A lot to love but there's just this one thing...

Silent Hill Townfall is the newest installation in the Silent Hill franchise and is a welcome one. The franchise over the last 3 years has been given a fresh breathe of life, starting with the Silent Hill 2 remake back in 2024. Silent Hill Townfall makes for another strong addition to the beloved franchise by fitting right in to the overall narratives and themes of its predecessors. New and interesting characters are introduced and well-fleshed out in the roughly 11 hour playthrough of the main story. The environment is an excellent choice being based on the small island St. Monans off the coast of Scotland. And a fantastic original soundtrack that is paired with some of my favorite sound design in a horror game. However, all these excellent aspects to the game are wrapped in a rough gameplay loop.

The Good:

Silent Hill Townfall excels in creating an uncomfortable and eerie atmosphere that is familiar to its name's sake despite being located hundreds of miles away from its home location. The change in environment/location suits the narrative and overarching themes of the characters. The melancholy soundtrack that plays during exploratory and story heavy sections perfectly emphasizes the character's current thoughts and emotions. The same can be said for the more intense soundtracks for the survival-horror sections of gameplay, creating tension and a sense of unease that leaves the player on edge and checking behind them constantly. This soundtrack was coincided with some of my favorite sound design in a horror game. The creatures (especially the Collapse monster) sound guttural, real, agonisized and something straight out of a nightmare. Guns are loud when you are able to use them due to limited ammo, and the little noises you don't think about sometimes (like doors and other interactables) are well designed and just add to the overall immersion and I appreciated every second of it.

This game does a fantastic job with its three main characters. They are all three so different but share the same emotions that ends with them even being in Silent Hill. Guilt. What helps emphasize the connection they all have and why they are in Silent Hill, is explored by actually playing as all three. The game is broken into 6 chapters where four are played as Simon (protagonist), one played as Zoe (deuteragonist) and one played as Richard (antagonist). This feature of experiencing all three characters' perspectives and that all three give a different form of gameplay actually strengthens the overall story and it was something I really appreciated and enjoyed and made me love the story and characters that much more.

In typical Silent Hill fashion, the game is riddled with puzzles and they are good. I was stumped several times but not stumped enough to where I wanted to give up. I just stepped back, started the puzzle from the beginning and maaaaybe looked up a guide or two to get through it. The puzzles also leaned into the themes of the game, giving players more clues to the ambiguity of the story before the final act. Like the title says, there is A LOT to love about this game and I do love all those things, but with the good comes one very big bad.

The Bad:

I will be short and sweet with this section. The gameplay loop is bad. Unlike all the other Silent Hill releases, this game is first-person, compared to all the other franchise entries being third-person. While the change is nice and helps create more sense of claustrophobia at certain points, it makes the overall experience a bit clunky. The game also REALLY wants you to use stealth and avoid enemies, but offers no good abilities or utility to make for a fun stealth-game experience. The game feels more like hide-n-seek simulator than being a rewarding stealth game experience. The game gives you a hand-held CRTV that you use to find enemies through walls and track them, but that is really it. You still don't even really need to use it because the other mechanic is peeking, but it still doesn't help the gameplay. You peek around a corner, look for enemy, wait for enemy to turn around and move away from the door you need to get to and then go. There is so much waiting and sitting that it becomes a chore. I honestly found the "throw bricks and bottles" lure mechanic borderline useless. And so much of the game, is this gameplay loop so by the time you are almost complete with the second act, playing the game feels like a slogging chore outside of the puzzles.

Conclusion:

Rating this game was really hard to decide. Because I did really enjoy the story and the characters and I was genuinely invested. But to get to those moments I really enjoyed, it hurt. It was not BAD but it also wasn't fun and that's one of, if not the most, important parts of a video game. However, maybe this experience won't feel like a dread for you like it did for me, and the game offers enough in its other departments that I genuinely feel like it is still worth experiencing if you love the genre or Silent Hill. If the gameplay loop did not feel like such a chore (besides Richard's chapter), this game would be an easy B+/A- minus for me, no doubt. The story, characters and other designs carry this game to being in the B rating, otherwise it would be a C.

So until next time.