Once a fictional town in Maine, Silent Hill has broken containment and become a transferable oral history mechanism, offered to videogame developers worldwide as a way of investigating, even celebrating local culture. I'm still in two minds about whether this licensing outreach project, begun with Silent Hill f, is more inspired than it is vampiric. I picture Konami's invitation being pushed under the door of potential collaborators like Mary's letter to James in Silent Hill 2: "in our restless dreams, we see that town... let's touch base there sometime, expand our concepts further."
There's opportunity and peril for any studio who answers the letter: opportunity, because Silent Hill is an uncommonly rich way of thinking about the past, with its parallel realities, monster metaphors, and woozy grounding in both mysticism and psychoanalysis. And peril, because licenses have a way of engulfing licensees, forcing them into a straitjacket of tropes: fog, sirens, antagonists with geometric heads. Thankfully, Silent Hill: Townfall's creators Screen Burn (previously No Code) haven't gotten lost in the murk, though I don't think Townfall is their finest creation, not least because it's overreliant on stealth. Like the makers of Silent Hill f, they've taken what they need from Silent Hill to tell a story of their own.
Townfall is the tale of the fictional late 90s Scottish island community of St Ameila, explored through the intersecting lives of three people. The first of these is Simon, a bespectacled and bemused Black American with a cannula of gritty fluid wrapped around one arm, who hauls himself onto the pier at the start of the game. Simon is here to do something for Richard, a grave and insistent white American who sends instructions by way of a chunky pocket TV that appears capable of two-way communication. Simon is also embroiled in a search for Zoe, a local white English nurse who is carrying a world of hurt on her shoulders.
It soon becomes clear that St Amelia has weathered a disaster. The roads are blockaded and deserted. The old stone memorial in the market square is covered in pictures of the missing. Access to the mainland has been cut off, and the shops have been emptied out. There are remnants of mass protests – fliers for rallies, and hand-made signs reading "our grief is their failure". Monstrous concrete walls block the routes inland, towering over the stuccoed housefronts. And then there are the "Others", as they're named in player stat screens: creatures of bound, boiled, divided flesh. They gabble and gesticulate among the aisles of gutted pharmacies, or run from corner to corner, furious and lost. They breathe brokenly on the pavement, and scuttle between the cubicles of open plan offices.
The nature and origin of Townfall's catastrophe remains opaque throughout. The cast do not entirely remember, or are afraid to. They move as though half-asleep, trying to escape each other's dreams. They fight or avoid the Others without ever quite assigning them a literal reality, or seeking to explain them. They are, in other words, consummate Silent Hill characters, beings of interwoven trauma. Their wincing efforts at recognising or resolving the things that haunt them spawn temporal ruptures and reversals, some of which take the form of Silent Hill's famous plane-shifts, which here replace St Amelia's salt-soaked streets with a radiant blue and scarlet labyrinth of pipes and concrete.
Simon keeps orbiting between that pier and a certain hotel room. Zoe is a prisoner of the people she couldn't save, always on the point of entering the operating theatre. Richard can never quite reach the tenth floor of a certain office, pillaging himself over and over in a quest for redemption. The temporal mechanics of trauma - the inability to stop reliving, without quite grasping what is being relived - extend into the game's puzzle and location design, which often consists of rites of suffering and abortive or, at best, incremental catharsis. There's a house in which the days have become tabulated bodycounts, captured on cassette for endless replay. In Zoe's worst nightmares, Simon searches for blood donors among patients cast in concrete: tombs for the agony of those kept alive by her inability to save them.
Townfall's puzzles are often more compelling than they have any right to be, given that a sizeable chunk consist of finding or figuring out 3 or 4 digit keycode puzzles. The best of them aren't just believable extensions of the location and story themes, but deviously facilitated by the world's period technology. Amongst other things, you will fire up beautifully beige, alt-historical desktop computers in order to comb a primitive email system, and call obscure numbers at meticulously recreated payphones, with a patina of scratches I found instantly familiar as a 90s kid (these also let you save the game, together with automatic checkpoints after story beats). Screen Burn remain adepts at both recreating older pieces of hardware, and at infusing that hardware with menace, though I think they've pulled their punches here in comparison to their more focussed, reputation-making Stories Untold.
The most sinister of the game's devices are generally medical instruments. During its opening half, Townfall often feels like a meditation upon the early months of the Covid pandemic, with Zoe's part of the narrative exploring the brutalising of British NHS staff, tackling an evolving plague with minimal resources, sometimes in toxic and unsupportive workplaces. Among her demons is an overworked senior male doctor whose contempt assumes supernatural dimensions, fed and distorted by her self-recrimination. One of Townfall's most distressing scenes has you carrying out an emergency procedure, alone in a room of confusing and diabolical machines, trying to make sense of readouts while Dr Glenn snarls orders through a speaker.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/silent-hill-townfall-review-an-often-inspired-if-slightly-lumbering-trek-into-the-fog
