Silent Hill: Townfall would be a better horror game if it had nothing to do with Silent Hill

Fog clings to the island of St Amelia like taut plastic on skin, but I'm still not convinced Silent Hill: Townfall makes sense in the Konami psychological horror franchise. The 30-minute hands-off demonstration developer Screen Burn shows me during Summer Game Fest 2026 is laden with Silent Hill's trappings, milky fog and scabby monsters, but it's missing the cigarette-burned soul.

It's all too clean. Leading man Simon Ordell has ripped himself out of a hospital bed with all the tape and needles attached. A cannula pokes through a vein between his fingers, allowing healing liquid to revive him when he's injured, and a tight medical bracelet sticks to his wrist. But Simon is otherwise spotless while investigating St. Amelia in 1996, with vague instructions to find a brunette who I need to double check isn't Mary, the missing brunette from the soul-tearing Silent Hill 2. In only 30 minutes, I notice many callbacks to fan-favorite, early Silent Hill games – and I worry the unique parts of Silent Hill: Townfall can't compare.

Take me upstate

Townfall follows 2025's Silent Hill f, which was set in Japan, in taking Silent Hill international. I still yearn for the original lakeside town in Nowhere, USA, and the slow, somewhat inviting decay it represented, but I appreciated Silent Hill f's invention of a highly stylized, red spider lily landscape, too. Townfall's Scottish island St. Amelia is ruled by realism. Its cobblestone streets and neat white houses are hyper-realistic, looking better-suited to Call of Duty than an introspective horror game. Nonetheless, they are impressive. When the camera lingers on a bit of patterned wallpaper in an abandoned home, I can imagine what it would feel like just by looking at it.

Less tantalizing to me, someone whose favorite aspect of the best Silent Hill games is the poetry of their strangeness, is that Silent Hill: Townfall also employs realism in its puzzles. Rather than adding names to the Grim Reaper's list, as you do in the original Silent Hill, or burning pork liver to reveal a path in Silent Hill 3, the Townfall demo I saw has Simon searching for a prepaid electric card common in '90s Scotland to get the house's lights working.

Again, Screen Burn is demonstrating an impressive attention to detail here. But I don't play Silent Hill games for their faithfulness to history, and especially not to reality. I love them for the way they use magic to reveal our skeletons. Whenever the occult Otherworld falls over a Silent Hill protagonist, you're confronted with the rust under the hospital room paint, blood beneath a young woman's skirt, denial before freedom. I've always thought the supernatural was more real than real, so I've found comfort in past Silent Hill games, which lie on the cliff between observable life and hidden feelings. They push into each other, yin and yang, to make a whole world.

But Silent Hill: Townfall seems more oriented toward its surface. I'm first introduced to Simon as he's seated near a town monument littered with protest signs – "We Need The Truth," "Whatever Heart This Town Had Has Stopped" – and their unsubtle nature reminds me of Dead Space graffiti that routinely took me out of that game's horror. A Screen Burn developer also suggests during my Summer Game Fest session that Townfall uses first-person perspective because the series' usual third-person does more to coddle you from horror. In a sense, that's probably true. It's more viscerally horrifying to play Resident Evil in a VR headset than with ungainly tank controls, after all.

But third-person also encourages players to connect with a game's protagonist, as you can observe them as you control them, linking your movements with their mind. And since the average Silent Hill story is a storm whipped up to torment its main character, specifically (there are very few all-purpose spooks aimed at you, the player), third-person helps its effectiveness.

Though, Townfall isn't completely devoid of fantasy. It pays homage to the series' early convention of letting you identify monsters with a stammering radio by replacing the tech with a handheld CRT TV, which also swaps the need for on-screen UI by flashing cryptic images of your next location. It's an intriguing change, as the CRT TV is an elegant way to focus the player's attention on their next game objective while still being immersive in its story. However, I don't think a Silent Hill game's user interface has ever dulled the impact of its corpse nurses and brown toilets for me.

Ultimately, I feel like Screen Burn is worried about iterating on the wrong genre conventions.

I'm confused by all the changes I see in my Silent Hill: Townfall demo that are neutral at best. When the monster finally arrives, it's a melted flesh humanoid with its head sharpened into an axe. It looks like a struggling Lying Figure from Silent Hill 2... except with an axe for its head.

I thought this was supposed to be the fun part, but it's still too tame.

Refresh your memory of the Silent Hill we left behind with our list of the best Silent Hill games.