We Played An Hour Of Silent Hill: Townfall, And It's Phenomenal

Townfall Is Going To Make Me A Silent Hill Convert Published Sep 1, 2026, 11:01 AM EDT Sam Woods is TheGamer’s Senior Reporter. He’s been in games journalism since 2020 and has undertaken a variety of roles in that time. These have included roles such as SEO Editor, Managing Editor at DualShockers, and Global Head of Gaming, and he's also been seen on the BBC. He was promoted to the Senior Reporter position in 2025 following a series of high-quality reports and exclusives for TheGamer. Since 2020, Sam has written over 2,500 articles and specializes in telling the stories of the people behind the games. He’s interviewed the biggest game directors, some of the industry’s top talents, told the stories of how indie games came to be, and spoken to players about what really makes them tick. He’s also interviewed some of the world’s biggest musical artists to find out how the medium has inspired their work, and TV and Film actors about their roles in video game adaptations. He even hosted a PAX panel in 2021 and made a documentary in 2024 surrounding the creation of a Disney game. Alongside this, Sam focuses on breaking news. He got the scoop on Perfect Dark’s cancellation, got context around some AI drama, and revealed how Lady Dimitrescu’s actress would love to step back into the character’s giant shoes. These articles have been picked up by the biggest gaming sites, including IGN, GameSpot, and PC Gamer. He also loves to dive into the numbers behind the games. Sam’s journey in games journalism has taken him all over the world. He’s covered Gamescom in Germany, Summer Game Fest in Los Angeles, and Tokyo Game Show in Japan, each on more than one occasion. He’s been learning Japanese since 2024 with the intention of identifying and translating Japanese-language news and bringing it to English-language audiences first, something he’s done countless times. Sam’s first review was 2020’s Battletoads reboot, and he’s since reviewed games in The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario, and Pokemon franchises. I’m in a weird spot with the Silent Hill series. I’m living what I’ve dubbed my ‘Survival Horror Discovery Era’ and have been for the last five and a half years or so. It was a genre I had no interest in during my formative gaming years, maybe because I was a giant baby, but it's one I’ve fallen in love with now. During this era, I’ve played the whole Resident Evil remake series, plus the new entries, as well as Dead Space, Alan Wake, and a few more. Aside from a few gripes, I’ve really enjoyed them all. Silent Hill has been a different matter. I watched a good friend play The Short Message, which I’m acutely aware isn’t a fair representation of the franchise, and I purchased the remake of Silent Hill 2 upon its release last year, but it just did not click. I can’t quite put my finger on why; maybe it felt a bit too plodding, but I dropped off relatively quickly. I’ve been meaning to give it another shot, alongside Silent Hill f, but a backlog is a backlog for a reason. At this year’s Gamescom, I got to go hands-on with the next iteration of the franchise, Silent Hill: Townfall, and it looks like the other Silent Hill games will be in the backlog for a little longer, as a little under an hour with the game was enough to have me craving more. Silent Hill: Townfall Might Be The Silent Hill Game That Finally Converts Me Silent Hill: Townfall is the first game in the series to be set in the UK— St. Amelia, Scotland, to be precise. It follows Simon Ordell as he washes up ashore in the town in 1996 with no recollection of his ties to the place, but an endless determination to find out what happened and make things right. It's a game set in an era and locale I’m all-too familiar with. I grew up in a small town in the UK in the early 90s, and I still have so many distinct memories of it. Charity collection pots of all shapes and sizes lined shops, using cards to top up our electricity meter, and phone booths on every corner. It’s a time and a place I’ll never forget, and one Townfall has replicated perfectly. Every corner I turned, something took me back to a time gone by, and never has a game setting felt more like home. This is, of course, before the horrors make their grand entrances, and it was all part of developer Screen Burn Interactive’s grand plan. “Our attitude to it was that it should feel nostalgic to us,” the game’s writer and director Jon McKellan told me in an interview at the same event. “But it should feel very different and unique to everyone else. Because they've never played a game set in a place like this at a time like this.” After exploring the town, I set out to find what plagued it. Streets were empty, protest signs had been abandoned, and warnings were strewn over buildings. Something was evidently wrong. I made my way to a 90s-style phone box, figured out the number to dial, and the mystery grew deeper. A man at the other end of it depicted me, Simon, as its savior, but I had no idea who I even was. While I didn’t find out too much about the central mystery, and anything I did would be an early spoiler, its opening gripped me instantly. Far more than Silent Hill 2’s, which, given the outpouring of love that game received, should mean something. It may have just been that I clicked with the setting so quickly that everything fell into place, or it may have been the underlying sense of dread Screen Burn had woven into the opening. In our chat, McKellan told me the studio’s take on horror was “more tension-driven, more understated, less bombastic,” something I felt with every step I took as I ventured deeper into St. Amelia. Distant sounds, the occasional red hue, and ominous warnings made everything feel unsettling. This was further helped by the switch to a first-person perspective. Mechanically, the switch was made to incorporate the handheld TV that Simon uses to recall past visions and locate enemies, but naturally, this perspective makes everything feel more real. More alive. Townfall will lean less on folklore to build its horror, as was the case in Silent Hill f, and more on what McKellan described as “real life over mythology”. I’m not sure how this translates directly to the enemies seen throughout the game, as I only encountered a couple, but it was hard to discern how exactly they were inspired by real life. One, a humanoid creature with an axe for a head, stalked the streets, while at another point, a second hulking monster, hundreds of feet tall, passed by. With Silent Hill’s enemies typically so intrinsically tied to the internal horrors its protagonist is facing, I’m desperately keen to play more and find out where they come from. I’m desperately keen to play more… In the space of around 45 minutes, Silent Hill: Townfall went from a game on my radar to one of my most anticipated still to come this year. The care paid to its setting, its unsettling mystery, and an opening more gripping than Silent Hill 2's has me very excited to see what Screen Burn is cooking. Systems Released September 24, 2026 ESRB Mature 17+ / Blood, Strong Language, Violence Developer(s) Screen Burn Publisher(s) Annapurna Interactive, Konami Genre(s) Horror, Action, Adventure, Exploration