“The throughline that we see within any Silent Hill game is that it needs to have a solid narrative,” Okamoto adds. “As long as we have a consistently strong narrative to deliver, we believe those games qualify as Silent Hill. With the Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill f, and now Silent Hill: Townfall, as long as the throughline of a strong narrative is there, that is what makes up what we believe to make it Silent Hill.”
One unique thing that stands out about Townfall compared to previous Silent Hill games is that it’s the first entry in the series to take on a fully first-person perspective, placing players in a much more immersive experience. That also puts players right in Simon’s shoes as he encounters the nightmarish monsters infesting St. Amelia, with the game placing a larger emphasis on stealth than prior Silent Hill games. Players can fight back against these monsters, either with makeshift melee weapons or, later in the game, firearms, but these enemies certainly won’t go down easily.
“If you go in swinging, you’re going to have a bad time,” McKellan observes. “You need to figure out when’s the right time to engage and when to step back. There are a lot of things to figure out and it slows things down a little bit and makes it more about tension rather than action. It can be a hard and challenging game, but it’s hard in a different way. It’s not Souls-hard in that way, but it does need you to play in certain ways. There is still quite a lot of room there but maybe not what you expected. You have to assess how you’re going into this.”
Before working on Silent Hill: Townfall, a lot of the Screen Burn team had worked on the first Alien: Isolation before forming their own studio. The tension-fueled sensibilities of that game, along with Screen Burn’s subsequent titles Stories Untold and Observation, are evident within Townfall and its moody, analog take on Silent Hill. But for Okamoto, he was particularly struck by the development team’s outside influences and desire for a Silent Hill game with more salient social commentary.
“When Jon and the Screen Burn team first provided their pitch, two things stood out that made us realize that Townfall had its own potential,” explains Okamoto. “One was their story was inspired by documentaries and more thought-provoking type of work, I felt that really stood out. The other thing was that it has a more social commentary type of angle. It’s the dynamic between the individual and society at large and corporations. We felt that type of social angle was previously unexplored and had great potential.”
Even with these unique qualities, from its change in perspective to its narrative themes, Silent Hill: Townfall definitely feels like a distinctly Silent Hill adventure. And after playing the game for several hours, I’m personally interested to see where the story goes next, along with Simon’s connection to St. Amelia and its undoubtedly tragic history. Silent Hill has always been about broken people facing their trauma in a haunted setting and, with Townfall, that tradition looks to be in good hands with a fresh twist.
