I played about three hours of Silent Hill: Townfall a few weeks ago, and it hasn’t left my mind since. Townfall‘s new first-person perspective, stunning graphics, and the fact that it’s being developed out-of-house by Observation developer Screen Burn, all combine to make it uniquely alluring, and I’m anxious to learn more about it.
In particular, I’m excited to gain better insight into the novel setting of Silent Hill: Townfall, the fictional Scottish town of St. Amelia in the 1990s. This isn’t the first time that Silent Hill has departed from its US roots, with last year’s Silent Hill f showing us the franchise in rural, 1960s Japan. It came as a bit of a shock—the eponymous Silent Hill is supposed to be a town in Maine, after all—but it worked surprisingly well. In a Q&A session with Silent Hill: Townfall director Jon McKellan and series’ producer Motoi Okamoto, I was able to draw back the curtain a bit on the choice to place Townfall not only in Scotland, but also thirty years in the past.
Why Is Silent Hill: Townfall Set in Scotland?
When asked what the Scottish setting adds to the Silent Hill: Townfall experience, Okamoto, who has been heading up the current Silent Hill revival, said this:
“From our perspective, I think it was a very natural decision for a team from Scotland to create a game that is based in Scotland. We feel that it’s very interesting to allow developers to set their games in locations that they’re familiar with, that they know best. We all know that Silent Hill fans are very analytical, and I think we’re able to provide another layer for that analysis by having fans guess where we are going to explore next.”
McKellan, co-founder of the Scotland-based Screen Burn, had this to add to Okamoto’s comments:
“To echo what Okamoto-san said, you write what you know. We wanted to create the most grounded, realistic, and believable place to tell a story about, so it made sense to write something that we understand rather than try to do an American city that we’re not familiar with.
“But I think on top of that, as players will find as they progress through the game, the town is really the star of the show—the Scotland setting isn’t just a coincidence. There’s meaning behind the community of St. Amelia, the way it’s positioned in the world. Hopefully, as people dig into it, they’ll realize the setting isn’t just a stylistic choice, or a choice made because we just happen to live there. There are a lot of reasons for Townfall to be set in Scotland, and a lot of reasons for St. Amelia to be the kind of town it is.”
It’s clear from both men’s comments that Silent Hill: Townfall‘s setting is anything but arbitrary, which is quite reminiscent of Silent Hill f. The culture of rural Japan sat at the heart of that game, and was inextricable from the greater experience that it wrought. Silent Hill f wasn’t just “Silent Hill takes on Japan,” but a compelling expansion of the series’ lore and themes into another country. With the new setting, Silent Hill f was able to set itself apart from its predecessors in a meaningful way; here’s hoping the same can be said about Silent Hill: Townfall.
Explaining Silent Hill: Townfall’s Eerie 90s-isms
Something else that struck me as interesting was Silent Hill: Townfall‘s 1990s setting and, by extension, the emphasis the game places on analog technology. This primarily manifests through a device called the CRTV, which players use as a stealth and puzzle-solving tool, but there are other nods to retro tech as well, like dial-up internet and black-and-white computer interfaces. All of this is surprisingly unsettling, so I figured I would ask McKellan and Okamoto why they thought 90s tech is so creepy. Here’s McKellan:
“Well, I think it’s creepy because we know it’s unreliable—it’s not a magic bullet. It’s not intelligent. These systems are cables and wires and transistors and they can break. We don’t really think about the components in an iPhone in the same way. The fact that this older tech can fail you at any time certainly lends a certain creepiness to it.
But we also talk about weaponizing nostalgia in all of our games: taking things that people love and then turning them on their head to make, like, the most horrible experience you can have. This is what we did with Stories Untold, where we took text adventure games, something cute and quirky and fun, and weaponized it. I think that’s a big part of why we decided to set Townfall in the 90s.
Not only did we want to make it feel like you’re exploring a different time and space from other games you might be playing, but we also wanted to show another relevant part of Scotland during that era. The technology, the kinds of things that were happening in the world at the time, all of these things fed into the design of the game.”
McKellan’s comments weren’t really what I expected, but they certainly make sense. After all, I would probably feel a lot safer in the creepy town of St. Amelia if I had my iPhone, with emergency satellite communication features, tucked away in my pocket. For his part, Okamoto reflected on the popularity of the 90s in the horror genre specifically, and offered a slightly different take on why analog tech has scare potential:
“It’s a little bewildering because I see a lot of up-and-coming indie horror games, and so many of them are fixated on the 90s. My take on it is that the 90s are the borderline between older, analog tech and the more modern, digital tech of today. It’s a period when those two technologies were starting to overlap, and I think that’s part of why analog tech can feel so creepy.“
Worth noting is that the timeline for earlier Silent Hill games is a bit unclear, leading to them feeling a bit anachronistic. Even if, for instance, Silent Hill 2 takes place in the 90s (which it very well may not), it doesn’t really lean into that decade in the same way Townfall does.
Whatever the reason, I can personally attest to the unnerving nature of Silent Hill: Townfall‘s 1990s setting and technology which, when coupled with the gruesome psychological horror Silent Hill is known for, makes for a delightfully unpleasant experience. There’s a clear intentionality behind these setting choices, which is part of what makes them promising, in my eyes. It’s easy, in a way, to simply return to the historical Maine-based town of Silent Hill, retreading old ground and repeating the series’ greatest hits. It’s far riskier to take a creative leap with a new location or time period. But as Silent Hill f has proven, it can also be far more rewarding.
- Released
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September 24, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood, Strong Language, Violence
- Developer(s)
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Screen Burn
