This is the third Silent Hill I have played, so I have a pretty small sample size, but I know where this one sits: better than Silent Hill f, not as good as the Silent Hill 2 remake, and closer to f than I was hoping. I still think about the SH2 remake about once a week. Townfall I enjoyed, finished, and then kind of stopped thinking about by the weekend.
That is basically the review. The rest is me explaining myself.
What it is, no spoilers
Townfall is a standalone Silent Hill story, set on a Scottish island in 1996 and played in first person. It was made by Screen Burn, a Glasgow studio that used to be called No Code, and published by Konami and Annapurna Interactive on September 24, 2026, for PS5 and PC. Screen Burn’s founder, Jon McKellan, was the lead UI artist on Alien: Isolation, which explains a lot. About ten minutes in it is obvious that this is a hiding game, not a shooting game.
I am going to keep the setup vague on purpose. Small island, mid nineties, and a CRTV, which is a little portable television you carry around and hold up way more often than you would expect. The game tells you very little and lets you piece it together yourself, and that ends up being one of the things it gets most right.
I played on a PS5 Slim, on Normal, for about 15 hours. If I am being honest, around two of those hours were me being lost or stuck. More on that later.
The story is the best part
Let me start with what works, because the story is the reason I would still tell a fan to play this. I went in expecting one kind of story and got a different one, and I could not figure out what was actually going on until the very end. I mean that as a compliment. Silent Hill f lost me because the story was loose and hard to follow. Townfall is the opposite. It holds things back on purpose, and when it finally shows you what it has been doing, everything before it makes sense.
It is not as layered as the SH2 remake, which kept giving me new things to think about for weeks. Townfall’s story lands once, lands well, and then it is over. I am keeping this short because the less you know going in, the better it works.
The stealth has to carry the game, and it wobbles
Townfall is built almost entirely around hiding, so the stealth has to carry the whole game, and for the first few hours it does not. The enemies are insanely tough early on. Not tough as in they take a lot of hits, tough as in you die very, very fast. That is a legitimate design choice, but the game gives you almost nothing to work with at the start, so you mostly learn by dying until you accept that the answer is nearly always run and hide. Once that clicks it gets better. “It gets better” is still not the thing you want to say about a game.
The bigger problem is variety. There are three regular enemy types plus one stalker, and that is it. By the halfway point you have seen everything the island has to throw at you, and the back half is mostly the same encounters in different rooms. The SH2 remake kept finding new ways to make me uncomfortable. Townfall finds one and sticks with it.
One setting you should change right away: the CRTV. By default you have to hold the button to keep it up, which gets old fast over 15 hours. There is an option in the settings to make it a toggle instead. Turn it on. It was a lifesaver for me, and I honestly do not know why it is not the default.
The combat is fine. Not clunky like it was in f, but nothing you will remember either. You will not use it much, and the game is better when you do not.
The save system is the one small thing I liked with no caveats at all. You save by picking up a phone and dialling. It is tiny, but it fits the year and it fits the place, and it is a lot more fun than opening a menu. I wish more of the game had that kind of thought in it.
The Weight
The stalker is called The Weight, and when I ran into it, its AI was broken. I do not mean hard, I mean broken. About halfway through the game I spent what felt like an hour in a closet while it walked in and out of the same room over and over, never giving me enough space to get out. There was no pattern to read and no real strategy. I got through that section on pure luck and a lot of running.
Screen Burn put out patch 1.4.0 on October 8, 2026. It stopped The Weight from camping objectives and searching the same spot over and over, and on Story and Normal its grab now does heavy damage instead of killing you outright. I played both sides of the patch, and I think they went too far the other way. After the fix it was too easy to slip past. The one enemy that is supposed to be the heart of the game went from unfair to kind of harmless in a single update, and neither version is the one I wanted. Somewhere between “stuck in a closet” and “walk right past it” there is a great stalker enemy. It did still get me a few times, and those were easily the scariest moments in the game. I just wanted more of them. (Patch 1.4.0 notes)
The puzzles are filler
I am not a puzzle person. I do not have a lot of time to game, and standing in a locked room turning a dial is not how I want to spend it, so I looked most of them up. That is partly on me. But the SH2 remake’s puzzles were deep enough that looking them up felt like giving up. Townfall’s are shallow enough that looking them up felt like skipping an ad. They are not hard, they are not interesting, and they mostly seem to be there because a Silent Hill game is supposed to have puzzles.
The two hours I spent lost belong in this section too. Some of that was me. Some of it was the island not doing enough to point you in the right direction.
Look and sound
This is a great looking game, with one catch on the PS5 Slim: quality mode lagged enough that I switched to performance mode and never went back. That is a shame, because the lighting is the best part of the whole presentation and you are not seeing it at its best. On the plus side, I did not run into a single bug in 15 hours, which is more than I could say for the SH2 remake at launch.
The sound design is excellent. Standing in the dark with that soundscape around you is Townfall at its best. The music is good but not great. There are maybe two tracks I actually want to download, where with the SH2 remake it was the whole soundtrack. That matters more than it sounds, because the music is a big part of why the remake stays with you.
Where it lands
Townfall beats Silent Hill f on story, atmosphere and ideas. It never gets anywhere near as tense or stressful as the Silent Hill 2 remake, and I think that is because it only really has one trick. A few sections reminded me of Toluca Prison, but none of them got under my skin the way Toluca did. I still think about Toluca. I do not think I will be thinking about anything in Townfall, and that is the whole gap between a good Silent Hill and a great one.
If you are a fan of the series, you will like this. If you loved Alien: Isolation, you will feel right at home. If you are new to Silent Hill, start with the 2 remake and come back to this one later, with your expectations set a little lower than the name on the box suggests.
Score: 7 out of 10. Good, not great, and I am glad I played it.