The decision to no longer set its Silent Hill games in Silent Hill may be one of the smarter ones Konami has made in recent years.
While on paper it sounds like it shouldn’t make much sense, by giving developers the freedom to make their Silent Hill adventures wherever they like instead of always having to set them in a small American town, it opens up the series to a much wider variety of experiences.
After all, anyone who’s played just a handful of previous entries knows that Silent Hill is just a metaphor for the protagonist’s trauma, so does it really need to take place in a similar environment each time? Last year’s fantastic Silent Hill F, with its rural 1960s Japanese setting, delivered the strongest possible message that no, it doesn’t, and now Scottish developer Screen Burn is putting the same point across with Silent Hill: Townfall.
Townfall is set in 1996 and takes place in St Amelia, a Scottish coastal village. It doesn’t exist in real life, but as someone who spent much of my childhood visiting Scottish fishing villages, it’s stunningly authentic anyway (especially to St Monans, the Fife hamlet it’s based on).
The streets and houses themselves are brilliantly presented but it’s the tiny details that really make the difference here. The Post Office (or its trademark-shimmying equivalent, at least) has exactly the kind of charmingly crap promotional posters on the wall that you would expect to have seen there at the time. Residents with computers keep their floppy disks in those little boxes with the clear lid (and some of these are locked, leading to puzzles where you have to find the key).
Even the photos of people dotted around the village look authentically Scottish, which may sound like a strange thing to say, but it’s something that’s very hard to put into words. There’s a certain look that old Scottish family photos from the 70s, 80s and 90s have, and it’s perfectly replicated here (to the extent that I’m fairly certain it wasn’t ‘replicated’ at all, and just consists of real old photos of friends and family of the development team).
Later, when the game takes players to another housing estate elsewhere, it’s even more authentically grim. I’ve been to many shopping districts that looked like this back in the day (with apologies to the fine people of Motherwell and Cumbernauld), and while I appreciate the vast majority of Silent Hill fans will simply see this as a new, detailed town to visit, on a personal level I’ve never had a game conjure up imagery from my childhood in such a starkly authentic manner before.
Indeed, as I looked through the digital artbook accompanying the game, I found a piece of concept art that literally shows my own hometown of Coatbridge, so it’s no surprise at all that I related to it so strongly.
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