Konami’s latest experiment with the Silent Hill horror series is almost upon us. Reviews for Silent Hill: Townfall — a Scottish-set, first-person game made by Observation developer Screen Burn — broadly welcome Konami’s commitment to expanding the series’ horizons with new locations and gameplay styles, although it’s less of a hit with critics than last year’s Silent Hill f.
Townfall‘s rating on Metacritic currently sits at a positive but not exactly effusive 81 (Silent Hill f scored 86). On OpenCritic, Townfall has a rating of 82. Reviewers were deeply impressed by the detail and atmosphere of the game’s location, but some were frustrated by its crude stealth gameplay.
For IGN’s Tristan Ogilvie, who gave the game 8/10, “Townfall feels like Konami’s seminal survival horror series returning to what it does best” after “the more action-oriented” Silent Hill f. “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,” Ogilvie wrote. “It also has some of the most cleverly designed and challenging puzzles I’ve experienced in any horror game in recent memory, many involving impeccable recreations of technology from yesteryear that really transported me back to its mid-nineties setting.”
In a four-star review, Eurogamer’s Matt Wales found that Townfall was “more ambitious” than suggested by its early signaling of Silent Hill tropes like “a sad man with a clearly guilty conscience roaming the darkly shifting melancholy mists in search of a woman.” British critics like Wales were especially wowed by the detailed observation of the game’s setting. “St. Amelia is a world of such convincing detail — the very British street signs, the blinking crossing lights, the cheery bunting, the local noticeboard ads — that it’s engulfing even before you’ve stepped away from its weather-battered seafront into its cobbled market square,” Wales wrote. He also noted that Townfall‘s acute sense of place extends to real political history: “Screen Burn infuses its tale with a quiet sort of rage as it grapples with themes of corporate colonisation and worker exploitation.”
This aspect of the game’s story, as well as Silent Hill’s traditional focus on personal trauma, gripped PC Gamer’s Elie Gould. Gould, who gave Townfall a rating of 89, was particularly drawn not to the protagonist Simon but to two other characters who also have playable sections, Zoe and Richard. “Examining the curse through the lens of three different characters adds enough diversity for an incredibly rewarding story and analysis of its characters,” Gould wrote.
But several critics found Townfall‘s game mechanics could not sustain its atmosphere or ideas. In a three-star review, VGC’s Chris Scullion bemoaned “infuriating downers,” especially instant-death stealth sections involving a creature called The Weight. “It’s rare that I find sections in a game that hit a brick wall and kill the momentum dead like Townfall does,” Scullion wrote.
Polygon’s Elijah Gonzalez agreed about the monster confrontations. “These situations start scary, before turning workmanlike and eventually flat-out dull,” Gonzalez wrote. “Horror games tend to evoke strong emotions, but I can’t remember one that left me this annoyed.” Gonzalez also felt that Townfall is a little too thematically pointed and that it could have been more ambiguous. “By laying out its greater meaning so plainly, Silent Hill: Townfall lacks the spiraling dread of games like Silent Hill 2, where sudden truths clanged like a steel pipe smashing a skull.”
You can make up your own mind when Silent Hill: Townfall is released for PlayStation 5 and PC on Sep. 24.