During tonight’s PlayStation State of Play, Konami finally revealed details on its brand new Silent Hill game. Silent Hill: Townfall was revealed with little fanfare, but looks absolutely fantastic, and it’s coming so soon after Silent Hill f was released.
There was fog, there was a scared man with a radio, so it was probably going to be a Silent Hill game, but it still took us a while to realize what we were watching. All the while, however, we were buzzing over just how damned cool the whole thing looks, with its proper Lovecraftian podcast chic.
Simon Ordell is apparently being called back to the island of St. Amelia, although it does seem a lot like it’s a cycle he’s been trapped in for a while. The village looks British, with the road signs, decor, and the fact that everything’s written in English all being pretty big clues. He’s trying to “put things right” in a quaint but spooky small town that is, of course, smothered in heavy fog. “Venturing deeper, and driven to understand his connection to the place and its inhabitants,” the blurb tells us, “Simon begins to discover fragments of a past rising to the surface.”
The time period appears to be perhaps the 1990s. Ordell looks like he’s in his 30s, and we see from his hospital wristband that he was born in 1959. That puts it between Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3, and a good 30 years later than Silent Hill f.
We haven’t been given a release date more specific than 2026, and given the previous game only came out last September this smaller entry in the franchise has been a little buried. Oddly, it’s being published by the ghostly remains of Annapurna Interactive alongside Konami and developed by indie team Screen Burn (formerly No Code), a Scottish studio best known for 2019’s Observation. This is by far the biggest project from the small studio, but both Observation and Stories Untold were excellent, so there is good reason for high hopes.