight the enemy or make a run for it and hope that I could find somewhere to hide or a door that I could lock behind me to get away from them

For my playthrough of Silent Hill: Townfall I decided to play the game on Normal difficulty for combat and the same for puzzle difficulty, there is a “Hinted” difficulty that will highlight portions of puzzles that are relevant but I wanted to see how I would fair without it and I must say there are some brilliant puzzles in here, majority of the time I felt challenged but not so much that it felt like the puzzles were using moon logic, that is to say thought that not all of them stick the landing, there were some that I found slightly too obtuse or too long, an example of this would probably be the final puzzle of the game, you’re tasked with following the instructions set out on a typewriter where you need to mimic button presses on what’s being described, you have a monitor that you can view specific rooms that have 3 digit numbers on them, there is a keyboard with three sections on it two columns with actions, two columns with the equipment being used and a number pad to indicate an ID, I felt overwhelmed with the combinations and the keyboard keys are pictures but for some of the keyboard presses it wanted I had no idea what picture corresponded to which button and it felt like it took me forever to understand not only what was being asked but what I actually needed to look at to progress, this combined with the slow process of entering keys, getting it wrong and it repeating made the puzzle destory any momentum I felt I had, while that puzzle on my first attempt felt too difficult and tedius I felt the puzzles overall were a highlight for Townfall. As previously mentioned the game wants you to be stealthy, while the CRTV helps in this regard there are times where it felt like the stealth would actively fight against you, Screen Burn have employed a lean mechanic where you can peak around corners, over ledges or even duck further behind cover to hide yourself even further into cover, however there were times where the enemy AI felt like it had super vision and would see me extremely easily forcing me to either fight the enemy or make a run for it and hope that I could find somewhere to hide or a door that I could lock behind me to get away from them.

This became more frustrating in later chapters where you need to deal with an enemy called “The Weight”, an invincible stalker-like enemy that if caught by kills you instantly, the AI felt rather unforgiving for this enemy as it would hover around where you were at all times, giving you little time to breathe or move, this became especially egregious when I was on another floor in an area and I could see “The Weight” following me from above or below, it always seems to be aware of where the player is and with how slow hiding in lockers and wardrobes can be there were times where I’d be chased into a room with nowhere to go. The game does give you items to combat this though, you can make reviving IV bags that you equip and if you do are brought back in the same location you died in, you can also hit “The Weight” with a flare gun that stuns it for a good period of time, or you can rely on throwing bottles and bricks to push it further away from you for a short period of time. A stealth mechanic combined with a relentless invincible enemy would usually have been something I’d have loved, but the instant kill from being grabbed was more frustrating for me than fun.

I do wish that I’d heard more Scottish accents, it felt easy to forget that the game was meant to be taking place in Scotland

Silent Hill: Townfall‘s story is the standout for me, it kept me engrossed through the entire playthrough, finding notes informing me of what was happening and trying to guess the story as I was going was great fun and I think Screen Burn have done a fantastic job in this regard. Along the way Simon will meet with two other characters, these being Zoe a local nurse and Richard who initially speaks to Simon telling him that he needs him to help fulfil a purpose that we’re not given knowledge to initially. All three characters are trapped in this Silent Hill St. Amelia for a specific reason and usually when you’re trapped in Silent Hill it’s not for a good reason. After finishing off Act 1 of the story we actually switched from Simon over to Zoe, which I was pleasantly surprised by, I did not expect to be playing as more than one character in this game, Zoe largely plays the same as Simon but instead of the CRTV we’re instead given a pager that won’t show us exactly where an enemy is like the CRTV but it’ll point to the direction that they’re in, eventually we also get to play as Richard in later in the last third of the game with it having six acts in total. I do wish that I’d heard more Scottish accents, it felt easy to forget that the game was meant to be taking place in Scotland as two of the characters have American accents and the third has a Welsh accent, compared to another Scottish set oil rig horror Still Wakes the Deep which had an entire cast of Scottish voices it felt somewhat lacking in that regard.

As we progress the story we’re shown that the three characters have been trapped in St. Amelia, looping through the events of the game due to their guilt in association with a massive oil rig disaster. Richard turns out to be the CEO of the company that was performing off-shore drilling, transforming the town of St. Amelia into a more modern town and bringing work to the town with the oil rig, having the town be as a homebase to the workers on the rig, after approving faulty parts for drilling to avoid delaying any further the whole operation falls apart with the oil rig exploding, giving us the reason for the subtitle of “Townfall” as this is done irreparable damage to St. Amelia and its citizens, with his reason for being trapped is that he refuses to accept blame for causing the disaster.

As previously mentioned we get to play as Richard and it’s by far my favourite part of the game, not just from a gameplay perspective but from a thematic point of view, in Richard’s chapter we’re let loose in a multistory office solving puzzles and also filled with enemies that typically try and hide from us, unlike Simon and Zoe, Richard doesn’t have any kind of CRTV or Pager to find enemies, instead you’re just littered with ammo and just expected to blast anything and everything away, this fits brilliantly with the story as finding out that the enemies you fight during this time do not appear in Simon or Zoe’s chapters and are aptly called “Widows”. So you have an uncaring CEO bucking the trend of the stealth focused gameplay and pivoting to feeling more akin to the Doom Slayer, blowing away enemies that are named after people that have lost spouses, I’m hoping that I’m not just easily impressed but I cannot sing the praises of this section enough from a story and gameplay perspective, we’ve constantly been on the backfoot so it feels great to let loose, only for you to actually think about the implications and how it ties in with the narrative, fantastic stuff.

On the opposite side we have Zoe who is racked with guilt over failing her patients, during our play time as Zoe we see her doubt her abilities as a nurse, having a patient die from neglect as she couldn’t perform a house visit, alongside this we experience her being berated by a doctor for not being qualified enough while tending to patients of the oil rig disaster, meaning that the town is keeping her there because she thinks that she could have done more to save those people. That leaves Simon, as it turns out Simon was an independent safety inspector that was sent to inspect the oil rig on the day it exploded, meaning that Simon was the only survivor of the disaster and coincidently was the one person that Zoe was able to save.

Richard strikes a deal with Simon that he testifies that Richard done everything he could as CEO to ensure the oil rig was safe, in return Richard would organise for Simon to receive a heart transplant as his was damaged beyond repair in the disaster and this is Simon’s conscience struggling with the guilt for accepting that deal, birthing the “The Weight” enemy as a physical manifestation of the guilt of the people that Simon is betraying on his back and in doing so not allowing the people of St. Amelia to receive justice for the negligence that was committed by Richard and the company. It’s not exactly the most groundbreaking plot, but I would be lying if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy it.

Technically wise, I found the game to be good in my initial startup I was experiencing stuttering while playing but it seemed to just go away after playing for a bit which I thought was odd, but was noticeable either way, I was able to play the game on max settings with ray tracing enabled using DLSS on auto and still get 60FPS on 1440p which I thought was pretty good. The gameplay was good enough for me, some annoying stealth but I feel I have more tolerance than others for stealth where others may not have that level of patience which I completely understand, melee combat is fine and the aiming and shooting of guns felt good. Silent Hill: Townfall shines the brightest for me with its story and narrative, the music compliments it and does a great job at capturing the Silent Hill vibe that many fans have grown accustomed to through Akira Yamaoka’s soundtracks, it grabbed me from the very beginning, there is eldritch horror sprinkled in as well which I was a fan of too, it’s difficult for me not to give any kind of rating except for highly recommend, there are parts that annoyed with regards to the stealth and puzzles but in my opinion the good vastly outweighs the bad here, with my total time played clocking in at around 41 hours to get the every achievement in the game.