Multiple endings have become a tradition for Konami’s Silent Hill series. 2025’s widely acclaimed Silent Hill f had five endings, one of which is more comedic in nature. 2024’s Silent Hill 2 remake features a whopping eight endings, five of which can only be accessed in a second playthrough. The latest installment, Silent Hill: Townfall, developed by Screen Burn Interactive, is no exception to that rule. At a preview event earlier this month in Los Angeles, we learned the upcoming game will also have five endings, depending on the choices you make throughout the story.
During my demo of the game, I encountered several tension-building choices that led me to wonder if the game had branching paths. These were basic yes-or-no scenarios, like “Will you open the door?” or “Will you open the box?” They were presented with daunting red selection icon and left me with an uneasy feeling, like when Pentiment and The Outer Worlds tell you “This will be remembered” after a consequential dialogue choice.
Screen Burn writer and director Jon McKellan didn’t directly answer my question about Townfall having alternate routes, but he did offer a bit more insight as to how choices will work in the game.
“I would say the game is fairly… we refer to it as, like, ‘wide linear.’ You’re going on your journey, but there’s a little bit of deviation as you go. Especially because of how the player will play, and the order in which you do things. There’s a couple of sections in the game where you can kind of do things in different orders. So there’s a little bit of room to breathe. It doesn’t feel so on-rails,” he explains.
So are those daunting yes-or-no questions a red herring? From what McKellan says, it doesn’t sound like the pivotal moments will be quite so obvious to the player — at least not the first time around.
“There’s a lot of things in the game that contribute to those endings, and they’re all very subtle. Nothing is an A/B choice. It’s more about, like, how did you play as Simon? Like, what did you do? What were your actions? At certain moments in the game, how did you go about that thing? That almost kind of says to us as a developer what kind of player you are, and how that manifests through Simon,” McKellan says. “It’s a very subtle mix of things, but yeah. Everything counts.”
Alas, it seems we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to discover if there’s a nefarious Shiba Inu pulling all the strings in Silent Hill: Townfall. The game will be released for PlayStation 5 and Windows PC on Sept. 24.