Silent Hill: Townfall Review

The Silent Hill franchise was on ice for years, but it’s been making an incredible comeback. Bloober Team hit it out of the park with the Silent Hill 2 remake, and that was followed by the excellent original game Silent Hill f. Silent Hill: Townfall is the latest in Konami’s Silent Hill revival efforts, and it offers something different while remaining distinctly Silent Hill. Rest assured, Silent Hill: Townfall keeps the franchise’s hot streak going strong.

Most Silent Hill games are played from a third-person perspective, but Silent Hill: Townfall is a first-person experience. Switching to first-person helps Silent Hill: Townfall be more immersive and makes the scares hit a little harder than they sometimes do in the other games. Silent Hill has dabbled in first-person before, but never on the scale seen in Townfall, and like the Resident Evil franchise before it, the transition is a resounding success.

Players primarily explore Townfall‘s foggy, freaky world as a man named Simon, who washes up in the Scottish island town St. Amelia at the beginning of the game. Like most other Silent Hill protagonists, Simon starts off with little in the way of defending himself against the monstrosities that cross his path, and so avoiding combat is usually the best option.

Silent Hill: Townfall is NOT a Walking Simulator

Image via Konami, Annapurna Interactive

Simon is able to get his hands on melee weapons early on, like wooden boards and metal pipes, and eventually he even finds some guns. These weapons come in handy when there’s no avoiding a fight, but even then, players have to be cautious. Even the weakest enemies can make quick work of Simon, and resources are limited. Weapons can break, healing supplies are in short supply, and ammunition is hard to come by.

Running and hiding is almost always the best course of action in Silent Hill: Townfall because the monsters are relentless. In one early encounter, I was being chased down an alley by a twisted creature with what looked like an axe for a head. I burst into a building, turned around, and shut the door. Thinking I was safe, I started to loot and look for key items, only for the monster to open the door and beat me to death. Townfall is full of intense and memorable moments like this.

There was some concern that Silent Hill: Townfall would be a “walking simulator” or otherwise feature limited gameplay compared to other games in the series, with too much focus on narrative. Those concerns can be laid to rest. Think of Townfall as a proper, full-fledged Silent Hill experience with all the puzzles and combat encounters one would expect, simply played from the first-person perspective, and with a greater emphasis on stealth.

silent hill townfall monster in red room

The stealth mechanics in Townfall are admittedly hit or miss. It often feels too simple, largely relying on old tropes like throwing things to distract enemies and then crouch-walking to the next area, but there are times when it effectively ratchets up the tension and adds serious stakes to any given stretch of gameplay. What’s here is serviceable, but the game perhaps leans on stealth a little too often considering the mechanics aren’t terribly deep.

Besides throwing bottles and slowly walking by enemies, Simon can also utilize his portable CRTV for stealth. The CRTV is Simon’s most important tool throughout the game, as it can detect enemy locations through walls and sometimes gives players visual clues of where to go next. Townfall has some interesting motion control DualSense puzzles that utilize the CRTV as well, so the game gets a lot of mileage out of the gimmick.

Silent Hill: Townfall is Horror How You Want It

Puzzles are a big part of most survival-horror games, and Silent Hill: Townfall has plenty of great ones. I don’t want to discuss any of them in detail because it will ruin the surprises they have in store, but there are some puzzles in Townfall that I would put up against the series’ best. On the flip side, there are a couple of puzzles in Silent Hill: Townfall that are more tedious than fun, with one near the end that is particularly obtuse and hurts the story’s momentum.

Some Silent Hill: Townfall players will love the puzzles, while others will want to focus on combat instead. Luckily, Townfall caters to all kinds by offering specific difficulty options. It’s possible to play through the game with puzzle hints, and it’s also possible to do away with hints entirely. It’s possible to ditch the puzzle hints but turn the combat challenge way down, and of course, players can crank up the difficulty in both categories if they desire.

Freedom to tweak the gameplay based on your own preferences is a nice touch, but Townfall developer Screen Burn Interactive recommends playing on Normal difficulty for combat and Hints Enabled for puzzles, so that’s what I did for my initial playthrough. I agree that this is the best way to experience Townfall, as the puzzles still provide a decent challenge even with the hints, and it makes it so every enemy encounter is nerve-wracking without slipping into hair-pulling territory.

Silent Hill: Townfall Has P.T.’s DNA

No matter what difficulty settings you choose in Townfall, you will have fun exploring the world. Townfall has plenty of P.T.‘s DNA, with photorealistic environments that lull you into a sense of security with their ordinariness, only to transform into the stuff of nightmares. Townfall is a downright stunning game that makes absolutely brilliant use of lighting to craft an eerie atmosphere that will constantly leave you on edge.

Most of the time, Silent Hill: Townfall delivers breathtaking visuals and an impressive level of polish, but immersion-breaking bugs occasionally rear their ugly head. Sometimes the issues are merely visual quirks, like closing a drawer only to have its contents floating in mid-air, but other times, they impact the gameplay. At one point, I was being chased by an invincible enemy that could kill me in one hit, which was legitimately terrifying, only to turn around and find the creature had not only stopped following me, but was endlessly spinning in circles.

Technical issues like these aren’t the end of the world, but they do pull you out of the game a bit, which is a shame, as so much work was put into creating an engrossing horror experience. The strong performances from Silent Hill: Townfall‘s cast and the twisting narrative never fail to pull you back in when these incidents occur, but they still hold the game back from reaching its full potential.

My initial playthrough of Silent Hill: Townfall took about 12 hours, but like most games in the series, there are multiple endings and other reasons to keep playing after the credits roll.

Silent Hill: Townfall isn’t perfect, but it is still yet another stellar entry in Konami’s ever-expanding survival-horror franchise. Developer Screen Burn Interactive has proven itself capable of delivering an authentic first-person Silent Hill experience, and I hope it gets another turn at bat in the future.