SILENT HILL: Townfall review

The Silent Hill franchise is having a resurgence, and I’m all for it. With 3 straight autumns of new releases: Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, and now Silent Hill: Townfall, fans are in for a treat with this new rendition. After playing through all 3, I’m genuinely impressed with how much each individual title stands out from one another. Screen Burn has done an incredible job crafting their own version of Silent Hill, and Townfall might be the best one yet.

I was initially worried after my hands-on preview that Townfall might be a rehash of Silent Hill 2, but boy was I wrong. Screen Burn wasn’t lying when they said the game would be social commentary around big corporations, coverups, and whistleblowers. The narrative truly does deliver here, and with several endings to achieve, I’ll have to see them all to get the full picture of the story and message. Pacing is also excellent, with the overall length of the gaming feeling just right, not too short, and not too long. 

If you want a brief refresher on what the game is, check out my preview.

SILENT HILL: Townfall hands-on preview

Tuned into terror

GAMINGTRENDHenry Viola

There’s only so much I want to and can say about the actual story elements, since I don’t want to spoil anything for you. I want you to experience them firsthand yourself. Just know that Simon isn’t some random American that stumbled upon St. Amelia. He is heavily involved with CEG, the corporate entity that had directment involvement with the island and its inhabitants.

You do get to step into the perspective of other characters, Zoe and Richard. All of them have ties to one another in some way. Not only does this allow you to see a different side of the narrative, piecing together things that were confusing to you before, but it also forces you to play a bit differently than Simon. Zoe starts off with absolutely nothing other than a pager, meaning she doesn’t have the CRTV to help locate threats or a melee weapon to defend herself. You have to rely on pure stealth to pass her sections. Richard, on the other hand, starts off with a shotgun, and the game absolutely showers you with ammo, so feel free to go to town with anything that comes your way.

The “survival horror” gameplay might not break the typical mold of the genre, but Townfall does so with confidence and grace. Why fix what ain’t broke right? Ammunition is scarce, melee weapons like wooden sticks and pipes degrade and break, and healing items can be crafted to create better ones. The only real new additions are Simon’s CRTV and his IV bag that acts as a second life if he is fatally struck.

You’ll be switching between pure stealth sections and hybrid stealth and combat portions, and the cadence and transitions help it not to feel forced or weird. The Alien Isolation influence is seen clearly, with several spaces to hide in, radios to turn on to draw attention, and bottles and bricks to throw to distract. Gunplay, on the other hand, is crisp and responsive, and for the revolver, you can physically see yourself reloading all 6 bullets into the chamber before you can fire again. Simon gets his hands on a flare gun later in the game too.

The gameplay and narrative sail smoothly into one another in a way that feels like natural progression. My only complaint is that some forced stealth sections are a bit too dragged out. In the middle chapter of the game, there is a Mr. X-like entity that is unkillable and will one-shot you if you’re caught. These sections last a bit too long for my liking. The enemy AI is a tad too sensitive, so any small movement will trigger them, forcing you to hide and de-aggro them.

Normally immense backtracking would be a point of contention with horror titles, but Townfall strikes a good balance at this. You’re never really treading the same path more than a couple times, and levels are intricately designed so that you might find a new path to a previously visited area. This is also true when you play as different characters, so don’t worry about them tasking you to do the same thing twice.

This is not a game that holds your hand, even on “Hinted” difficulty for puzzles. You’ll have to think outside the box or even brute force some solutions if you can’t figure them out. That being said, I absolutely adored the variety of riddles that range from your typical image alignment with the CRTV all the way to more complex ones that require you to keep track of several key factors and backtrack to previously inaccessible areas. My favorite involved finding blood bags of different patients and piecing together their blood types. There were ones that veered on the edge of being too obscure, so take that as you will. Like I mentioned in my preview, these brainteasers aren’t just salad dressing, but they actually shed light on memories and push the story further.

Since Silent Hill uses the physical world to mirror a person’s mental state, it makes absolute sense that each character experiences reality a bit differently. The monstrosities that each sees are different as well, ranging from grotesque medical failures to others that represent corporate negligence. 

The one thing Townfall absolutely nails is the atmosphere. The retro-tech aesthetic of the late 1990s is so immersive and fits the theme so well, since this was the time period right before technology really boomed. There was email, but no world wide web, cell phones, tablets, billboards, or any of the things we see every day in the digital age now. Things were done manually and old school, with hand drawn signs and hand written notes.

Townfall comes in at 51.18 gigs on the PlayStation 5, which is quite a size for a game that can be completed in only around 10-12 hours. Load times are decent, coming in at around 7 seconds to load in from the main menu. 3 difficulty options are offered: Story, Normal, and Nightmare, and Hinted and Normal are offered for puzzles. You also have settings to tweak show time played, adaptive triggers, auto aim, and letterbox aspect ratio. Not a bad suite of settings but you can’t rebind controls unfortunately.

Technical performance is mostly solid, aside from a couple hard crashes that occurred during my playthrough and once when I got body blocked by an enemy that forced a reload. I encountered some frame dips too, even on Performance mode, though they didn’t really detract from the overall experience. Thankfully I’ve run into no bugs or other issues, and the ones I mentioned can easily be fixed with a Day One patch.