Silent HillTownfall

What makes a horror game scary? The creature that jumps at the screen, or the long, silent wait before it? I say the wait, and you don't have to go far to prove it. The moment you show the monster, the fear is over and all you have left is a fight. As long as you don't show it, the player's head does the work for you, and for free. The Silent Hill series has leaned on this cheap but brilliant trick for a long time, and the trick has a name: fog. Silent Hill: Townfall picks up that fog and carries it somewhere else entirely, to an island off the coast of Scotland.

First, the credits. The game was developed by Screen Burn (formerly No Code), an independent studio in Glasgow, and published jointly by Konami and Annapurna Interactive. It came out on 24 September on PlayStation 5 and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store). The Steam page says 23 September, probably the time difference. There's no Xbox version and no announced plan for one. Our hero, Simon Ordell, goes back to the fog-bound island of St. Amelia to "set things right". As you'd guess, he doesn't. He digs up his own past instead. Konami calls it a standalone, full-length, first-person psychological horror game. So Silent Hill is in the name, but you never set foot in that town (despite the "Town" in the title, yes). The press reported that the island is inspired by St Monans in Fife and that the story is set in 1996. Konami hasn't confirmed any of it, so for now read it as rumour.

The real idea here is the CRTV. It's a little television that fits in your pocket. You tune in to unstable signals and something takes shape through the static. On paper it's a very clever gadget: the series' old radio warned you that something was coming, and this one wants to show you what you can't see. It's also what the positive Steam reviewers bring up most. They say the signal hunting is worked into both the puzzles and the atmosphere, so the gadget isn't just there for decoration. The second thing critics and players agree on is the island. The foggy Scottish town is reckoned to be the game's best card. (Describing Scotland through fog is like describing Istanbul through traffic: easy, but not wrong.) For me, the first thing that holds up a horror game is the place, and Townfall seems to have nailed the place.

A stealth game that wears out its own stealth is like a coffee shop that burns the coffee.

Now for the flaws. Weapons and tools are kept scarce on purpose. In a design built around running away, that's the right call. But if you put running at the centre, the running had better work. Konami describes the gameplay as tense escapes, frantic fights and story-driven puzzles. The players' complaints land on exactly the first two. The stealth sections start repeating themselves after a while, and the fighting that kicks in when you can't get away is clunky. Repetition turns fear into routine, and clunky combat turns tension into irritation. In a horror game repetition is fatal. The third time you hide from the same kind of creature in the same way, you aren't scared any more, you're bored (and your eyes drift to the clock). A stealth game that wears out its own stealth is like a coffee shop that burns the coffee.

The numbers show the same split. On OpenCritic the top critic average is 80, and 78% of critics recommend it. Scores run from 6.5 to 9 out of 10, and the Metacritic average is put at around 81. Players are cooler. Of the 2,501 English reviews on Steam, 71% are positive. Counting every language, third-party trackers had it in the 65–68% range in October. That leaves a gap of nearly ten points between the critics and the players who paid for it. I'd call that gap repetitive stealth. A critic plays through once, quickly, and remembers the atmosphere. The player sits through the same game of hide-and-seek evening after evening.

Let's talk money for a moment. On Steam's Japan store the Standard edition is 7,480 yen and the Deluxe edition 8,580 yen. We couldn't confirm the dollar and euro prices from an official source, so check your own store. The Deluxe extra got you a digital artbook, the soundtrack, an alternate outfit for Simon and 48 hours of early access. Now that the game is out, the early access is worth exactly nothing. To buy Deluxe today you'd have to be truly in love with the soundtrack. My advice is to buy Standard and put the difference toward a good pair of headphones. Nobody goes to a foggy island without headphones (in my opinion).

So why isn't the score higher? Because the game's own description puts escape and combat at the centre, and those are the two things players complain about most. Judge a game by what it sets out to do and Townfall has a solid spine, but its joints creak. Why isn't it lower? Because the CRTV is a real idea, the island feels like a real place, and a horror game that misses its atmosphere has nothing else holding it up. Townfall got the hardest part right and tripped over the part people think is easy.

Townfall earns the series' name with its atmosphere, but as a game it looks a little washed out in that name's shadow. Don't shelve it next to the series' classics, but give it credit as a brave attempt for daring to leave the town behind. If you love fog, silence and making your brain work, buy it. If hide-and-seek bores you fast, wait for a sale and maybe a few patches.