Silent Hill fans have stumbled on secret messages hidden within the audio that accompanies a teaser trailer for the upcoming Silent Hill game, Silent Hill: Townfall.
Among the numerous projects announced during this week's Silent Hill Transmission broadcast, Konami unveiled Silent Hill: Townfall, a new game developed by Stories Untold developer No Code and published by Annapurna Interactive.
As we reported at the time, the reveal trailer focuses on a transmission received on a small, portable television, with someone warning that punishment and judgment are on the way. There are numerous quick clips of unsettling images, and some footage that suggests a seaside setting.
Without much else to go on, creative director Jon McKellan said there'd be no more information until the new year, but did suggest that fans of the series watch the one-minute teaser again for clues.
Just hours later, u/MilkManEX popped up on the game's subreddit to say they'd "extracted the Townfall trailer audio and converted it to an MP3", adding: "there's text in the spectrogram".
At first, MilkManEX could only decipher one line - "has now stopped" - but after running it again "in the higher frequencies", they've discovered a full sentence: "Whatever heart this town had has now stopped".
It's a thoroughly creepy message that sits right at the heart of Silent Hill, as fans of the series will know only too well. It's also got some (including me!) excited that Townfall's story may take on the town itself, telling us more about its mysterious origins. The pieces don't quite fit yet, but I'm looking forward to finding out more as we get closer to release, whenever that may be.
Other findings include a reference to the name Alessa - that should ring a bell or two for fans of the movie and the original games - and an SOS message relayed in morse code.
Silent Hill 2 translator Jeremy Blaustein says it's "the right thing to do" for Konami to properly acknowledge his work on the original script that the forthcoming remake is based on.
Blaustein vented about the Silent Hill 2 remake on Twitter shortly after it was revealed. "They will, once again, use the [Silent Hill 2] English script that I wrote/translated (oh, directed too) completely by myself and I will get zero compensation for it and there will not be tens of thousands of people on Twitter outraged on my behalf," he said.
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