Silent Hill Townfall review: "Unrelentingly dark and disturbing horror"

I've played a lot of horror games over the years, and built up a thick skin in that time to anything but the bluntest of jump scares. So when I say Silent Hill: Townfall scared me, upset me, and left me with just a whole lot of stuff in my head I don't entirely want to have to think about, that means it impressed me. Now it's done I just keep rolling it around in my mind, trying to find a way to make it lie comfortably, but I suspect I will be thinking about it for a long time to come.

Townfall almost certainly isn't going to be for everyone. It's an incredible slow burn mechanically and narratively; very stealth heavy with lots of hiding and ruthless punishment for being found; and the story, once it reveals itself, is a much more difficult beast to wrestle with than birthing gods or manifesting murderous sexual repression. But, while there's a few missteps and at least one late game puzzle I hated with a white hot fury, the overall experience has stuck with me in a way few things have. There are moments, ideas and entire levels worthy of discussion in their own right, as well as events, themes, and topics I'd rather weren't in my head anymore. I'm going to keep this as spoiler free as possible going forward though, so if anything seems vague it's to keep those secrets for you to discover.

I see that town

It all starts with you arriving in the tiny Scottish coastal town of St Amelia, in the early '90s, as a character called Simon Odell. He doesn't know why he's there, or where even there is, which works well setting him up as a cipher for your joint investigations into what the hell is going on. These early few hours – as you poke around the foggy streets and hide behind dumpsters from gnarly, skinned-flesh things skipping along the cobbles – are about as perfect as horror gaming gets.

The key mechanic the stealth hangs on is an old retro CRTV, a pocket television that replaces a Silent hill staple, the radio, in helping you detect monsters. Instead of just having a warning crackle when danger's near, you can now tune the TV into threats to get an interference laden X-ray view of danger through obstacles. The twist that stops this becoming too overpowered is that each individual creature is tuned separately, leaving you jumping between signals one at a time to check where everyone is as you creep around. There's also a peek mechanic to peer around or over things that I clung to like a liferaft for a long time, sparing nothing but the barest of pixels to glimpse fleeting shapes around corners.

While it's very effective in building fear, this stealth does dominate everything. Combat is tough as you swing planks that quickly fall apart (and, later, pipes that fall apart a little more slowly). Firepower is also limited by incredibly scarce ammo, and the fact that gunfire often attracts every monster within earshot. As a result, most of the game is spent cowering behind walls and darting between gaps in monsters' paths, terrified you'll hear a 'found you' scream.

Getting caught either leads to a messy, dangerous fight or a desperate run to escape and hide. In open areas like town streets the latter isn't too bad, leading to heart in your mouth sprints away from danger. However, in more claustrophobic interior areas your options become limited, leading to several arduous levels where you're just stuck hiding with no clear route ahead, or fleeing with nowhere to go to end up torn apart in a corner. The copious abundance of healing items and a resurrecting IV bag mechanic seems to be in place partly to counter this, and prevent you being murdered all the way back to your last save too often.

The dark side

A few of these overly harsh moments really can push Townfall from terrifying to a bit of a chore – one section takes away your ability to fight or resurrect, for example, while hampering your detection of threats, and is immediately followed by an almost as harsh section of a similar length, making for a grinding few hours after an excellent opening. There's also a particular special enemy, capable of insta-kills, that appears occasionally and seems stuck on you, even when it doesn't know where you are. That creates irritating moments where you're just sort of trapped in a room while it patrols endlessly outside, often giving you little choice than to take a hail mary dash hoping it won't see you. You can throw distracting bottles and bricks to buy a gap to get away in, but somehow it always ends up wandering right outside wherever you are.

Those moments can be grueling, and largely responsible for this just missing a perfect score. Partly because it pushes the tense stealth past the point of being fun, clags up the pacing and, whenever the insta-kill creature appears, you just know the next bit is going to be horrible and take forever.

But, for every annoyance, Silent Hill Townfall has many more moments of pure horror magic. In particular a late game level pulls a deliciously subversive power flip with a shotgun and some cat and mouse scares. Then there's just a list of puzzles, reveals, character, or story developments and more that had me scribbling 'Oh my God' repeatedly in my notes.

There are some areas where nothing's happening, but just taking it all in is just amazing – the atmosphere and vibes of just existing are incredible. The foggy town streets are flawlessly eerie and forlorn, creating an isolated and foreboding pressure as you explore. I swear I could smell the cold, briney sea mist I was wandering through. It's specifically set in Scotland, but the amazing recreation of its '90s streets, estates, and shopping centers will resonate with anyone who can remember the UK of that era.

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The Otherworld on the other hand takes on a weighty, cinematic, concrete brutalism, harshly lit in monotone slabs of colour. I've taken more pictures of Townfall than any other game recently, and it doesn't even have a photo mode, it just looks that good. Wherever you are, the warbling, drowning piano, shimmering skeezy guitar, and honking synths build an edgy tension as metal clangs in the distance and as yet unlocated wet skinned breathing shreds your nerves. I haven't played anything that looked, sounded, or felt this good in years.

As you explore you'll uncover puzzles which, for the most part, ditch cryptic poems and ornately overengineered door mechanisms in favor of more realism – an early challenge has you getting a pre-paid card for the electricity meter from the newsagent. There are some way out there puzzles there, especially in the Otherworld when they tie explicitly into the story, and the CRTV even comes into play – letting you tune into disjointed videos that tease clues and locations – but most of it feels grounded and practical. There's a much more investigative feel and plenty of satisfying 'it can't be?!' moments when it all clicks. A couple of sequences are basically overly long fetch quests that feel like a chore, and there's one puzzle at the end that seems to just involve guessing symbols that drove me mad, but the majority of it is all very satisfying.

Through all this, the story takes its time to reveal anything, and you'll be a good ten hours in before you have anything more than half-guesses and assumptions that I guarantee will be wrong. All you'll know for almost three quarters of the game is that something truly awful happened, and letting your mind run rampant with that is far more effective than telling you anything (although the reveal is a worthy pay off). There's only a handful of characters but they're all fascinating as you learn more about them and why they're there. One in particular is extremely interesting, for reasons, given the state of the world right now, and how they deal with what's happening.

The narrative weaves through the substance of the game as you make connections and join the dots. There were so many 'OH. Oh. Ohhhhh' moments making connections; realizing things, like what a certain monster was using as a weapon, or why one of the first 'keys' you get is a scalpel. A new game plus playthrough is just this times a million, as things you didn't really register before are reframed with what you now know.

This is an astonishing horror experience, full of the sort of fear and unease I haven't felt from a game in a long time. The world and atmosphere Screen Burn Interactive has created here really feels like it's set a new bar, and it's done it in a way that feels utterly Silent Hill – reimagining what it can be, while staying utterly true to what it is. It's not perfect and I suspect a few people will struggle with how unrelenting it can be. But even with its flaws it's about as good as horror gaming gets.

Don't go quiet, check out our best Silent Hill games and best Japanese horror games rankings for more!