Silent Hill: Townfall makes some big changes from the usual Silent Hill experience that fans have come to expect, not only with its Scottish setting, but also with its first-person perspective. While this gameplay style is unusual for Silent Hill (we still remember you, PT), it turns out there was really no debate about whether it was right for Townfall.
Speaking at a media roundtable event that GameSpot attended, director Jon McKellan said that from the very start, Silent Hill: Townfall was planned as a first-person game.
“It was first-person from day one for us,” McKellan said. “Our previous games were first-person, [and] the stuff I’d worked on before that was first-person, so it’s something we felt we understood and knew pretty well.”
Yet developer Screen Burn’s familiarity with first-person games wasn’t the only factor that contributed to this decision. McKellan went on to explain that one of the game’s central mechanics, Simon’s handheld CRTV, also necessitated this perspective.
As with previous Silent Hill titles’ radios, Townfall’s CRTV serves as a means for solving puzzles and finding threats in survival-horror game. However, the tool’s visual nature meant utilizing the device outside of a first-person perspective felt “out of place.”
“You know, there is no way to hold that in front of the player in third-person without having to render it onto a UI, and that starts to feel like a mini-map, you know–something that feels really out of place for Silent Hill,” McKellan added. “So for us, the combination of those features was like, ‘This feels like the right way to go.'”
Prior to its work on Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn developed the games Stories Untold and Observation. McKellan was also an artist on Alien: Isolation, which certainly made the most of its first-person perspective.
Silent Hill: Townfall releases for PS5 and PC on September 24.