Platforms: PS5, PC
Seconds into Silent Hill: Townfall, you’ll find yourself exploring the picturesque St. Amelia, a remote island off the coast of Scotland. As new protagonist Simon Ordell, you’ll soak in the detail-packed, near-photorealistic setting from an immersive first-person perspective — a departure from the long-running series’ standard over-the-shoulder view.
As you pass by discarded lobster traps, flickering street lights, life jackets hung on posts, reflective puddles, and colourful flags flapping in the wind, you’ll swear you can taste the salt in the air. Of course, as the latest chapter in Konami’s survival horror franchise, Townfall‘s most prevalent visual element is its suffocating fog, which serves as a stark reminder that you’ve definitely not stepped into a travel brochure.
If the heavy, foreboding mist doesn’t clearly communicate that St. Amelia shouldn’t be your next vacation destination, however, the fleshy, mutated monsters roaming its streets should do the trick. Like most Silent Hill games, Townfall combines exploration, stealth, puzzles and, yes, plenty of nightmare-conjuring creatures, all wrapped in a cryptic, dread-inducing story. But this latest standalone entry also separates itself from the skin-crawling pack with some welcome new inclusions.
For starters, Townfall leans pretty heavily — and disturbingly — into medical-based body horror. Simon, for example, washes up on St. Amelia with a mysterious IV jammed into his arm. As unsettling as the intravenous needle is, though, it pales in comparison to an enemy you’ll later encounter that attacks by shooting a similar, tube-tethered apparatus from its open chest cavity.
Thankfully, Simon’s IV — which also serves as a second-wind lifeline when he’s downed — isn’t the only object in his unconventional arsenal. He also carries an old school portable TV, a chunky, static-emitting handheld device that offers puzzle clues, creepy narrative bits, and the ability to locate nearby enemies.
Sort of like a retro take on the Alien movies’ motion tracker, the weathered gadget is the primary representation of the game’s larger focus on dated, analog technology. Townfall takes place in 1996, so the ancient tech perfectly fits the era, but it’s also brilliantly blended into the gameplay.
Beyond the CRTV, you’ll gain access to other tools — sometimes while controlling different characters — like a doctor’s beeping pager. But other nostalgia-fueling items are spread all over the quaint town’s exteriors and interiors, ensuring you’ll crack conundrums and gather intel using payphones, cassette players, boxy computers, floppy disks, fax machines, and more.
The pitch-perfect audio of a dial-up modem or dot-matrix printer effectively places you in this mid-nineties nightmare, but some flaws can also occasionally shake you from it. Townfall‘s combat can be clunky, its stealth finicky, and that enemy-tracking CRTV unreliable. These rough edges might be by design, as dealing with them can certainly ramp the tension. But they can also breed frustration, especially when coupled with a checkpoint system that frequently feels unforgiving.
Like a degrading wood plank cracked over a creep’s skull, the immersion is sometimes broken by these issues. That said, such moments are easily overshadowed by an otherwise stellar survival horror experience that continues the franchise’s resurgence – following the Silent Hill 2 remake and Silent Hill f — while also ensuring fans remain terrified of the fog.
