Silent Hill: Townfall

What I have enjoyed so much about Konami’s renewed efforts with Silent Hill is how it is finding developers like Screen Burn Interactive that understand what makes Silent Hill so intriguing and are managing to produce unique experiences within an admittedly undefined structure. The franchise is about loneliness and trauma and how that affects your emotional state of mind. Townfall presents these emotions well, and my only frustrations arose when I was forced to grapple with some of its unbalanced video game mechanics.

Silent Hill: Townfall is the best the survival horror series has been in 25 years. Developer Screen Burn takes the series into first-person with a new remote Scottish town setting, breathing fresh energy into the franchise. But while some things change, Silent Hill’s phenomenal atmosphere, visuals, and sound design remain. It’s a horrific, often unsettling experience, but it’s one that I never wanted to stop playing.

Silent Hill: Townfall is, though, an often phenomenal ride; reverent to its roots, rich with ideas, and yes, properly unnerving too. And there is, I think, some pleasing symmetry in the fact the two grandaddies of the survival horror genre - Resident Evil and Silent Hill - have bookended the year with their own distinctive highs; one with a warm eye to the past, the other taking bolder, more experimental strides.

Off the back of the more action-oriented sidestep of 2025’s Silent Hill f, Silent Hill: Townfall feels like Konami’s seminal survival horror series returning to what it does best. Its atmosphere is oppressively ominous, its central mystery is genuinely compelling to unravel and packed with themes that feel fresh, and its army of disfigured demons are exhilarating to both encounter and evade.

Silent Hill Townfall is an unrelentingly dark and disturbing horror game that takes its time to build a complex story and characters. While its reliance on stealth can wear thin in a few tough sections, it's a compelling and imaginative experience full of real fear, an impeccably crafted atmosphere, and a distressing story of remorse and penance.

Silent Hill: Townfall is just the right mix of old and new. It has classic psychological horror and grotesque monsters with the added benefit of the CRTV as a new puzzle solving and stealth tool.

Screen Burn proves once again what experts they are at masterful storytelling. Silent Hill: Townfall is another triumph in Motoi Okamoto’s revival of a new era for the franchise.

Their memorial in the centre of town is one of the game’s clearest images, unobscured by fog, though we’re never privy to the exact events that lead to their deaths. Townfall seems to understand that some things should remain shrouded in fog. The fate of St Amelia naturally festers in our imagination. How very Silent Hill.