Afraid and Alone #23: Silent Hill: Townfall (2026)

One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.

NOTE: Due to the recency of this game’s release, I tried even more than usual to avoid including major spoilers in this write-up. That being said, for your awareness, I do make reference to one or two mechanical (non-story) elements from later in the game.

A little over a year ago, I played my first ever Silent Hill game, the newly released and generally well-received Silent Hill f. The highly acclaimed Silent Hill 2 remake had released only a year before that, and as such Silent Hill f had stepped into a strange new phase for the iconic survival horror franchise. Silent Hill had gone from a series of poorly received games in the late 2000s and a complete drought from 2013 to 2023 (minus the famed P.T. demo for the cancelled Silent Hills in 2014) to suddenly being both a yearly and great franchise once again. That ‘yearly’ component to the series revival now continues with the September 2026 launch of Silent Hill: Townfall. The big question is, can Townfall continue the quality streak established by its two predecessors? It’s time to find out.

Silent Hill: Townfall is a spin-off to the main series (much like Silent Hill f) developed by Scottish developer Screen Burn Interactive (formerly known as No Code). Prior to its selection by Konami and its name change, No Code was primarily known for its horror/thriller adventure games Stories Untold and Observation. These games’ focus on puzzles and lack of combat foretold that Townfall was likely to be a very different experience from Silent Hill f. Also different would be the setting – while Silent Hill f took place in the Japanese village of Ebisugaoka (and the rest of the franchise took place in or near the titular Maine town), Townfall moves the action and intrigue to the small Scottish isle of Saint Amelia.

Townfall drops players into the shoes of Simon Ordell (Jovan Adepo), an American man who has just washed up on the shore of the fog-ridden island with no memory of who he is or how he got there. All he knows is that a man had contacted him, asking him to return to Saint Amelia to ‘make things right’. Much to Simon’s confusion, the island’s main port town appears abandoned, with every indication pointing to some kind of calamity that had rocked the community. Protest signs demanding justice litter the town square, but justice for what isn’t exactly clear. What does become obvious pretty quickly, though, is that Simon isn’t actually alone on Saint Amelia. Outside of the grotesque monsters roaming the streets (because this is a Silent Hill game, after all), there are two other people present – another American man, named Richard (Lost legend Terry O’Quinn), and a nurse named Zoe (Kezia Burrows). If Simon is to make it off of Saint Amelia alive, determine what happened to the town, and make things right, he must first figure out how he, Richard, and Zoe are connected to each other and to the events that befell the island.

The thing that most immediately struck me about Townfall, both from the trailers and from starting the game, is the huge shift in gameplay compared to Silent Hill f. In fact, if you made a line representing a spectrum from ‘combat-focused’ to ‘stealth-focused’, all three of the revival’s big games would land somewhere different. Silent Hill f, with its utilization of forced battles and mostly linear level design, would definitely be on the ‘combat-focused’ end. Silent Hill 2 Remake would probably land somewhere in the middle; you can choose to avoid enemy encounters at times, but with James’s infinitely durable wood plank and a reasonable supply of ammo you are able to take out pretty much every enemy if you so choose. Townfall, meanwhile, sits at the complete opposite end from Silent Hill f.

Now, I’ve indicated many times before that my views on stealth in video games are mixed. There are times where it works very well for me, like in Fear the Spotlight (where the stealth sections are relatively sporadic) and the Grace sections of Resident Evil Requiem (where the player does have the limited ability to defend themselves in cases where they are caught). But then there are the times where it frequently feels tedious and frustrating, like in the first two Amnesia games. Luckily, for me, Townfall is a lot closer to the former group than the latter. As with Grace in Requiem, Simon is not entirely defenseless. Ammo is scarce and melee weapons break pretty easily, sure, but as long as you manage to avoid some of the enemies along the way then you should still have enough to fight back if in a pinch. Really, I found the gameplay to be well-balanced overall. Due to a (likely intentional) clunky combat style and the aforementioned weapon scarcity you can’t just fight everything, but you always seem to have some options if the stealth becomes too difficult. You can take shelter in a designated hiding spot, for example, or toss a bottle or brick to distract (or even briefly stun) an enemy. It’s a system that is quite a bit deeper than I was expecting going in, and the terror that it can invoke is enhanced by the game’s status as the first fully first-person Silent Hill game.

Another gameplay element that helps make the stealth more bearable, and one of my favorite additions to the game, is the CRTV. A small handheld TV that can be displayed with the push of a button, the CRTV is in a way a more versatile version of the standard Silent Hill radio. It acts almost like an X-ray scanner, showing you where enemies are and what they are doing even through walls and other obstacles. In turn this helps the player in determining enemy patterns, planning their routes, and figuring out when to hide. This could have easily been a broken mechanic, but it is tempered by the CRTV’s inability to show more than one enemy at a given time; each enemy has its own ‘frequency’, and to see what a particular enemy is up to the CRTV has to be tuned to that specific frequency. If you want to know where one enemy is, then you by necessity lose track of the others in the area. This is a very cool concept that adds some great strategy elements to each enemy encounter.

Speaking of enemies, one area where Townfall unfortunately falls a bit flat is the monster variety. Townfall is fairly long for a survival horror game (it took me roughly 16 hours), and while there are a couple of additional types introduced in the later chapters most of the game’s runtime is spent with only two kinds of enemies. These two types are differentiated well enough – one is erratic, fast-moving, and focused on melee attacks, while the other is slower and capable of a ranged strike – but I have to admit that I did get tired seeing them over and over again. It doesn’t help that, while they are certainly creepy in isolation and do a good job of fitting with the game’s themes, all of the game’s enemy designs are quite similar to each other, with them all being humanoid and sharing very similar color schemes. The Silent Hill games have struggled at times in the past in terms of enemy variety – I think I mentioned this in my write-ups of Silent Hill 2 Remake and Silent Hill 4 – but even then the past games have generally done a better job of making their enemy types stand out from one another. So I do feel that Townfall was a bit of a disappointment on this front.

I feel that I should also mention, without getting into much spoiler territory, that there is a stalker enemy that shows up occasionally in the second half of the game. I probably wouldn’t have noted that here normally, except that this monster seems to be one of the main axes around which player criticism of the game rotates. To put it bluntly, the creature’s AI could use some work. I luckily managed to avoid most major issues with those sections of the game, but there are plenty of horror stories of players getting stuck in those areas for hours due to the stalker’s aggressiveness and tendency to camp in one location and not move. The developers have said they intend to patch its behavior, but as of the time of writing this I don’t believe it has happened yet.**

On a much more positive note, the puzzles in Townfall are honestly among the best I have encountered in the genre, in my opinion, and very much in the vein of what you would expect from Silent Hill. As with Silent Hill 2 Remake, the areas of the game are each centered around one big puzzle, with a series of smaller puzzles needed to solve it. These puzzles are, on the whole, the perfect mix of challenging and solvable; you are provided all the information you need, but figuring out which bits of that information are important is the key. (It helps that, like many Silent Hill games, Townfall has separate combat and puzzle difficulties that can be changed at any time.) It also feels like there is a stronger thematic resonance between the puzzles and the game’s story than I’ve typically encountered in the genre so far, and they can go in some pretty unique directions. One that particularly stood out to me (again, avoiding major spoilers) required the use of cassette tapes to shift an apartment backward and forward through time. There are several puzzles as well that make good use of the CRTV, making it an even stronger addition to the game and the series formula. All in all, I was very impressed with Townfall’s approach to puzzles.

The game’s environmental design is fantastic as well. So much detail and care was put into making St. Amelia feel like an actual Scottish island town, with the winding streets crowded on all sides with apartments and shops and the pervasive fog everywhere you look. Businesses and homes are strewn with the detritus of everyday life – dishes, unopened mail, boxes, etc. Protest signs and barricades litter the main square, giving us a good hint at the problems facing the town without even needing to tell us outright. And on top of all that, there is so much text everywhere that can be read even without interacting with it (messages on makeshift memorials, a shop’s hours posted in the window, a poster espousing good hygiene, etc.), enhancing the game’s sense of immersion. I won’t talk too much about the later areas, but the same level of care shown in the early game is still present throughout. The game’s version of the standard Silent Hill Otherworld is visually quite interesting as well, lit by a stark red glow and dominated by thick industrial pipes pushing through walls and the ground. It’s certainly different from Silent Hill 2 Remake’s rusty Otherworld, but it’s fitting and I like the contrast.

If there’s one complaint that I have about Townfall’s environments, it’s that I wish there was more interactivity. There are so many buildings that you walk by in St. Amelia, but outside of the ones required for story or puzzle purposes there are vanishingly few that can be entered and explored. And even when you can do so, inside there’s often only one or two objects that can actually be interacted with or items that can be found and collected. This was an issue I alos remember having to an extent with Silent Hill 2 Remake; it felt like a lost opportunity to further build out the town’s character then, and it does now too.

As with the puzzles and environments, Townfall’s story isn’t too shabby either. The mystery of what happened to devastate the island is set up very well, and while I’ve seen some quibbles about and disappointment with its resolution I felt like it mostly stuck the landing. It maybe pulls a bit too much structurally from Silent Hill 2 at times (I mean, the saving icon is literally the iconic nine-red-squares symbol from Silent Hill 2), but it does still carve its own path. Simon himself is something of a weak protagonist, at least for the bulk of the game’s run time. His personality really struggles to come through, something that could come partly down to the shift to first-person (Ethan wasn’t the most interesting character in Resident Evil 7, either), and his status as an American outsider does make him feel a bit removed from the goings-on for chunks of the game. Luckily the other two major characters, Zoe and Richard, are significantly more fascinating from a character perspective. That’s all that I’ll say about them for now, but suffice to say that I found them to be a worthy addition to the franchise’s character roster.

Before closing things out, I have to give a shout-out to Townfall’s sound design and score. It’s not easy filling Akira Yamaoka’s shoes, but sound designer Byron Bullock and composer Pilotpriest do so with aplomb. The enemy vocalizations are both incredibly unsettling and very helpful with determining their locations. Footsteps, creaks, and bangs left me constantly on edge. It’s just incredibly well-done. And the synth- and piano-heavy soundtrack is deeply atmospheric but recognizable enough to give the game its own identity. I was very impressed all around.

Anyway, I came to Silent Hill: Townfall with some trepidation. The apparent focus on stealth had definitely given me pause, and I was worried about whether Silent Hill’s new winning streak would be kept alive. Luckily my fears were mostly unfounded. The stealth took some getting used to and there were some issues with the enemy variety, blandness of the main protagonist, and a relative lack of interactivity with the environment. Overall, though, I came to enjoy the gameplay loop. Between the fantastic environmental and sound design, excellent puzzles, and largely intriguing story, Townfall does a great job of keeping this venerable franchise’s revival-era momentum going. I am excited to see what’s next.

** Note that shortly after I had already written up this review, Screen Burn released a patch that apparently reduced the difficulty of the aforementioned stalker enemy by a pretty significant margin. It also supposedly nerfed two of the final puzzles of the game, something I’m a lot more mixed about.

Survival horror and adjacent games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil (OG), Resident Evil 2 (OG), Resident Evil 4 Remake, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil Revelations, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Resident Evil: Village, Amnesia: Rebirth, Amnesia: The Bunker, Tormented Souls, Tormented Souls 2, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, Alisa, Dead Space 2, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Alone in the Dark (2024), Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2, Darkwood, ObsCure, Cold Fear, Lempo, Stasis, Stasis Bone Totem, System Shock 1 and 2, Metro 2033, Look Outside, Heartworm, Little Goody Two-Shoes, SOMA, Empty Shell, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Clock Tower: Rewind, White Day: A Labyrinth Called School, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Fragile Reflection, Bioshock 1, Bioshock 2, You Will Die Here Tonight, My Friendly Neighborhood, Conscript, The Callisto Protocol, Penumbra: Overture, Penumbra: Black Plague, Penumbra: Requiem, Lamentum, Outlast, Outlast 2, Carnival Massacre, Late Homework, Routine, Alan Wake 2, White Night, Onimusha, Onimusha 2, Heavy Metal Death Can, Remothered: Tormented Fathers, Remothered: Broken Porcelain, NightCry, Nightmare of Decay, Ground Zero, White Night, Still Wakes the Deep, The Chant, Silent Hill: Townfall, Maid of Sker, DreadOut

My Current Survival Horror Ranking:

1. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (9.5/10)
2. Resident Evil Remake (9.5/10)
3. Silent Hill 2 Remake (9.5/10)
4. Signalis (9/10)
5. Dead Space (2008) (9/10)
6. Resident Evil 2 Remake (9/10)
7. Sorry We’re Closed (9/10)
8. Resident Evil Requiem (9/10)
9. Cronos: The New Dawn (9/10)
10. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (8.5/10)
11. Crow Country (8.5/10)
12. Silent Hill: Townfall (8.5/10)
13. Fear the Spotlight (8.5/10)
14. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake (8.5/10)
15. Subversive Memories (8/10)
16. Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (8/10)
17. Silent Hill 4: The Room (8/10)
18. Silent Hill f (8/10)
19. Resident Evil 3 Remake (7.5/10)
20. Resident Evil 4 (7/10)
21. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (7/10)
22. Amnesia: The Dark Descent (7/10)
23. Alone in the Dark (1992) (7/10)
24. Deadly Premonition (5/10)

Up Next: Resident Evil 0

Header image courtesy of Fangoria.