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Need to know
What is it? A single-player psychological horror game which takes place on an isolated Scottish island. The protagonist Simon Ordell has to solve puzzles, fight monsters, and figure out what the hell is going on.
Release date September 24, 2026
Expect to pay $50 / £45
Developer Screen Burn
Publisher Konami
Reviewed on RTX 3070, Core AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer No
Steam Deck Unknown
Link Steam
Walking up to the old town of St Amelia for the first time in Silent Hill: Townfall, I was greeted by that familiar thick fog and eerie quiet—an omen of the horrors to come. I know what kind of monsters are waiting for me beyond the fog and I am painfully aware of just how unprepared I am for it—with no flashlight, healing items, or weapon on hand. But weirdly enough none of that matters, because for the first time in a Silent Hill game I feel content.
St Amelia is a fictional town, but as I’m sure many players based in the UK will soon discover, developer Screen Burn breathes so much life into this sleepy fishing village that I could’ve sworn I’d been here before. It’s certainly a strange feeling to have in a game like this, but with Konami opening Silent Hill up to the world it’s now the UK’s turn to have our sense of home toyed with.
Here to suffer
The story follows Simon Ordell, a man unknown to us and himself. The only sense of person he has comes from a medical bracelet with his name, date of birth, and blood type written on it. I watched as he dragged himself up from the waves of the North Sea, onto the docks, and headed into St Amelia seeking help and answers as to why he’s here on this cold foggy island.
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A Silent Hill game is nothing without its setting and St Amelia delivers. I spent more time than I’d care to admit reading info boards about the history of fishing on the island and peeping over fences to see how the locals had done up their gardens. The more I explored, the better sense I got of the kind of people who lived in this town and what had happened to them.
Simon also sees more than just the old town as he ventures to a hospital, a corporate office, your classic Silent Hill supernatural ‘other place’, and, brace yourself, some new builds. My time in St Amelia flew by rather quickly, with just 13 hours spent in total, but that was more than enough to be rewarded with heaps of brilliant visual storytelling and the usual gift of stressful encounters.
(Image credit: Konami)
St Amelia has its fair share of gut-wrenching horrors lurking around each corner, though—you don’t spend a grand total of 35 minutes and five seconds hiding in lockers unless there’s something pretty bad waiting for you on the other side. But even still, I found myself drawn to exploring the fog because my curiosity outweighed my fear.
But the further I progressed the less content I became. Not because there were more faceless and bound monsters stumbling around (although that didn’t help), but because there was more to the island than St Amelia’s historic old town. There was a side that was painfully familiar—cobblestone streets shifted into tarmac roads and cottages were turned into flats for better efficiency. The island changed as Simon moved away from the heart of St Amelia and towards the parasite which had latched onto it.
The town itself felt alive more than just lived in, and if that doesn’t tick all the boxes for a world-class Silent Hill setting, I don’t know what does.
Try to B positive
A good rule of thumb in Silent Hill is to approach its puzzles with lateral thinking, and Townfall is no different. They start fairly easy, coaching you in the art of taking in absolutely everything from your surroundings, digesting it, and then stitching together an answer from what has been gathered. It’s the classic case of finding the combination to a lock by sifting through letters conveniently left scattered around the near vicinity.
But as I spent more time in St Amelia, my brain gradually got the hang of looking at things from a Silent Hill perspective. And although the puzzles got harder it didn’t feel like a noticeable difference. Hell, the first thing I thought when stumbling across a bunch of blood types scribbled across the wall was “This is a puzzle and it wants me to figure out how to create blood type A+”. If it weren’t for the 7+ hours I’d already spent in Townfall I doubt that would have been my default response.
There were a few exceptions towards the very end of the game, however, I think a fresh brain would have had far less issues. Take the dreaded pipe room for example, where I had to use what looked to be morse code to twist a room full of levers in the right direction. After bashing my head against my desk my synapses sparked, a thought was formed, and I figured it out—I wish you all the best of luck with that one.
The puzzles aren’t the only smart design features in Townfall, though, with the best and brightest being the handheld CRTV. This quickly became my closest companion as it allowed me to see the creepies through any wall or obstacle. It may seem like a bit of a cheat code getting to know where the monsters are but there are some limitations.
The CRTV may be the most creative, fun, and useful puzzle solving tool I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with.
It’s not always crystal clear where the monsters were, sometimes the CRTV could be a smidge off or it wouldn’t relay that a monster is actually further away than it first seemed. It also can’t show multiple enemies on one frequency, which means I had to toggle between several to see all the monsters that were close.
I wouldn’t say I’m much of a pacifist but I opted to forgo the planks of wood, pipes, and firearms for most of the game, instead favouring the CRTV as my weapon against the monsters to help me stealth around them. I played on the normal difficulty and I didn’t have a run in with a monster until quite far into the latter stages of the game. They’re not blind, I was just able to move around them with some ease if I used the CRTV correctly and was cautiously optimistic about how fast Simon could run.
Even with all its finicky buttons the CRTV may be the most creative, fun, and useful puzzle solving tool I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with. It turned navigating Townfall into one big scary puzzle, which is exactly what I look for in Silent Hill.
You can’t change
But all of these amazing puzzles and fantastic world building would be for nought if Townfall hadn’t also been able to pull off the kind of beautiful and psychologically jarring storytelling we’ve come to expect from the Silent Hill series.
But the fact that there’s something off about Simon isn’t what interests me—the fun part is finding out what he did.
To say there’s something wrong with Simon would be to state the obvious. We’re in a Silent Hill game after all, and no one in their sound mind would hallucinate grotesque faceless monsters which shoot needles out from their abdomens. But the fact that there’s something off about Simon isn’t what interests me—the fun part is finding out what he did to end up like this. It’s clear that people in the town are angry, that some awful disaster happened on this island which rocked its community to its core. What’s unclear, however, is why it involves some seemingly random American dude with induced amnesia.
But Simon’s not on his own. There are two other characters who also inhabit this liminal space with him—Zoe and Richard. At first I just thought these to be your typical filler characters but as it turns out these two are perhaps the most interesting characters to have ever fallen into the fog.
Zoe and Richard portray different sides of the same disaster that Simon’s caught in the middle of, with one being wrongfully guilty and the other willfully ignorant. Both have their own playable segments within the game in which their characters are explored in depth alongside the roles they played in the catastrophe, and through this I began to piece together Simon’s story.
My favourite sequence in all of Townfall was actually Zoe’s part. In this she relives the aftermath of the disaster as a nurse and a first responder to the victims as she tries to save the life of an unknown patient.
I am not a trained nurse so taking the patient’s readings, running tests, and ultimately medicating them was probably one of the more stressful experiences I’ve had in a horror game. But it was worth it because through the stress I understood her guilt and trauma with painful clarity. It also made it clear why she’s found herself wrapped up in this mess.
Then there’s Richard who is an opposite to Zoe in every sense of the word. He’s not blameless or caring; he’s an asshole. But boy, is he an interesting character study. I won’t go into too much detail concerning Richard as his story is one that is better experienced firsthand. But, like with Zoe, after playing through his sequence it became clear to me what this game’s curse is. While the answer seemed simple at first examining the curse through the lens of three different characters adds enough diversity for an incredibly rewarding story and analysis of its characters.
(Image credit: Konami)
My only issue with Townfall was that I didn’t get to spend more time with Zoe and Richard, because in comparison Simon is just a little boring. His role as a blank template for players to print themselves onto worked wonders for immersion but ultimately his character suffered for it. I found myself drawn more to Zoe and Richard, two characters who had more invested in this community from the get go.
That’s not to say I dislike Simon. He’s a fantastic character who comes into his own during the latter stages of the story and is someone who will grow on me the more time I spend mulling Townfall over.
After all was said and done and I’d finally reached the end of Townfall’s brilliant story, my overwhelming feeling was one of relief. Like Silent Hill f before it, Townfall had some monumental expectations to live up to and the unenviable task of proving that yet again the mystique of Silent Hill is not limited to one mountainous town. But it’s now clear that Screen Burn absolutely understands what makes a great Silent Hill game and the series is better off for it.
