Silent Hill Townfall Review: The Fog Finally Feels Personal

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This Silent Hill Townfall review comes from someone who started on the first night of early access and has barely played anything else since. Silent Hill: Townfall is the first full-length Silent Hill in the collection played entirely in first person, and it trades the American small town for St. Amelia, a fogbound Scottish island village in 1996. It's slow, oppressive, and more interested in making you hide than letting you fight.

The Scottish studio Screen Burn Interactive built it, Konami published it with Annapurna Interactive, and it landed on PS5 and PC on September 24, 2026. Silent Hill f took the series to 1960s Japan a year earlier, and Townfall leaves the United States behind again. It's also the first entry to put a portable television in your hand where the old radio used to be.

Below, you'll find my read on the town, the CRTV, the stealth and combat, the puzzles and the sound, plus who should buy it and who should wait.

Silent Hill: Townfall Review Summary

• My verdict: St. Amelia is the most convincing place the series has ever built, and the Silent Hill Townfall CRTV is a real evolution of the radio.

• Stealth first: you'll spend far more time crouched behind a parked car or shut in a locker than swinging a pipe.

• The Weight is the near-invincible stalker of the second half, it kills in one hit, and its sections are where the pacing buckles.

• Puzzles lean on notes, drawers, dictaphone tapes and a dial-up computer, and they get their own difficulty setting.

• Length: a first run lands at roughly 10 to 14 hours, longer if a puzzle stalls you.

• Silent Hill Townfall endings: there are five, three reachable in a first run and two locked to New Game Plus.

• Combat is a last resort: melee is block and swing, weapons break, and ammo stays scarce.

St. Amelia Is Lived In And Haunted

St. Amelia hooked me with how specific it feels. Screen Burn modeled the town on St Monans, a real fishing village in Fife. Then it filled the streets with things I could almost smell: corner shops, Post Office posters, charity collection boxes, pharmaceutical ads and stacks of floppy disks. It looks like a place someone grew up in. Director Jon McKellan told the PlayStation Blog that his team grew up in Scotland, knew it best, and saw its natural fog as a perfect fit for Silent Hill.

Simon Ordell, played by Jovan Adepo, keeps waking up in the water by the docks with no idea why he is there. A nurse called Zoe, voiced by Kezia Burrows, reaches him through the CRTV and asks what he is doing there. Terry O'Quinn plays Richard, an enigmatic figure whose motives stay hard to read. The cast is small, and I liked that, since each character gets room to be strange. The story circles guilt, remorse and who pays for a town's disaster.

The 1996 setting earns its place. The team picked that year as the moment home technology started to take off, so the fears here are tied to CRTs, pagers, dial-up modems and dictaphones. When the town slips into the Otherworld, the town turns into harshly lit concrete brutalism, cold and monotone, a sharp break from the damp streets outside. Those shifts hit hard every time.

First person narrows everything. The game runs in a wide 2.35:1 frame, so I saw less above and below me than I expected, and I started listening for footsteps behind me within the first hour. Simon's thoughts appear as short text overlays when something disturbs him, which kept me inside his head without cutscenes doing the work.

The CRTV Is Townfall's Smartest Idea

The CRTV is a handheld television, and it replaces the series' radio as both warning system and storyteller. Holding it up and tuning through the static reveals monsters as distorted silhouettes through walls. Each creature sits on its own frequency, so one sweep never shows the whole street. I learned to tune for the thing I feared most and accept that the rest of the block was a mystery.

On PS5, holding L1 lets you watch the screen and the world at the same time, and the DualSense gives a haptic pulse as something gets close. Motion controls can fine-tune the dial if you switch them on. I left them on for most of my run and turned them off again for a couple of late sequences that demand precise tuning, where tilting the pad felt imprecise under pressure.

Static also flags story. When the screen crackles in a quiet room, tuning in pulls up broken video fragments that point toward a clue or fill in what happened to St. Amelia. It works as a hint system that never feels like one. There's also a pager, a cruder radar that shows only directional dots. Going from the CRTV to that thing made me feel half blind in a way I suspect was deliberate.

In the back half the device settles into a routine. It keeps working as a scanner and a puzzle tool, but it stops surprising me. The first few hours with it are some of the best the series has offered in years, and the idea deserves a sequel that pushes it further.

Stealth Carries Townfall Until The Weight

Silent Hill Townfall stealth is the core of the game, and for most of the run it works. You duck behind fences, signs and parked cars, lean around corners with R1 and the right stick, and break line of sight by rounding a building. Cabinets, closets and lockers let you hide and watch through the cracks. If a creature sees you climb in, it can come after you, and I learned that lesson the painful way on my first evening.

The common monsters are slimy, fleshy humanoids that moan and shamble through the streets, and their hearing is sharp. I threw whatever I could pick up to pull them away and locked doors behind me for a few seconds of peace. Even checking the map is dangerous, since you do it with the game still running, so stopping to plan is a risk in itself.

Fighting is always the last option. Simon can block and swing, with no dodge, and planks splinter after a handful of hits, and steel pipes last only a little longer. Guns turn up too, a handgun and, late on, a shotgun, but ammo stays scarce and every shot pulls other monsters toward the noise. On PS5 the adaptive triggers give each weapon its own resistance, which made the rare shot feel expensive. Melee settles into a rhythm of block, swing twice, back off, and against more than one enemy it falls apart fast. The game wants you outclassed, and anyone hoping for Silent Hill 2 remake style brawling will find it thin.

Then The Weight shows up. It's a larger, nearly invincible creature that lumbers around as if hauling something on its back, and it kills Simon in one grab. Its sections move into dark basements where you need a light to see and the light gives you away. I spent long stretches in lockers waiting for it to wander off, and a couple of times it seemed to know where I was without any reason I could read.

An equipped IV drip brings you back after a death, and against ordinary monsters that saves a lot of backtracking. Against The Weight, I came back to life with the creature still standing next to me and died again before I could move. Those basement stretches in the second half are the worst hours of the run, and they are the main reason this isn't a 9.

Townfall's Puzzles Reward Slow Reading

The puzzles are the part of the game I'll remember most fondly. They sit in the world rather than floating on top of it, so solutions come from notes on desks, diagrams in drawers and documents you'd be tempted to skim. One task sends you to a newsagent for a prepaid electricity meter card, which is about as 1996 Scottish as a puzzle can get.

Later setpieces get more ambitious. One pairs dictaphone tapes with a time-travel twist that made me reread my notes twice. Another asks you to print photos on a painfully slow dial-up computer with enemies roaming outside, and waiting on that modem with the CRTV crackling was one of the tensest minutes of my run.

Not every puzzle lands. A late one built around guessing symbols felt more like trial and error than deduction, and a few fetch sections dragged. The separate puzzle difficulty helps, with a hint-friendly option for anyone who doesn't want to fill a notebook.

Searching rooms in first person adds its own pressure. Rifling through drawers or reading an email means your eyes are off the door. That tension between curiosity and safety is Townfall at its best.

Pilotpriest's Score Does Half The Scaring

Pilotpriest's score leans on warped piano, grimy guitar and low synth drones, and the 3D audio made me turn my head at footsteps that turned out to be two rooms away. I played with headphones and would recommend nothing else. Silence does just as much work. Some of the worst moments in St. Amelia are empty streets where the only sound is the CRTV hissing in Simon's hand.

On PS5 the game looked great and loaded fast. Ray-traced lighting makes flashlight beams and Otherworld shifts feel physical, and the fog has a density that turned a single streetlight into a landmark. The PS5 feature rundown covers the haptics and trigger work, and the DualSense does a lot here, from the pulse of an approaching monster to the thud of a pipe swing.

Voice work holds the whole thing together. Jovan Adepo plays Simon as tired and confused without tipping into melodrama, and Terry O'Quinn gives Richard a calm that never feels safe. Kezia Burrows has the hardest job, since Zoe reaches Simon through a tiny screen, and she makes every call feel urgent.

Is Silent Hill: Townfall Worth Buying Right Now?

Yes, if you want slow, heavy horror and can tolerate a stretch of frustrating stealth in the middle. Townfall is for players who liked P.T., Alien: Isolation or the quieter parts of the older Silent Hill games, and who enjoy reading every note in a room. If you came to the series for combat, this is about as light on fighting as Silent Hill gets.

The game is complete, with one mid-game design problem rather than a pile of loose ends. The story finishes properly, the five endings give it a reason to replay, and New Game Plus goes much faster once you know the routes and puzzle answers. Check the official Silent Hill: Townfall website before you pick a version, and PC players can find system requirements on the Steam page.

Anyone who hates instant-death stalkers should know The Weight is unavoidable, and I'd wait for a sale in that case, since those sections will color how the whole thing feels. The same goes for players who want a horror game they can fight their way through, since Townfall keeps taking the weapon out of your hand.

FAQs About Silent Hill: Townfall

Final Words

Townfall reminded me why Silent Hill works best when it's specific. A Scottish fishing village in 1996 shouldn't feel more frightening than an American resort town, and yet the corner shops and floppy disks got under my skin faster than any monster design. The CRTV is the idea I'll be thinking about longest, and I'd happily play a second game built entirely around it.

The Weight is the thing that will split people. Some players will see those sections as the series' old helplessness pushed to its limit, and others will quit in a locker. I sit closer to the second camp, and I still finished the game wanting to start again.

My first run went past twelve hours and left two endings locked behind New Game Plus, which I've already started. Go in with headphones, read every note, and treat The Weight as a test of patience more than skill. Get through those basements and the last third of the game, with its clever vertical layout, pays you back.

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