Silent Hill has always been a place tied to negative emotions, be it grief, guilt, regret, or anger. The deep narratives reveal unwanted secrets and terrifying truths, where a terrifying town reflects the intrinsic terror of the people lost in its grasp. Silent Hill: Townfall is no different. The first game in the series to be experienced in first-person, it constantly leaves you choking on fear, uncomfortable and anxious. Being set in a place that feels familiar yet strange, it strives to embody survival and psychological horror the series is known for, and does so consistently throughout.
You play as Simon, a man who wakes up on the docks of the small Scottish Town of St. Amelia with an IV drip in your hand. With no recollection of why or how you ended up there, you must piece together what brought you to this place. It doesn’t take long before the horrors of what happened in St. Amelia start to become apparent, with strange creatures lurking through the streets, and that terrible place known as Silent Hill swallows you up and refuses to let you leave. The story drip feeds you with information, never quite giving you the knowledge you so sorely need.
I was so invested in who Simon was and why he returned to St. Amelia. After meeting a strange man called Richard, the same man who wanted you to return to make things right, you start to experience the horror of Silent Hill: Townfall. Zoe, a nurse on the island, is someone else who shares a deeper connection with you, and her story is another that keeps you guessing, but also makes you care about her and what she has experienced in this town. Something bad happened. People got sick and many died, with a certain company who are possibly to blame.
The survival horror is orchestrated masterfully. There are limited medical supplies to refill your health. Simon can equip an IV bag that revives him if he succumbs to nasty attacks from the monsters in the town, but once used death sends you back to the last save point. There are phones in many shops and houses that can be used to save, so it pays to stay savvy when doing so as auto-save points are few and far between. I went a fair few times thinking I would be safe, only for something to come out of nowhere and kill me before I had time to realise it was there.
You never feel truly safe. There are ways to fight back, but these resources are limited. Pipes and planks of wood can block attacks, and while swinging them at enemies does hurt them, it’s easier to try running away. Later on, gaining access to a pistol (and other firearms) offers some protection, but bullets are scarce and some creatures take a good two or three bullets to kill. The flare gun is something you acquire further in the story, but again, unless you use it tactically, running is still the safest option. Bricks and bottles can be thrown to distract enemies, giving you further options to escape.
There aren’t a ton of different creatures you encounter, but it makes the story more personal. One of the earlier missions where you make a house visit with Zoe to a sick patient leads you to the first tense moment of Silent Hill: Townfall. After escaping the house, you’re then introduced to these naked humans afflicted with the sickness that seems to have killed most of the people on the island. Playing most of the game as Simon, his CRTV is a tool that helps you to see nearby enemies once you’ve locked onto a signal, but you still never feel entirely safe.
The CRTV is also used to tune into signals that reveal certain story beats and puzzles clues. By holding your controller still at the right moment and using the controls to tune in, the clips can be watched repeatedly until you choose to move on or solve the puzzle at hand. Some of the puzzles are incredibly smart, offering layered ways to solve them across the town. One such puzzle had me collecting floppy disks, taking them to a house next to a small shopping precinct, and clearing the corrupted files before finding the information I needed.
Another had me finding a locker code by finding the sequence through clues scattered around a doctor’s surgery that gave me the numbers I needed. Almost all of the puzzles took time to solve, but they’re inventive and smart throughout the story. One puzzle left me feeling incredibly frustrated, and even now I’m not sure how I solved it. There were a few that seemed almost too complex and it did take up far too much time trying to work out where I was going wrong. I’m interested to see how others playing work out the ‘blood puzzle’ because I’m still scratching my head after it.
On a personal level, I felt connected to Silent Hill: Townfall through the inherently British setting. Like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, there’s so much I’ve seen in my own life represented on screen. Those old phone boxes and the plastic dogs with coin slots on their heads outside newsagents and post offices; tower blocks with staircases where you can almost smell the cigarettes and faint odour of urine; the semi-detached houses and their interiors that were all stuck in the 90s; video stores and off licenses you went to on the way home from school.
While Silent Hill: Townfall does a great job of creating a town that is eerie, it becomes terrifying when the skies turn red and the walls of houses turn to mould. Hulking metal pipes fill the streets and buildings become rotten and corrupt. When one of the medical centres becomes a living nightmare and Silent Hill turns into its own brand of hell, fear takes hold. In a later mission where you have to find blood bags on different floors while avoiding huge creatures bulging with puss and blood, I’m not sure I took anything other than quite, shallow breaths for at least an hour or two.
Silent Hill: Townfall is terrifying. It’s claustrophobic, and with the first-person perspective, it heightens the terror because you feel more immersed in what’s happening. The town of St. Amelia, whether in the fog or the nightmare, you never feel safe, with enemies not following dedicated paths making them hard to read. The attention to detail is excellent, and the intelligent puzzles are mostly well-designed. The acting is engaging and the stories tied to the town are what drives you to keep going regardless of horrifying creatures scattered around it’s corners.
