SILENT HILL: Townfall

If you want a shelf to put Townfall on, the Silent Hill 2 remake is the obvious one, and I think that comparison misleads people more than it helps them. Bloober's version is a slow walk into the fog with a pipe in your hand, asking a combat system to carry the whole runtime. This one, from Screen Burn with Konami and Annapurna behind it, is built around the opposite instinct: not fighting. Simon Ordell goes back to the island town of St. Amelia to fix something he left broken, and the moment-to-moment job is staying unseen, cracking open puzzles that do not want to be cracked, and surviving the occasional flashpoint where quiet stops being an option. It carries the license as a setting and a mood rather than as a formula, which is either the most interesting thing about it or the thing that will make series purists furious. The three gears pull against each other by design. Evasion is your default state: read a room, work out what is moving through it, pick your moment, accept that sprinting is almost always the wrong call. The violent flashpoints are not boss fights in the traditional sense so much as admissions that the situation has stopped being survivable politely, and horror games that do this well make them feel like failure states you barely walked out of rather than power fantasies. Then there are the puzzles, which look like the actual spine here. Silent Hill has always used its puzzles as the place where the fiction leaks into the mechanics, and Townfall wants them to carry the truth about St. Amelia instead of parking it all in a pile of readable notes. If you would rather be handed a locked box than a lore dump, that is a genuinely appealing design bet. Who this is for is easy to sketch. If Alien: Isolation, Amnesia, or Soma are the horror games you replay, if you like being underpowered and forced to think your way sideways out of a room, you are the target. If your favorite part of the SH2 remake was finally getting comfortable with the shotgun, you are probably not. It is single-player only, and it wants a controller: full gamepad support is there, DualShock and DualSense included, and a game built on slow deliberate movement is not one I would insist on playing with keyboard and mouse. PC is the platform on the table, which at least means the usual levers (frame rate, gamma, sensitivity) are yours to tune, and horror this dependent on darkness lives or dies on whether you can actually see the thing about to kill you. The risks are the ones the whole hide-and-seek subgenre carries. Stealth horror collapses the second you learn the rules. Once you can read a patrol pattern reliably, dread turns into routine, and the difference between a great one of these and a tedious one is usually whether the designers kept changing the terms on you. The loud confrontations are the other worry, because they are the easiest element to script badly. If they land as set pieces you cannot really lose, they hand back all the control the rest of the game spent hours taking away. And the Action and Adventure labelling sets up an expectation of combat this clearly does not want to serve, which is going to produce a lot of annoyed early reactions from players who wanted Silent Hill with a weapon wheel. Go in knowing it is chasing atmosphere, powerlessness and puzzle craft over encounter design, and you will meet it on the right terms. What I would tell anyone hovering over the wishlist button: this is a swing, not a safe sequel. Konami handing the fog to a small team with Annapurna's fingerprints on the release is how you get either the most memorable entry in the modern run of these games or an interesting misfire, and the honest answer is that the evasion and puzzle loop has to be exceptional to justify the name on the box. Nothing about the pitch suggests it is trying to be safe, and after a decade of horror sequels that mostly were, I want to see it try.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on SILENT HILL: Townfall.