The newest entry in the Silent Hill franchise – Silent Hill: Townfall – is out now on PC and PS5. Developed by Screen Burn and published by Konami and Annapurna Interactive, the title tells a new story revolving around Simon Ordell finding himself in the small Scottish town of St. Amelia.
The launch of the PC version hasn’t gone too well, however, and at the time of publishing, its aggregated user ratings on Steam sit at “Mixed”. Many reviews have pointed to issues regarding the game’s performance on even high-end hardware, as well as other technical problems like crashes.
Aside from these issues, however, even the negative reviews have praised the visuals of Silent Hill: Townfall, as well as its atmospheric depiction of St. Amelia, with one reviewer even calling it “arguably the best part of the game” and “one of the best settings I’ve seen in a horror game.”
Konami has acknowledged the PC version’s technical issues and has confirmed that the development team is working on an update that will alleviate these issues. “We will announce the release date as soon as it is confirmed,” said the company.
On the other hand, the PS5 version doesn’t seem to be suffering from the same issues. As we noted in our review, where we gave it a score of 9 out of 10, Silent Hill: Townfall features an excellent story with strong pacing, nuanced writing, and great performances, all combined with tense combat and stealth gameplay, strong puzzle designs, and a unique layer added by the inclusion of the CRTV. We did, however, criticize some of the horror game’s aspects, like exploration not feeling rewarding, disappointing enemy variety, and level design that can be too straightforward at times.
Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto had spoken about his confidence in Silent Hill: Townfall earlier this month, expressing the belief that it would do even better than Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 Remake and NeoBards’ Silent Hill f.
“Both Silent Hill 2 and f received very high praise, and their Metacritic scores were great. I have confidence that Townfall will achieve similarly high acclaim […] I have enough confidence to feel that it might end up being the masterpiece [of the revival], so I have extremely high expectations.”
The story of Silent Hill: Townfall involves Simon Ordell exploring St. Amelia in his efforts to “put things right”. Taking a page out of Silent Hill f’s book, the newest title also takes place in the past – in the year 1996. Writer Jon McKellan spoke about why the period works well for a horror game.
“It’s almost like the perfect time for horror where you don’t quite have enough technology to help you. You don’t have a smartphone. You don’t have maps on your device to help you get around, but it’s also not so far back that you don’t have anything at all.”
McKellan had also spoken about the use of analogue technology like pocket televisions during the game’s development “to create something that was truly authentic.”
