I found solace from Silent Hill: Townfall's stealthy horror in the soothing Britishness of its abandoned homes

I suppose, in a way, I asked for this. Crouched and cowering behind a garden fence, inches away from the thrashing, cleaver-faced miscreation who’d quite comfortably win in a fight against my splintering plank of rotten wood, I can almost hear Silent Hill: Townfall whisper mocking in my ear: not too much combat now, eh?

Point made. New protag Simon, through whose eyes I explored Townfall’s forsaken Scottish village of St. Amelia in a Gamescom 2026 demo, is taller, wider, and wearing a far more padded gilet than Silent Hill f’s Hinako. Yet next to her spear-wielding and I-frame dodging, he’s a wet mouse, barely able to whack a garden-variety knifeface bloke into submission with desperate, panicked swings. What a loser, and also, more conventional survival horror character.

As you’ve probably seen, mind, Townfall is (again) not a conventional Silent Hill. St. Amelia is an ocean away from that town Jimmy S sees in his restless dreams, and is packed with the details of 1990s Britain – 20mph signs, the yellow kitchen cabinets, the shitty grey phoneboxes – that only a homegrown dev studio, namely Glasgow’s Screen Burn Interactive, could get so consistently right. Simon also uses tech to regain something vaguely approaching an advantage, a portable TV that displays puzzle clues and tracks enemies - once manually tuned.

The introduction of the CRTV, as it’s called, is masterful horror. Trapped in an almost entirely pitch-black room, I followed the tutorial steps to tune into a detected frequency, and followed the red arrows to a lurking humanoid on the dinky screen. Can’t see exactly what he is, but he is right there. Then another frequency appears, leading to another silhouette. He’s got a mate. Then another frequency. Then another. The music swells. I'm surrounded. I still can’t see five feet in front of Simon’s face, and in the space of a minute, the CRTV has gone from magic monster detector to herald of likely death.

Out on the foggy but still daylit street, it does become more straightforwardly utilitarian, serving to help keep track of the ghoulies while stealthing from house to shop to house, gathering keys and puzzle components. But it’s not some EZ mode wallhack, thanks in part to the inherent fiddliness of the device itself.

"I think that's where the Nineties [setting] helps," director and writer Jon McKellen tells me, "because you're at the cusp of technology. It’s pre-Internet, pre-smartphone, so you're not leaning into tech that does empower you.

"The tech's kind of unreliable, it doesn't work all the time. It feels slow and sluggish. It's limited. Even the way that we use the CRTV to track enemies and see through walls, you can only see one enemy at a time. So if you have three enemies in an area, you've got to tune between them, and it feels tactile, and a little bit clunky, but deliberately so. It feels like it's not the perfect tool to save you."

Sure enough, spending too much time looking at the screen instead of the creatures themselves is a good way to get them slashing at you, as is - I can attest - overestimating how concealed you remain while lean-peeking. Still, both these physical and observational tools strongly favour stealthy use, as does Simon’s ability to slip into cupboards, Alien Isolation-style.

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