St Amelia is where dreams go to die. Not unlike many other British towns, I think. I can tell as much as soon as I wash up on the shores of Silent Hill Townfall's Scottish-coded (though never stated outright) island, where fog sinks into the spaces between each cobblestone. I've lived in the UK full-time for about four years now, so there are many jokes to be made about feeling right at home in its dreary gloom (I'll save those for another time). But even if the setting's subtle iconographic accuracy is lost on those less familiar with Great British environs, it's the perfect canvas for a Silent Hill game.
The first thing that strikes me about Silent Hill Townfall is how deserted it is. That, and how choppy the animations get when you climb or descend stairs. You've got smudgy grey fog. You've got empty streets with lights still flickering in vacant apartments, as if the town's inhabitants vanished on the spot mere moments ago. You've got an amnesiac protagonist wearing a hospital bracelet. Let's go, am I right?
Pacing through the town center from a first-person perspective – a series-first for a mainline game, as seen in PS5 freebie Silent Hill: The Short Message – I expect some sort of glimpse of an enemy. An early warning that I'm not as alone as I feel, just like in Silent Hill 2.
But even after getting curiously turned around while picking through St Amelia's detritus, I don't come across a single bad guy. This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of my hands-on demo session had more to show for itself than 70 minutes of walking and cutscenes, always keeping me at arm's length as I experimentally press against its edges, getting little in return
These dark times
Developer: Screen Burn Interactive
Platform (s): PS5, PC, Xbox Series X/S
Release date: September 24, 2026
Don't get me wrong. Silent Hill Townfall is a gorgeously rendered nightmare. Developer Screen Burn has clearly put a lot of love for its Scottish roots into this place, which is as immersive and spooky as you'd expect from one of the best horror game franchises that built its name specifically off creating oppressive vibes from the get-go. But I feel more like a ghost haunting the streets than a character inhabiting the world, because there's very little to actually interact with.
I spend most of my session inspecting things. Leaflets on the ground, hand-scrawled notes left in the local doctor's window. Information boards at viewpoints dotted along the boardwalk, looking out upon the murky waters encircling St Amelia.
By the time I reach the telephone box – ringing, of course, with no one on the other end when I go to pick it up – I feel like a local historian. One who fails to clock that I have to type in a specific number, listed on the short telephone directory as "save yourself", in order to save my game and trigger a cutscene. So I instead go back out into St Amelia to see if I missed anything. Spoiler alert: I have not missed a single thing, and lose another 10 minutes retracing my steps.
The above is entirely my fault, but it does mean that after being rescued from my predicament by a fellow demo player, the frustration gets compounded by having to sit through a lengthy cinematic that teleports me to a brand new location: a hotel room.
Here is where the radio mechanics and minigames come into play. For all the distance I feel is being put between myself and the game world, Screen Burn incorporates analog technologies in a beautifully on-theme way, tying back to Townfall's setting in the mid-'90s. I have to tune my device to individual frequencies, picking up either echoes of the past (or present? Who knows) that give me hints to solve puzzles or the staticky outlines of nearby enemies projected on the palm-sized screen.
Except I don't actually see any before my eyes. Delaying the moment we first lay eyes on a monster is a clever way to build up tension in any horror game or film – fear of the unknown, the unseen – and suggest the ephemeral manifestation of the character's guilt and trauma. But by this point in my hands-on demo, I am desperate for something a bit faster paced. I've just spent ages wandering barren streets only to be met with the winding basement of an abandoned hotel. Enemies seem so far away that I couldn't stumble into one if I tried.
Silent Hill Townfall has the makings of a brooding horror game. It just fails to communicate that in a vertical slice demo by virtue of its slow-build horrors being so excruciatingly slow. Here's hoping that I'm able to get a bit more absorbed in it from the comfort of my own home than I was on the bustling show floor of Gamescom 2026.
