The Silent Hill series and its particular brand of narrative-driven psychological horror have been enjoying a breakthrough in recent years, riding high along with the wave of new interest in the genre. Following recent successes with Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 and NeoBards Entertainment’s Silent Hill: f–set in 1960s Japan–publishers Konami and Annapurna Interactive are prepping a new Silent Hill that looks to tap into more immersive, analog horror that creeps at a sense of nostalgia. It’s all set in an eerie Scottish town with an American protagonist who is not totally himself.
With the upcoming Silent Hill: Townfall from Scotland-based Screen Burn, we’re seeing the series’ brand of psychological horror fully embrace a first-person experience–aiming to capture a sense of dread and immersion that pokes at the player’s vulnerability. We recently got to check out a near-final version of Silent Hill: Townfall and spoke with lead writer and game director Jon McKellan, along with Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto, about Townfall‘s effort to channel the series’ bizarre and haunting tone into first-person psychological horror.
A town in disarray OR It’s a matter of perspective
“We’re taking a much more grounded experience with Silent Hill: Townfall, and one of the important things that we wanted was to have a little bit of a social commentary element, with the relationship between the individual and the society of the town as a whole,” said series producer Motoi Okamoto. “The time period is 1996, and players will be able to explore this town and this era, where they’ll see for themselves the reality and delusions within the town slowly intertwine.”
An important tonal and narrative lynchpin of the Silent Hill series is the conceit of a protagonist haunted by the past, slowly coming to understand a nightmare of possibly their own making. Townfall takes place on the fictional Scottish island of St. Amelia, placing players firmly in protagonist Simon Ordell’s shoes in first-person. After he mysteriously finds himself back in St. Amelia, Simon begins his search for his significant other, Zoe. He soon discovers that the town’s prior conflict—involving a labor union fighting back against a corporate institution—boiled over, giving way to a nightmarish presence that’s overtaken the isolated community.
What makes the Silent Hill series so different from other survival horror games is its deeper focus on the protagonist’s perspective—not for just narrative grounding, but also in how players relate to a character surviving horrific encounters.
While exploring St. Amelia, Simon will have to pick his battles and sneak around the grotesque monsters wandering the streets, and players can even hide in rooms and lock the doors to evade lurking enemies. Along with observing Simon’s in-the-moment insights—which show up as “inner thoughts” presented on screen for players—he also possesses a mysterious portable TV monitor that doubles as a detector of all things supernatural. It’s a compelling spin on the dynamic of survival and action within Silent Hill, and ensures players are locked into the protagonist’s mental state.
For game director Jon McKellan, there was a particular desire to reevaluate how characters are presented within a Silent Hill game. When building Townfall’s main story, there was a clear effort to show more of Simon’s in-the-moment mental state to humanize him and other supporting characters as well.
“From my point of view, with many Silent Hill games, it feels like every character is like ‘ships passing in the night,’ they pass by and influence each other in some way and then move on,” said McKellan. “Whereas with Townfall, Zoe’s story is with Simon, and Simon’s story is with our other character we see at the beginning—they’re all deeply connected, but they don’t really know how or why. For our Silent Hill game, we’re trying to feel a lot more like an intelligent thriller, like something you’d see on HBO. We’re really leaning into those inspirations of primetime TV shows or a movie.”
“It’s a great slow-burn game, and that’s one of the reasons why Simon doesn’t speak out loud that often, when we do our take on inner thoughts instead. It’s about being as natural as we can to make these characters believable—the more you’ll engage with them, the more you’ll empathize with them and with the story,” he continued.
What’s old, and eerie, is new
When playing Silent Hill: Townfall, it was difficult not to recall the ill-fated P.T. demo from Hideo Kojima, a teaser for a planned Silent Hill reboot. As inviting as it was—and P.T.‘s impact on first-person, immersive horror is immediate to this day—Townfall actually has more in common with Creative Assembly’s Alien Isolation and its brand of stealth survival horror. Many developers from Screen Burn (McKellan in particular) worked on the 2013 classic, and, as with their work on the horror game Stories Untold, Townfall taps into a similar tone of immersive horror—with the signature hook of having to rely on a piece of inherently unreliable technology to survive.
“Analog horror has been our calling card since day one, and I was the user interface director on Alien Isolation, so I was working on the look of the old tech and designed the motion tracker for that one. It’s always been kind of in my blood to do VHS and that kind of visual style, and the same goes with Stories Untold. Working on Silent Hill: Townfall was like an evolution of that as well. With Silent Hill, it felt like, ‘okay, how do you pull this in and make it feel part of the world?’ I think the important thing for me is to make sure it doesn’t feel like a gimmick.”
The Silent Hill series has always had a subtle focus on analog horror, but Townfall is really diving into it. Simon’s most valuable tool is his portable television, which functions like the infamous radio warnings from previous games. The handheld not only warns players of nearby threats, but also offers a way to see nearby enemies behind walls and in the fog. But to get it working properly, players will have to tune the television to the right frequency in real time.
Much like Alien Isolation, there’s a sense that players have to lean on janky technology to survive and overcome puzzles. One challenge in particular had Simon figuring out a security passcode in a pharmacy, with his portable television feeding him cryptic recordings of numbered clues within the building. By funneling clips of the world through a distorted analog feed, it creates unnerving—yet captivating—moments that blend psychological horror with the moment-to-moment chills of trying to survive in Silent Hill.
The portable television also acts as a way for Zoe to communicate with Simon, sending him clues and poignant insights. It allows players to communicate with the story’s key, enigmatic character, and it’s an element that developer Screen Burn highlighted as part of its more intimate take on psychological horror.
With the Silent Hill series going for the anthology approach in recent years, it can take bolder risks with its character-driven survival horror. Townfall is a big shift away from the third-person horror of the series. Yet it’s still very much rooted in the introspective scares that made the core trilogy so memorable; Townfall‘s change to the first-person perspective and keen focus on lo-fi visuals especially highlight how captivating compelling a Silent Hill narrative in a new setting can be.