I spent so much of my time stalking through Silent Hill: Townfall tensed in a cautious crouchwalk, that by the end of the story I was just as worried about the damage to my character’s fraying mental state as I was about the wear and tear on his knees. Taking an about-face from the action-heavy adventure in last year’s Silent Hill f, this latest survival horror spin-off instead embraces the sustained tension of slow-paced stealth, handing you a motion-sensing gadget and tasking you with sneaking past a series of sound-sensitive beasts that have descended on its abandoned seaside village in mid-nineties Scotland. What unfolds is a gripping investigation through an increasingly unsettling world witnessed from a fresh, first-person perspective. Silent Hill: Townfall is riddled with tremendously satisfying puzzles to solve, and peppered with the most disturbing scenes to come out of mid-nineties Scotland since that baby crawled along the ceiling in the original Trainspotting.
Silent Hill: Townfall’s story begins with a cold open in more ways than one. American Simon Ordell washes up on the chilly shores of the fictional St. Amelia with a hospital ID bracelet on one wrist and an IV drip still stuck in the other, seemingly seeking redemption for an unknown sin from his past. It quickly becomes apparent that things have gone very wrong in the deserted Scottish town – market stalls are abandoned, ‘for sale’ signs are pegged out the front of almost every house, and the streets are littered with picket signs protesting an unknown organisation dubbed the ‘CEG’. Oh, and the first local you encounter is a mysterious man in the town square getting disgusting black goop pumped into his lungs through an intubation tube descending from the skies above.
Things only get more alarming from there, but Townfall dragged me through its increasingly squeamish scenes with the powerful allure of its central mystery, which gradually brings to light the tragic events that have impacted the town, the main players at fault, and exactly where poor Simon stands in all of it. It’s a story that deals with familiar themes of trauma and guilt that we’ve come to expect from Silent Hill, but it also tackles previously unexplored shades of evil like corporate greed and environmental mismanagement that help to make it feel like a refreshingly new twist on the series’ formula.
Although he comes across as fairly monotone at first, I grew to appreciate the understated earnestness of Simon as the events of Townfall mine the full depths of his despair, especially compared to some of the overly dramatic heroes of the earlier Silent Hill games. At certain junctions, the story also switches the perspective to a couple of other playable characters that further flesh out the details of what’s really going on, but I’d rather not spoil exactly who they are other than to say that they provide crucial roles in unravelling St. Amelia’s secrets.
Of course, a lot of its story themes are revealed in the form of nightmarish visual metaphors, as St. Amelia shifts into an ominous altered state with tangles of industrial pipes strangling its streets and the tentacles of a towering monster that drag along its rooftops. Sure, some sections feel like echoes of earlier Silent Hill settings, like apartment blocks in a heavy state of decay and creepy hospital wards to explore, but there are some really striking new sights to see throughout the 13 hours of Townfall’s tragic tale too, from alleys cloaked in a crimson haze to suburban streets lined with horribly bloated corpses that have freshly fallen from the sky.
The fact that developer Screen Burn Games has opted to break from the series’ predominately third-person style by telling its story entirely in first-person also does wonders for enhancing Townfall’s overall sense of dread. As proven by Resident Evil’s modern instalments, it’s considerably more intimidating to lean around a corner and come face to gaping maw with a menacing manifestation of pure malevolence than it is to witness it from a comparatively safe distance peering over your character’s shoulder. However, Townfall further enhances its first-person view by defaulting its presentation to a letterboxed widescreen format, and the benefits are twofold; aside from lending it a welcome cinematic touch, its narrowed anamorphic perspective also makes moving through confined spaces feel all the more claustrophobic and uncomfortable.
Silent Thrill
Whereas last year’s Silent Hill f demanded that you master an aggressive, action RPG-style melee and parry system, Townfall encourages a slow and steady approach to its enemy encounters that feels more inline with the survival horror systems of the series’ mainline entries. Simon can get his hands on wooden two-by-fours and lead pipes in order to beat the black pudding out of his frenzied assailants, but the actual melee combat is intentionally sluggish and weapons can degrade and break. More often than not, that meant I opted to sneak past the snarling skinbags patrolling the path to my next objective, only ever choosing violence when I found myself backed into a corner.
Even when you eventually do get your hands on some more powerful weapons like the revolver and shotgun, ammunition remains scarce, reload times are realistically slow, and the booming echo of gunfire tends to attract attention from other enemies. This makes them primarily last resort options when you find yourself overwhelmed by fleshmonsters with axe-blades for faces that are frantically trying to give you a Glasgow kiss.
Thankfully the environment provides you with enough tools to allow for a passive approach. As was the case in The Last of Us series, house bricks and empty bottles can be lobbed to create distractions away from your position, or thrown directly at an enemy to momentarily stun them and allow you to scurry past. Devices like radios can also be switched on to lure shuffling sentries away from their stations, and should you get spotted, there’s usually a conveniently placed wardrobe somewhere close by for you to run and hide in. Just be sure to break the line of sight before you do – if one of the unkillable stalker enemy types spots you cowering in a cupboard, it’s liable to rip you right out of there like the xenomorph from Alien: Isolation and send you straight back to your last save point.
Speaking of Alien: Isolation, Townfall reimagines the iconic motion tracker device from Creative Assembly’s sci-fi scarefest in the form of a portable TV that Simon clutches in his left hand. Bursts of static alert you to the presence of any nasties that might lurk in the murk ahead, and by tuning the little frequency band on his CRTV-branded device you can dial in a slightly glitchy, sonar-style view of their position on its tiny LCD screen, allowing you to plan your next steps through each area accordingly. You can’t keep a bead on every enemy at the same time, however, since each of Townfall’s monsters occupy their own space on the CRTV’s band. Anytime I found myself in more densely populated areas, I was forced to constantly flick through the frequencies in order to identify the nearest threat, which further ratcheted up my stress levels.
That said, although the CRTV is a vital piece of kit for surviving the increasingly mean streets of St. Amelia, its ability to effectively see through walls and allow you to anticipate any monsters waiting to ambush you means that Townfall is pretty light on any substantial scares in its opening hours. It eventually found a way to jolt me with a few excellent jump scares later on, especially during the prolonged section that removes the CRTV from your inventory and forces you to contend with an office block full of ghouls that stand statue-like in the shadows before surprising you when you turn away. Yet even though Townfall might not ever come close to the underwear-changing chills of the Silent Hill 2 remake or the heart-stopping horrors of Grace’s levels in Resident Evil Requiem, it does use its consistently unsettling atmosphere to maintain a strong feeling of unease throughout.
Dot Matrix Reloaded
The CRTV isn’t just a handy way to keep tabs on Townfall’s terrors, it’s also a valuable tool for uncovering clues to your next objective. Cryptic looping videos will often pierce through the static and offer brief glimpses of a specific location, forcing you to carefully scan your surroundings rather than blindly following a simple map marker to reach it. However, the CRTV isn’t the only relic from the ‘90s that you get your hands on in Townfall, since so many of the story’s puzzles involve operating all sorts of other obsolete technologies from the decade like cream-coloured desktop computers and slide projectors, each recreated with convincing effect right down to the rhythmic mechanical screeches of a dot matrix printer.
Anyone who played this developer’s 2017 debut Stories Untold (released under the studio’s previous name, No Code) will be familiar with the team’s ability to accurately replicate the look and feel of such bygone gadgets and gizmos – and as someone nostalgic for the era, I got a kick out of methodically loading floppy disks into a drive in order to unzip important documents, or the tactile experience of manually punching a series of digits into the metal keypad of a public payphone to save my game. This may well sound a bit mundane to you if you’re not old enough to remember monochrome monitors, but don’t worry because these primitive pieces of tech are occasionally used to trigger some seriously surreal sequences. For example, a microcassette recorder I found in one abandoned residence could be used to shuffle the contents of the house back and forward through time, opening up slightly altered areas to scour for a specific puzzle solution and briefly bending my mind into a pretzel.
I respect that for the most part the clues you need to solve each of Townfall’s brainteasers are there to find in your immediate surroundings as long as you’re prepared to search for them, and also the fact that in some instances there are countermeasures for any attempts to brute force your way to a solution. For example, in one level where you’re guided through the process of prepping a patient for surgery by a condescending doctor on the other end of an intercom, it soon turns into a sadistic game of Operation when identifying the wrong readout on a life support system triggers a health bar-sapping buzz. That really forced me to focus on finding the right solution, and when I applied myself I discovered Townfall’s puzzles to be regularly challenging but rarely too obtuse.
That is, aside from one particular late game contraption that confounded me so much that it seemed as though Silent Hill’s signature fog had seeped into my own brain. Seriously, it made me feel like I was Homer Simpson sitting at his keyboard and searching for the ‘ANY’ key. (It’s worth pointing out, though, that if you prefer to have your brain gently tickled rather than outright teased, you can activate hints in the options menu.)
Lastly, I was happy to find that Silent Hill: Townfall wasn’t ever dragged down by the same inventory management issues I encountered in Silent Hill f. Unlike the miserly nature of the item slots in last year’s spin-off, Townfall doesn’t really place restrictions on what you can carry besides limiting you to two throwable items and one melee weapon at any one time. You can otherwise hold as much ammunition and medkits as you like, although given how scarce these resources are it’s typically only ever a handful at any one time anyway.
There’s a light amount of crafting, too, since you can sterilise regular bandages with bottles of alcohol in order to make them more effective healing options. Meanwhile, the ability to fill an IV bag with revitalising fluid and keep it constantly equipped proved essential (especially as enemy numbers swelled in the story’s final hours) since it brings you back to life with a partially refilled health bar anytime you’re downed. Aside from some rare exceptions when I was killed by an enemy, brought back to life on the spot, and then instantly killed by the same enemy again before I had a chance to flee or fight back, I appreciated having the safety net of the IV drip since it gave me the courage to spend longer excursions exploring each area. That’s opposed to painstakingly tiptoeing back and forth to the nearest save point in order to bank each small amount of story progress I made, which is the cowardly path I often take in spooky stories like this.