With the good fortune of being invited to do a full four-hour hands-on preview with the upcoming and hotly anticipated Silent Hill: Townfall, it’s hard not to be eagerly excited. Often, these press experiences take place in an office space in a conference room filled with machines. For this press preview though, the chosen few were greeted into an enormous ballroom a la vintage turn of the century freemason architecture, the lights turned down to a paltry glimmer of shadows. In the far side of the room, a neoclassical pillar is decorated to look like the town square of the game’s setting, the fictional Scottish town of St. Amelia adorned with a protest indicating a pervasive sense of helplessness. The game hadn’t even been turned on and it was already clear this was not going to be for the easily scared or the faint of heart.
The event was introduced by its writer and director Jon McKellan and series producer Motoi Okamoto. McKellan explained the basic controls and combat mechanics to us. He indicated the player could choose between direct combat and stealth, but cautioned us immediately that if we relentlessly pursue fighting our foes, “you’re going to have a bad time.” From there we decamped to our stations and dove in. It’s hard to imagine that four hours of time a small slice of a game wouldn’t be enough, but in this case, it proved to be just shy of what we needed for the full experience. This is a richly designed world you enter into, and there is much, much, much to explore. Our main character is Simon Ordell, and you meet him literally as he pulls himself out of the ocean onto a dock, no idea where he is or quite how he got there. It’s an implausible entry, one that centers you in a veil of mystery as there’s no earthly explanation for his presence there. Almost like he fell from the sky Wile E. Coyote-style from some far-off plateau. Stranger yet, he has a complicated IV apparatus wired directly into his veins. Even trying to touch it to investigate it causes him immense pain and a splitting headache, so he kind of opts just to roll with it.
Simon has appeared dockside in this Irish town St. Amelia, apparently with no connection he can remember to the place. Or is there one? It becomes murkier and murkier the further you go. As Simon starts to head into town, there is two-folk evidence of a once tranquil seaside community and also something very bad that happened locally causing mass protests and a complete disappearance of the city’s inhabitants. With a heavy marine layer fog sitting atop the village, St. Amelia felt like a recently created ghost town. Where did everyone go? What happened here? Upon arriving at the city square, a payphone is ringing (for you younger readers before cellphones they used to be on almost every major street corner in America). Answering that phone brings about a hallucinogenic teleportation.
Ordell finds himself deep underground, in what feels like World War II era creepy catacombs. It’s dark and nigh impossible to see. Immense attention to detail has been put into the game’s sound design, and just walking through these tunnels is enough to give you the heebie jeebies. We find one of the game’s major mechanics, a handheld CRTV in these tunnels. Another aside for younger readers here: in the late ’80s / early ’90s many televisions still broadcast entirely based on what it could pick up over antennae. Televisions in those days were usually very large CRTVs glass tubes that were extremely heavy. A novel item that sometimes would be available were miniaturized CRTVs that were about the size of a walkie talkie. They were super low quality and struggled to pick up even the major network stations. So, as you can imagine, a pretty perfect device for a survival horror game like Silent Hill: Townfall. In this title, the gear works almost like a medium would talking to localized ghosts, picking up fragments of moments, sights and sounds, rock-and-rolled into a heavily distorted montage. You have to find just the right moment and then tune the TV to the right frequency and then the montage rolls out. It gives you just enough hints as how to puzzle out the way forward, but you really have to focus on the details. It might be a code, or a number sequence or even just a small fragment of a visual location. It also serves as a sort of demonic sonar for nearby enemies.
This is the first moment it becomes clear there are opponents on this wayward coastal town. Panning around this underground tunnel there are almost a dozen in close proximity. And yes, the CRTV makes their presence even creepier. We scurry away via an elevator and arrive back in the town square. We see our first human there, bizarrely stuck with a giant tube down his throat, apparently pumping a liquid into him. We help him with that problem just in time to see a gigantic visage of some airborne tentacle monster, it’s big to the point where you can’t even really see the full shape and size of it, but it’s clear whatever happened here, this is a large part of it. As you start to traverse the game proper, it becomes evident that whatever was happening, was getting worse and worse. People felt trapped and ignored by whatever governmental forces had jurisdiction here. There is evidence of mass death and a sense of the populous losing hope completely. “Hopelessness is absolutely a theme of this kind of thing, these kind of stories, but it’s more about what do you do with that? Can you do anything?” writer Jon McKellan told us in a roundtable interview later on when we inquire if the game’s aim is to examine hopelessness.
This opens the main corridor of game experience and it becomes an artful mix of puzzle solving and stealth combat. We pick up a plank of wood. Yes, literally just an odd board lying around and for most of the demo, that is the only weapon available to us. The first enemies we see look like a deformed humans with a giant, protruding angular nose. We try our luck fighting them head on, and it is possible to win, but it’s way, way harder. Also, our trusty board, breaks. Once you’re trapped weaponless against even these meager monsters, it is indeed, a very bad time. Luckily, the IV in Simon’s arm double as an extra life device, black blood pouring in and bringing him back to consciousness with meager health. We go more slowly through the experience from there, stealthing our way through town using the CRTV to fetch items and solve puzzles. We have to parse using a small tourist map from building to building, sometimes powering up generators to use ancient computers to read one vital email, other times to find a key card to enter into a hospital that hints at the tragedy that befell the town. As we go, there is a mounting sense of evidence that maybe Simon has been here before? And as a part of a disintegrating relationship? Or maybe his memories of that relationship are bleeding into this reality? Is this all a coma-induced fever dream? It’s unclear, but Simon is parsing through something traumatic both figuratively and literally as he starts to unravel this mystery.
The real thrill here is traipsing through this place, knowing you’re sitting on the edge of something truly awful. The sound design from Pilot Priest is awesome, and you have to think carefully about every move as you venture forth. It’s a nail-biting sense of dread in the largely silent, abandoned town. We make it just far enough to unlock the final sequence and get a sense of ranged combat with a handgun. Not surprisingly, even though that helps get a leg up on combat beyond the breakable board, it’s still an economy of ammo and thinking-on-your-feet conservation. We are told in our roundtable by McKellan in our roundtable interview that the game features five total endings, three of which available in first playthrough and two that require going through the game in a new game+ playthrough. One thing, and perhaps only this thing, is clear from our all too brief time with Silent Hill: Townfall: fans of the franchise are going to love it.
Silent Hill: Townfall comes out September 24th on PC and PlayStation 5.