The island town of St. Amelia is devoid of people. Nothing inhabits its narrow streets but mementos of past activity, the detritus of a bygone time in the shape of discarded protest placards, triangles of red, white, and blue bunting hanging listlessly in a thick white fog. Its houses are empty, too, with unwashed dishes, bits of trash, and rumpled clothes left in place, as if those who would’ve used these items had been raptured out of their homes in the middle of the day.
The exception to this emptiness is a single woman and two men, lingering more as ghosts than humans, and a host of shambling grotesques, stalking the streets more as pitiful monsters than people.
Silent Hill: Townfall is set in the winter of 1996, in a fictional Scottish fishing village built against the grey horizon of the North Sea. When the story starts, an American called Simon washes in from that sea and up onto the town docks. He has an IV line in the back of his hand, the tube running along his forearm and disappearing into his shirtsleeves, and he, like the player, has no idea what’s going on in St. Amelia or how he ended up in this strange place. The answers to these questions are provided in good time, but they’re presented in a way that’s far less compelling than the manner in which they’re raised over the game’s first several hours.
Created by Screen Burn, the small Scottish studio that, under its former name No Code, made the excellent Stories Untold and Observation, Townfall is another experiment in broadening the Silent Hill series’ scope by a non-Konami studio. Like last year’s (also excellent) Silent Hill f, Townfall looks beyond the original games’ fictional American town for a horror story that pulls from the aesthetics and, more importantly, the culture and history of a different country.
Your initial guide to that country is American. Though it moves between different perspectives across its runtime, Townfall is mostly centered on Simon. He looks at St. Amelia with a tourist’s eyes, unsure of how it ended up deserted and strewn with signs blaming an energy corporation for some recent unnamed tragedy. Given little more to go on than a voice that calls out to him from a telephone and the dreamlike flashes of a woman’s face that crackle into life on the portable TV he finds, Simon starts exploring. He works, for a time, like the player personified. He shakes with fear and goes wide-eyed in surprise when seeing something as inexplicable as giant tentacles suddenly descend from the sky. He, like us, looks for morsels of context when listening to voicemails or reading notes left behind by St. Amelia’s vanished population. Everything around him is as horrifying and bewildering to him as it is to us.
Before long, he finds more monsters. He’s transported into blood-red industrial versions of the town where reality fractures into the nightmare landscapes of Silent Hill’s longstanding “otherworlds.” His viewpoint also shifts in time to that of other outsiders, an English nurse called Zoe and a shadowy American named Richard. Using these three lenses, the first acts of Townfall provide a loose framework for the situation in St. Amelia. We know some terrible accident took place that shocked the town and filled its hospitals with dying patients or, in a particularly grim scene, choked its parking lots with triage tents and corpses shrouded in black body bags. We know that St. Amelia’s dismal economy has been revived by investment from a foreign energy company—Chapman Energy Group (CEG)—that employs much of the town. We know that there’s a direct connection between this company and all the death that surrounds Simon, Zoe, and Richard. The urge to explore further, to gain a better understanding of the tragedy and the three main characters’ roles in it, gives real momentum to the initial four or five hours of the game.
The tone established throughout Townfall’s opening hours is equally absorbing. This is partially the result of the fidelity with which St. Amelia is modelled. The concrete and brickwork that makes up its twisting network of houses and storefronts glistens faintly in the damp, and home interiors are lavish with fine minutiae. Breadboxes and tea towels sit on countertops, illuminated by pools of flashlight glare, in aged, ‘70s-built kitchens. Computer terminals with chunky plastic casings turn on with the clunk of a big power button, command lines and email text displayed in thick lo-res fonts. Sifting through St. Amelia’s houses is intimate in a way that few other Silent Hill games have been, with the first-person perspective lending a sense of presence to what could be rote exploration sequences—and reinforcing what becomes an essential thematic point: that this empty town was once home to believably ordinary people.
Once out on the streets, Silent Hill’s trademark fog finds natural expression in the climate of a seaside Scottish town. The yellow glow of streetlights pokes out from gauzy mist, and the chimneys of buildings are swallowed in perpetually overcast skies, so evocatively rendered that a chill humidity and the scent of salt on wet air become almost palpable.
It’s worth describing these elements at length because they end up as the most consistently successful bits of Townfall’s design. Screen Burn’s preoccupation with object tactility—with making a digital representation of its setting feel real—grounds the game immensely. Simon has a little portable TV that can be tuned to locate enemies and display their flickering silhouettes amidst static snow. Zoe holds a pager with black bars around the edges of its display that track the position of nearby monsters. And the puzzles that punctuate the characters’ exploration are largely centered on manipulating analog devices. There are floppy disks to find and load into external computer drives, toggles to flip on medical terminals, and lots of dials to twist and numbers to punch into keypads and combination locks.
Townfall’s puzzles are an early highlight as a result of this approach. They’re fairly simple for most of the game, requiring environmental observation and key-hunting to solve. But they’re satisfying in the way that pressing jigsaw pieces into place or fitting a key into a lock is satisfying. They also serve as solid storytelling devices in their own right. One extended puzzle early in the game sees the player guide Zoe, the nurse, while she treats a critically injured patient in an operating theater. As Zoe hunts down medicine and fumbles through X-ray scans and a nastily involved intubation, a supervising doctor berates her over the intercom with exaggerated digs at her lack of knowledge and skill. She fears professional inadequacy in the face of a medical crisis, and the game is designed to demonstrate this. Rather than silo puzzles off as discrete challenges to be overcome, Townfall uses many of them as storytelling tools in the same way it does cutscenes or text notes.
It takes a similar approach to enemy encounters, which stress hiding and sneaking over outright confrontations with creatures capable of killing Simon, Zoe, or Richard in quick, frantic attacks. Silent Hill typically draws monsters as funhouse mirror distortions of its characters’ tortured mental preoccupations. (See; the faceless nurses of Silent Hill 2, the phallic mall demon in Silent Hill 3, the towering bride in Silent Hill f.) Townfall’s aren’t imaginative enough to be among the series’ most memorable, though they are suitably gross manifestations of the cast’s obsession with mass death. There are corpselike figures dressed only in underwear, faces obscured into anonymous blurs of distorted flesh, and scuttling, waterlogged bodies that strike out from prone positions with leech-like maws.
More than the look of the monsters, it’s their deadliness that establishes the game’s mood. There’s a pervasive sense of being hunted throughout Townfall that’s made tangible by just how quickly enemies tear through your health bar and by how helpless you feel when fighting back with a plank of breakable wood or brittle length of pipe.
Screen Burn has always been interested in how videogames channel the theater-like connection between spectator and spectated, and that focus continues in its approach to survival horror combat. The characters find a pistol, shotgun, and flare gun over time, and they can throw bricks or bottles for distraction or to momentarily stun a monster, but they’re always one poor choice away from being ripped apart by an enemy or, later in the game, swarmed by them. Tracking movements by holding up a screen-obscuring TV or pager, swapping frequencies to keep an eye on a creature’s position, instills a certain paranoia to crouching behind barriers and scanning offices, living rooms, and alleyways for a path forward. There’s constant tension in actions as simple as crossing a street or looking around a room for items. The monsters seem always to be just out of view, looking out for you just as you look out for them. At its most harrowing, studying the map before planning a route between shopfronts or individual rooms holds the same kind of heart-in-throat trepidation as moving between cover in a military shooter.
Everything that works so well for the first third of Townfall, though, deflates as the game goes on.
The sense of danger that animates earlier enemy encounters curdles into frustration when you’re swamped by too many monsters, when solving larger environmental puzzles becomes an exercise in hide-and-seek that tests patience more than anything else. One particular creature—a tumorous hulk that both can’t be killed and can snatch you up into an instant death—shows up to ruin lengthy sections of the game. The puzzles, too, escalate into unnecessarily opaque obstacles that, like the enemies, seem to exist only to offer an arbitrarily heightened level of difficulty as the game progresses. There’s narrative value in reflecting a character’s increased psychological torment with correspondingly deadlier threats and more confusing puzzles to solve, but the kind of mechanical frustration Townfall creates after its opening segments isn’t justified by a story that feels emptier and emptier as it goes on.
The fault lies mostly in its characters. Simon is a blank slate whose character is only given dimension late in the game, and with not enough complexity to resound. Zoe remains one-note throughout, having little more to her personality than the medical anxieties she’s introduced with. Richard, a devoted businessman who is by turns self-loathing and self-aggrandizing, contains the most compelling dramatic fodder but, like Simon, ends up serving more as archetypal plot device than complicated individual. (His characterization is diminished, too, by a listless performance from Lost, Alias, and Millennium’s usually reliable Terry O’Quinn). The lack of a Scottish perspective among these central characters is understandable in light of the plot’s focus, but it’s also a choice that forecloses seeing more of the plot’s events with the sort of close-up terror that informs its real victims’ perspectives.
This is indicative of a larger problem. Too much of Townfall is devoted to the externalities of St. Amelia and the machinations of the tragedy that’s shaped it, not enough to the emotional and intellectual centers of its characters. As an outline, its plot is a welcome attempt to marry real Scottish history and political concerns with Silent Hill’s brand of psychological horror. In execution, it lacks in dramatic heft and engagement with the richest aspects of its setting. This is a game that asks how economic systems shape those who live within them on levels deeper than they might imagine. It asks how our sense of self is directed by our jobs, and how (or if) we can decouple personal and professional responsibility. It wants its player to consider individual and communal indebtedness within the framework of a cruel world. Simply asking these questions gives Townfall a vibrancy uncommon to big-budget game productions. The thin answers given to these questions, though, are a letdown in proportion to the promise given by posing them in the first place.
Poor late-game puzzles and frustrating monsters could be forgiven if the laboriously, impressively crafted basis of Townfall’s story and atmosphere was provided the telling it deserves. But there’s an ultimate emptiness to that telling. The characters function too often as props, with not enough emphasis lent to the anguish that’s trapped them in refracted visions of their torment. In the end, as in the beginning, there are no people in St. Amelia — none but a trio of ghostly humans and faceless monsters. In a larger sense, there are no people in Silent Hill: Townfall either.
