Silent Hill Townfall review: Spooky Scotland is Screen Burn’s crown jewel | Gaming | Entertainment

A year on from last year’s Silent Hill f, Konami is back with another fantastic in the series, swapping its iconic third-person perspective for a more tense and chilling first-person one. In the hands of Screen Burn, a new developer to the franchise, Silent Hill Townfall feels right at home in its new setting thanks to stunningly hand-crafted environments and themes that feel especially relevant in the modern world.

Although stumbling at a couple of key points due to one particularly frustrating enemy, Silent Hill Townfall is a worthy entry in this iconic horror series, and one that I’ll be thinking about for years to come.

Silent Hill Townfall swaps the previous settings of suburban America and rural Japan for a slightly different locale – the east coast of Scotland. Set on the fictional island of St Amelia, its appearance is heavily inspired by fishing villages such as St Monan’s and Pittenweem – two places I visited earlier this year in preparation for the game’s launch.

As a Glasgow-based developer, Screen Burn has to be commended for its unparalleled depiction of 1990’s Scotland. Its use of Unreal Engine 5 is an astounding showcase of technology with the fog-enshrouded, cobbled streets of St Amelia feeling like they could be screenshots of Google Earth at every step.

While some of that is down to rendering tech, a lot of it is thanks to the expert work that’s gone into recreating the recognisable iconography of Britain. Road signs and markings are all exactly as they should be, as are the black and gold rubbish bins adorning every corner. Walking along the highstreet, I found myself gawping in the windowfront’s at the advertisements for weird and wonderful local events, and wishing I could reach out and pat the head of the charity shop dog collection container that are synonymous with UK highstreets.

I also found myself wondering how on earth Screen Burn has managed to avoid legal battles with some UK companies given how closely their logos and brand materials match. Locations such as the Post Office and an NHS care facility – which you’ll spend a lot of time in – are almost 1:1 matches for buildings I’ve been in myself.

Public phone boxes, which I could have sworn use exactly the same font as those old BT boxes you find on street corners, are beacons of hope against an otherwise bleak backdrop. These are where you save your game, manually punching in the number ‘100’ as you hope and pray the dial tone ends before your enemies catch up to you.

Even some of the puzzles are delightfully old-school British. One early puzzle tasks you with hunting down an electricity top-up card from the newsagents, handing you hastily-written instructions on how to load it onto the meter so you can boot up a classic beige PC tower upstairs.

The vast majority of Townfall’s puzzles lean into this gorgeously manual approach to technology that the 90’s had. You’ll hunt down floppy discs, tapes, projector slides and much more, with Simon having to interact with the minutia of the technology at every step.

Even on the more intricate puzzles, Screen Burn has clearly done their research. Another puzzle tasks you with monitoring a patient using the same technology that would have been around at the time. While the information required is given to you in nearby documents, the solution was accurate enough that my radiographer partner was able to begin solving the puzzle by using her own knowledge of the care profession.

All of this is to say that Silent Hill Townfall has one of the best senses of place that I’ve ever seen in a video game. St Amelia feels like a place that exists, somewhere that I might have already been to, and that makes the horrifying imagery it hosts all the more terrifying.

A large part of what makes St Amelia so scary is the enemies that it inhabits. These lumbering, bloated corpses stomp around the town, chasing after you and wrestling you to the ground whenever you’re spotted.

In the early game, stealth is the way forward with protagonist Simon equipped with an ancient-looking portable CRTV monitor. This can be used to scan for nearby enemy frequencies, and when tuned to particular enemies shows a fuzzy outline of their position on-screen.

I was worried that always being able to see these outlines through walls would suck all the tension from the game. However, as there’s usually more than one enemy in an area, it becomes a tense game as flicking between the bunch, never quite knowing the whole picture while you plot your next move.

Simon can throw bricks and bottles to distract his assailants in the early hours of the game, but this progresses to being able to use planks as melee weapons and a revolver for some light ranged combat. Ammunition for this is particularly scarce though, and firing the weapon alerts all other enemies in the area to your position. It’s definitely a last resort rather than a primary method of dispatching foes, with Simon never feeling truly powerful unless you knock the difficulty down.

Enemies are mostly fantastic with a few running on pre-defined paths that are easy to slip by and others more sporadic. Townfall constantly throws new enemies at you throughout its runtime, with the more basic remaining constant throughout. They never eased up though, with a sense of dread filling my soul every time I heard my CRTV crackle to life with a new signal.

Each enemy type switches up their approaches too. While the first assailants you meet potter about almost aimlessly, later enemies stalk you, actively hiding around corners and jumping out when you least expect it.

It’s in these moments that Silent Hill Townfall is at its most terrifying. Spotting a streak of black running past in the darkness regularly had me floundering with the controls, clumsily reaching for a firearm and wasting precious ammo as I misfire into the distance.

Sadly, there is one enemy that I think Screen Burn has fumbled massively, and to such an extent that it degraded my opinion of Townfall significantly. Around the halfway mark, Simon runs into a great lumbering beast of a foe called ‘The Weight’. They’re five times the size of every enemy you’ve seen up until now, with it stomping around the damp, cramped maze of corridors you’re trapped in for this particular section.

It can see you, and it can definitely hear you with even the slightest noise alerting it to your location. Even when distracting it with a thrown brick on the other side of the room, The Weight seems to be tied to your location in some way, always quickly making its way back to within a few metres of you.

This scenario is terrifying at first, but quickly becomes mundane when you realise how slow the guy is to leave you alone. He’ll sit outside the door you’re hiding behind for up to 30 seconds at a time, only wandering a few feet away before turning back to face your hidey hole. It leaves very little opportunity to escape, and after the first few times, you spend longer thinking about the time you’ve spent waiting for a window instead of how terrifying the situation is meant to be.

The real kick in the teeth is that getting caught by The Weight results in an instant-fail state. You can be self-revived by an equipped healing item, but with the enemies remaining in the same place, it’s nearly impossible to escape, rendering the item pretty useless.

I could have forgiven The Weight as a single frustrating enemy if it appears once, but it crops up once again towards the end of the game in a drawn-out puzzle that felt more laborious than entertaining to solve thanks to this enemy’s constant presence. While most of Townfall zips along at a comfortable pace, this enemy grinds its gears to a complete halt on multiple occasions, making me almost yearn for the corpse-strewn streets I’d been exploring hours prior.

I like the overall message of what this assailant turns out to represent, but it feels like Screen Burn missed the mark when adapting that into gameplay.

While this enemy feels like a misstep, the same can’t be said of its story. Right from the get-go, I found myself completely hooked on the mystery surrounding St Amelia. The truth is drip-fed to you through fuzzy CRTV transmissions with the layers peeled back as you meet new characters and solve more puzzles.

It takes some big swings, to the point where picking apart the heart of the mystery would err into spoiler territory. By the halfway mark, there’s just about enough to go on that you can figure out where the story is heading, but that didn’t stop its crescendo from feeling satisfying all the same. Despite pouring over 12 hours into Silent Hill Townfall, I’m itching to go back and figure out how to unlock the remaining four endings.

The Verdict

Silent Hill Townfall is a masterclass in world building. Much of my playtime was spent gawking at what Screen Burn has achieved in accurately representing this corner of Britain, with its familiarity lending a heightened sense of unease to the whole affair. If you’re someone who’s had a bad experience in either a hospital or corporate setting, you’re in for a rough ride here.

Its puzzles are delicious brain-teasers that almost had me whipping out a pad and paper at times. Even its worst ones are only laborious due to one poorly designed enemy, who feels like a huge mark on an otherwise fantastically thought-out and realised project.

It’s more than a worthy entry in the Silent Hill franchise, and I’m very glad that Konami has taken a chance on Screen Burn. I’d love to see what they do with a second crack at it.

3.5/5

Reviewed on PlayStation 5. Code provided by the publisher for review purposes only.