Silent Hill, once a fictional town in Maine, has become a transferable oral history mechanism for videogame developers, allowing for the investigation and celebration of local culture. This approach, also seen in Silent Hill f, presents both opportunity and peril for studios. The opportunity lies in Silent Hill's rich framework for exploring the past through parallel realities, monster metaphors, and psychoanalysis. The peril, however, stems from licenses that can engulf developers in a straitjacket of tropes like fog, sirens, and geometrically-headed antagonists. Thankfully, Silent Hill: Townfall's creators, Screen Burn (formerly No Code), have navigated this challenge, though the game's overreliance on stealth prevents it from being their finest creation. They have selectively adopted elements of Silent Hill to tell their own story.
Townfall unfolds on the fictional Scottish island of St Amelia in the late 90s, exploring the intersecting lives of three individuals. The player initially controls Simon, a bemused American with a cannula, who arrives on the pier to carry out tasks for Richard, an insistent American communicating via a pocket TV capable of two-way communication. Simon is also searching for Zoe, a local nurse entangled in a web of shame.
It quickly becomes apparent that St Amelia has suffered a disaster. Roads are blockaded, the town is deserted, and the local memorial is adorned with pictures of the missing. Access to the mainland is cut off, shops are looted, and remnants of mass protests – flyers and signs decrying "our grief is their failure" – are visible. Monstrous concrete walls loom over buildings, and the "Others," creatures of "bound, boiled, divided flesh," inhabit the abandoned spaces. They gibber and gestate amidst empty shelves and scuttle through offices, appearing broken and lost.
The nature and origin of Townfall's catastrophe remain ambiguous, with characters either unable or afraid to fully recall events. They move as if half-asleep, their actions driven by interwoven trauma, fighting or avoiding the Others without assigning them literal reality. This translates into temporal ruptures and reversals, manifesting as Silent Hill's signature plane-shifts, where the island's streets transform into abstract labyrinths.
Simon repeatedly cycles between the pier and a hotel room, while Zoe is a prisoner of her inability to save others, perpetually on the verge of entering an operating theatre. Richard is unable to reach the tenth floor of an office building, endlessly repeating a quest for redemption. The game's puzzle and location design reflects this temporal mechanic of trauma, often featuring rites of suffering and abortive catharsis. One house tabulates days as bodycounts on cassette for endless replay. In Zoe's nightmares, Simon searches for blood donors among patients rendered in concrete, tombs for the agony of those kept alive by her failures.
Townfall's puzzles are frequently compelling, with many involving three or four-digit keycodes. The best puzzles are integrated into the narrative and themes, facilitated by the game's period technology. Players interact with alt-historical desktop computers to navigate primitive email systems and use payphones to save progress, reminiscent of 90s technology. Screen Burn excels at recreating older hardware and imbuing it with menace, though it feels less focused than their earlier work on Stories Untold.
Medical instruments serve as some of the game's most sinister devices. The early narrative, particularly Zoe's sections, evokes the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, depicting the brutalization of NHS staff facing an evolving plague with limited resources and unsupportive workplaces. Her tormentor, an overworked senior doctor whose contempt escalates to supernatural dimensions, is fueled by her self-recrimination. One harrowing scene forces the player into an emergency procedure in a room of confusing machines, with the doctor's snarled orders creating a disorienting experience.
This portrayal of structural misogyny is a stark contrast to the fevered fantasies of female nurses in Silent Hill 2. The player's tormentor mixes moments of cordiality with verbal abuse, tightening his control like a leash. Recovering medications from darkened wards filled with Others offers a reprieve from this psychological torment, albeit one that brings back memories of real-world hospital experiences during the pandemic.
Later, Townfall shifts to a narrative of banal corporate arrogance and neglect specific to the late 90s, a period of peak North Sea oil production before widespread broadband internet. The game presents a playable cross-section of a company's callous reputation management attempts, where layers of damage control and paperwork reveal underlying decay. Evidence of greenwashing and memos about "restructuring" to remove troublesome employees are uncovered, at times echoing practices within the video game industry itself.
While the narrative elements are fascinating, the gameplay often devolves into extended periods of stealth. Most major objectives require traversing the town, navigating locked doors and blockages, with the paper map often feeling like a primary adversary. Encounters with the Others are frequent. While some can be fought with salvaged planks or pipes, it's not advisable on normal difficulty, especially as the melee weapons break quickly, and even a single foe can be deadly if blocks are missed. Ammunition for acquired firearms is scarce, making stealth and distraction with thrown objects the preferred approach.
Simon's magic pocket TV aids stealth by tracking individual Others with simple horizontal indicators and stored signals. Zoe's LCD pager functions as a compass, tracking multiple enemies but offering less detail. The ability to pinpoint one foe's proximity and orientation proves more useful than managing multiple targets, especially as the game's voice acting often alerts the player to nearby threats.
These stealth sequences can be thrilling in well-designed areas, such as navigating an apartment warren with creatures above and below, or exploring an open-plan ward with only cubicle curtains separating the player from abominations. However, the stealth mechanics can also feel robotic and plodding. Enemies exhibit awareness of closed doors but patrol with a monotonous regularity, emphasized by a dynamic score that signals awareness states. This mitigates frustration but reinforces the sense of playing a game of chance.
New enemy types are introduced later in the game, adding variety. A particularly un-fun addition is a large, unkillable tower of buboes that patrols an area requiring object collection from inaccessible rooms. This Other is scripted but less predictable, making encounters a time-consuming chore. More successfully, enemies that play dead introduce unsettling soundscape layers and alter exploration stakes. Others that rush from off-screen or play hide-and-seek, reminiscent of Left 4 Dead's Special Infected, inject fresh tension, particularly when the player acquires a shotgun. These later additions are crucial for revitalizing interest when the earlier shambling enemies become tedious.
For players with a tolerance for extended stealth gameplay, Townfall is recommended. Despite the sometimes grating stealth mechanics, the mystery of St Amelia becomes increasingly engrossing in the latter half. While Bloober's Silent Hill 2 remake may be more polished, Townfall offers a more compelling exploration of a developer asserting its cultural specificity and narrative choices against the confines of the Konami code. Ultimately, a locally grown Silent Hill should strive to rebury the town and tell its own stories.