Silent Hill: Townfall review: There goes the neighborhood

Silent Hill: Townfall continues the franchise's modern renaissance with another spooky and inventive entry.

After last year’s Silent Hill f took the franchise to rural Japan, Silent Hill: Townfall brings the fog to a mysterious island town. Developed by Screen Burn Interactive, Silent Hill: Townfall puts a strong focus on puzzles and immersion, and it results in a gripping psychological story that kept me guessing until the very end.

Simon says

Silent Hill opens with Simon Ordell returning, by water, to the island town of St. Amelia. He finds the town empty and engulfed by a thick fog. As Simon explores St. Amelia, he begins to unravel the mystery of what happened, and his place in it all.

Another anthological entry in the Silent Hill series, Silent Hill: Townfall takes the familiar and blends it with new elements. You’ve got the signature fog, unsettling creatures, and a psychological element that makes you question everything you see and hear. Still, the game feels incredibly fresh. I loved the use of the widescreen format and first-person perspective, which make the game feel more cinematic than 2025’s action-oriented Silent Hill f.

Silent Hill: Townfall also introduces the series’ first Black protagonist. Simon, played brilliantly by Jovan Adepo, quickly became one of my favorite Silent Hill characters. His authentic reactions to the horror unfolding around him made him a relatable leading man, even if I was often questioning his motivations and background. The game knows that players come to Silent Hill expecting major revelations and shocking twists, and has a lot of fun both meeting and subverting those expectations.

More than anything, the game is downright creepy as hell. The dead silence of St. Amelia means every sound in the distance makes you raise an eyebrow, and the first-person perspective often obscures your view of the horrors that lurk in town. There’s nothing more scary than running from an enemy, and hearing its hobbled movement rapidly approaching from behind as you search for cover. 

Living nightmare

“Immersion,” is the word I keep coming back to when I think about my time with Silent Hill: Townfall. The camera perspective is part of it, sure, but it’s far more than that. Take the map, for example, which is a physical map that you have to hold in your hands and manually flip to see the other side. The game doesn’t pause when you bring it up, and it stops you from moving. If you’re in a dark area, it’s harder to see. 

When you want to save your progress, it can’t be simply done from the pause menu. You have to find a phone and dial a number to save your game. I lost count of how many times I frantically dashed through the streets towards a phone booth, slamming the door shut on whatever was pursuing me so that I could save my progress.

It’s these details that really drive home that survival horror feeling. You have to be thoughtful about the sounds you make, when you decide to sit and stare at the map, and where your nearest phone is. 

Strange Signals

Puzzles are the defining mechanic of Silent Hill: Townfall, as they’re typically what stands between you and the next cutscene or locked area. Puzzles include safe codes, item locations, keys, and more. You’ll collect a lot of documents around St. Amelia that’ll provide clues as to how to progress past a given obstacle.

When looking at a document, information relevant to your puzzle will be highlighted red, but this feature can be disabled in the settings if you want as little help as possible. I loved this game’s puzzle design; it’s open-ended enough that I was stumped on numerous occasions, but it felt oh so satisfying to finally come upon a solution. 

Simon’s most vital item is a pocket-sized CRTV that he uses to track radio activity on the island. Depending on your location, you can manually tune it to different frequencies, which will play video and audio messages from other characters that provide story and puzzle information.

When enemies are nearby, you can use the CRTV to see their position through walls. This allows you to sneak around them. When stealthing around, you can lean around corners and over surfaces to get an eye on a foe without fully entering their line of sight. When being pursued, you can hide in various buildings and closets around St. Amelia, some of them having locks for added security. The logic isn’t always sound, though. For example, I’d often have an enemy chase me into a closet, only for them to completely ignore the fact that they witnessed me enter my hiding spot and drop their aggro immediately. I wasn’t always 100% sure when a certain action or movement would trigger an enemy or how.

If all else fails, you can engage enemies in combat. This is typically your last resort, as Simon isn’t much of a fighter. I did my best to avoid combat at all costs. Not only because I enjoyed playing stealthy, but because fighting enemies doesn’t feel great in this game. While Silent Hill f was a proper action game with dodges, parries, and a plethora of resources at your disposal, Silent Hill: Townfall's combat feels bland. More than anything, it’s a way to get an enemy off your back so that you can regain your stealth or go save your game.

Mind games

Silent Hill: Townfall is a great horror game that prioritizes immersion, using small details to make you feel like you’re walking the cold and lonely streets alongside the protagonist. Its puzzles are thoughtful and challenging, and its implementation of stealth led to some heartpounding sequences as I navigated the creepy island town. This should be the path forward for Silent Hill: standalone installments that retain the franchise’s signature elements, but with interesting characters in unique locations. 

This review is based on a Steam code provided by the publisher. Silent Hill: Townfall is available now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.

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Review for
Silent Hill: Townfall
8
Pros

• Great puzzle design
• Immersive world design
• Simon is a great protagonist
• Solid scares

Cons

• Bland combat
• Enemy behavior isn't always logical