Silent Hill: Townfall wants you white-knuckled from start to finish, and for most of its runtime, that’s exactly what makes it work. This is a game confident enough to relocate the series’ fog to a crumbling Scottish fishing island, swap the third-person camera for something far more vulnerable, and ground its monsters in grief, guilt, and worker exploitation rather than pure nightmare logic. According to Eurogamer’s review, published September 21, that confidence mostly pays off — but Townfall’s refusal to let players breathe eventually works against it.

A New Kind of Fog

Townfall comes from Screen Burn, the Scottish indie studio behind Observation and Stories Untold, and it shows in every cobbled street of St. Amelia — a small town on a remote North Sea island, set in 1996. Protagonist Simon Cordell drags himself out of the water in the opening moments with an IV bag mysteriously taped to his shoulder, and from there the game commits fully to a first-person perspective with more than one playable character along the way.

That approach to psychological horror sits alongside other recent swings at the genre, including Sam Barlow’s forthcoming Precognition, which shares Townfall’s interest in cinematic dread over jump-scare theatrics.

Eurogamer’s review lands ahead of Townfall’s public launch. Per Konami’s own announcement, the standard release is set for September 24 on PS5 and PC, with Digital Deluxe buyers getting 48-hour early access from September 22 — timing worth flagging since it means critics were playing well before most fans get their hands on it.

St. Amelia’s Quiet Rage

The setting itself does an enormous amount of work here. St. Amelia is rendered down to the very British street signs, blinking crossing lights, cheery bunting, and local noticeboard ads, with rows of ‘for sale’ signs and ‘closed for business’ notices suggesting decay set in long before the supernatural fog did. The review notes the town later expands into pebbledashed terraces, tatty pubs, and a shift into stark 1970s brutalism, calling St. Amelia as much a character as anyone in the cast.

What’s genuinely clever is how Screen Burn reinterprets Silent Hill’s iconography through that British lens: gleaming hospitals become cramped NHS wards, spacious malls become concrete shopping precincts. The horror leans on corporate colonisation, worker exploitation, and fractured community as its emotional bedrock — the review specifically points to a nurse reframed not as a monster but as a traumatised key worker reeling from mass death. It’s a similar instinct to The Watcher‘s fixation on unease born from ordinary, observed life rather than pure fantasy.

The CRTV and the Cost of a Fight

Combat in Townfall is intentionally bad. Blocks are clumsy, melee swings are wild, and the creatures — described as tumorous things with axe-like heads or syringes bursting from puckered wounds — hit hard and pursue aggressively enough that direct confrontation is a last resort. Even the eventual revolver, while offering real stopping power, reloads slowly and draws every nearby creature toward the noise, according to the review.

Survival instead runs through the CRTV, a Game Boy-meets-portable-television reinvention of the series’ radio static warning system. Move into a hostile area and it hisses to life, marking each patrolling enemy as an isolated silhouette in roiling red static — with zero information about the surrounding layout. That withholding, the review argues, recalls Keiichiro Toyama’s Siren in how it forces players forward on guesswork rather than certainty. Rocks and bottles can stun or distract, and a topped-up IV drip buys a revive, but the tension never really eases.

Crucially, whenever Simon isn’t the active character, the CRTV disappears entirely, stripping away that safety net and pushing a more intimate, sound-and-sightline stealth style. Anyone who found the tension in No More Room in Hell 2 compelling will recognise the appeal of horror that punishes carelessness this specifically.

Too Much of a Good Scream

Each chapter gets its own visual identity: daylight snapping to night under queasy streetlamp yellow, the otherworld reimagined in transfusion red and ambulance blue, crimson skies silhouetting vast industrial pipework. One extended stretch smothers the world in corpses and repeatedly sends players back through the same grim minefield — a sequence the review says makes the Silent Hill 2 remake’s prison level look tame by comparison.

The puzzles hold up well individually, including one with echoes of the text-adventure structure from Stories Untold and another built around a house shifting through time as environmental storytelling. The problem, per the review, is structural: once the patient opening act ends, Townfall rarely lets up, holding players in prolonged emotional extremes across roughly 15 hours without the fogworld-otherworld rhythm that historically served as the series’ pressure valve.

That relentlessness curdles late, with excessive backtracking, fussy repeat encounters, and occasionally obtuse puzzle logic compounding in a final chapter the review singles out as the game’s blandest location. It largely recovers for the resolution, which lands among five possible endings, but by then the point has been made more than once.

Sound That Earns Its Static

Composer Anthony Scott Burns makes his series debut here, and the review calls it a genuine standout — capturing the melancholy synths and industrial cacophony associated with longtime series composer Akira Yamaoka while bringing a distinct beauty and violence of its own. Paired with the town’s careful sound design, it’s one area where Townfall never wavers.

Pros and Cons
  • Pros: A richly realised, distinctly Scottish St. Amelia; inventive reinterpretation of Silent Hill iconography; genuinely tense CRTV-driven stealth; strong social-realism themes; a standout score from Anthony Scott Burns; five possible endings.
  • Cons: Simon is a dull protagonist early on; combat is deliberately awkward and risky; pacing rarely lets up after the opening act; late-game backtracking and fussy encounters; occasionally obtuse puzzle design; a weak, blandly located closing chapter.
Verdict

Silent Hill: Townfall is an often phenomenal ride — reverent to its roots, rich with ideas, and properly unnerving when it wants to be. Its setting alone justifies the price of admission, and the CRTV system is a smart, stressful reinvention of a mechanic the series has leaned on since the PS1 days.

Where it stumbles is in restraint. A roughly 15-hour campaign that refuses to ease off after its opening act, paired with a fumbled final stretch, keeps this from being an unreserved triumph. Still, alongside other 2026 survival horror standouts, Townfall is proof Silent Hill’s ongoing revival is anything but timid — even when its ambition occasionally outpaces its pacing instincts.

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