I spent so much of my time stalking through Silent Hill: Townfall tensed in a cautious crouchwalk, that by the end of the story I was just as worried about the damage to my character’s fraying mental state as I was about the wear and tear on his knees. Taking an about-face from the action-heavy adventure in last year’s Silent Hill f, this latest survival horror spin-off instead embraces the sustained tension of slow-paced stealth, handing you a motion-sensing gadget and tasking you with sneaking past a series of sound-sensitive beasts that have descended on its abandoned seaside village in mid-nineties Scotland. What unfolds is a gripping investigation through an increasingly unsettling world witnessed from a fresh, first-person perspective. Silent Hill: Townfall is riddled with tremendously satisfying puzzles to solve, and peppered with the most disturbing scenes to come out of mid-nineties Scotland since that baby crawled along the ceiling in the original Trainspotting.
Silent Hill: Townfall’s story begins with a cold open in more ways than one. American Simon Ordell washes up on the chilly shores of the fictional St. Amelia with a hospital ID bracelet on one wrist and an IV drip still stuck in the other, seemingly seeking redemption for an unknown sin from his past. It quickly becomes apparent that things have gone very wrong in the deserted Scottish town – market stalls are abandoned, ‘for sale’ signs are pegged out the front of almost every house, and the streets are littered with picket signs protesting an unknown organisation dubbed the ‘CEG’. Oh, and the first local you encounter is a mysterious man in the town square getting disgusting black goop pumped into his lungs through an intubation tube descending from the skies above.
Things only get more alarming from there, but Townfall dragged me through its increasingly squeamish scenes with the powerful allure of its central mystery, which gradually brings to light the tragic events that have impacted the town, the main players at fault, and exactly where poor Simon stands in all of it. It’s a story that deals with familiar themes of trauma and guilt that we’ve come to expect from Silent Hill, but it also tackles previously unexplored shades of evil like corporate greed and environmental mismanagement that help to make it feel like a refreshingly new twist on the series’ formula.
Although he comes across as fairly monotone at first, I grew to appreciate the understated earnestness of Simon as the events of Townfall mine the full depths of his despair, especially compared to some of the overly dramatic heroes of the earlier Silent Hill games. At certain junctions, the story also switches the perspective to a couple of other playable characters that further flesh out the details of what’s really going on, but I’d rather not spoil exactly who they are other than to say that they provide crucial roles in unravelling St. Amelia’s secrets.
Of course, a lot of its story themes are revealed in the form of nightmarish visual metaphors, as St. Amelia shifts into an ominous altered state with tangles of industrial pipes strangling its streets and the tentacles of a towering monster that drag along its rooftops. Sure, some sections feel like echoes of earlier Silent Hill settings, like apartment blocks in a heavy state of decay and creepy hospital wards to explore, but there are some really striking new sights to see throughout the 13 hours of Townfall’s tragic tale too, from alleys cloaked in a crimson haze to suburban streets lined with horribly bloated corpses that have freshly fallen from the sky.
The fact that developer Screen Burn Games has opted to break from the series’ predominately third-person style by telling its story entirely in first-person also does wonders for enhancing Townfall’s overall sense of dread. As proven by Resident Evil’s modern instalments, it’s considerably more intimidating to lean around a corner and come face to gaping maw with a menacing manifestation of pure malevolence than it is to witness it from a comparatively safe distance peering over your character’s shoulder. However, Townfall further enhances its first-person view by defaulting its presentation to a letterboxed widescreen format, and the benefits are twofold; aside from lending it a welcome cinematic touch, its narrowed anamorphic perspective also makes moving through confined spaces feel all the more claustrophobic and uncomfortable.
Whereas last year’s Silent Hill f demanded that you master an aggressive, action RPG-style melee and parry system, Townfall encourages a slow and steady approach to its enemy encounters that feels more inline with the survival horror systems of the series’ mainline entries. Simon can get his hands on wooden two-by-fours and lead pipes in order to beat the black pudding out of his frenzied assailants, but the actual melee combat is intentionally sluggish and weapons can degrade and break. More often than not, that meant I opted to sneak past the snarling skinbags patrolling the path to my next objective, only ever choosing violence when I found myself backed into a corner.
Even when you eventually do get your hands on some more powerful weapons like the revolver and shotgun, ammunition remains scarce, reload times are realistically slow, and the booming echo of gunfire tends to attract attention from other enemies. This makes them primarily last resort options when you find yourself overwhelmed by fleshmonsters with axe-blades for faces that are frantically trying to give you a Glasgow kiss.
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