// KOTAKU — GAMING
Silent Hill: Townfall Tackles The Scariest Subject Of Them All: Healthcare
Over the last couple of years, Konami has been experimenting with Silent Hill, as seen in the most recent installment in the franchise, Silent Hill f, which put players in the shoes of a young girl in a Japanese town in the 1960s. The publisher is back at it again with another fresh take on the series, this time teaming up with Annapurna and the studio Screen Burn Interactive for Silent Hill: Townfall. Ahead of its release date, Kotaku was invited to go hands-on with the upcoming game for four hours. During that time, I often screamed in terror while going toe-to-toe with various monsters as I tried to figure out what was happening to the town around me.
My time with the game started at its very beginning, with protagonist Simon Ordell climbing out of the ocean and into the Scottish town of St. Amelia, a fictional location that takes inspiration from the real village of St Monans. The first thing I noticed was a weird IV plugged into my arm. Then I noticed how cinematic the game was. This is because it’s presented in a 2:35:1 aspect ratio rather than the usual 16:9 used by most games. The first-person POV only elevated that.
In every way, Simon is an outsider to the town of St. Amelia; one of the clearest examples of this is that Simon is a person of color. This was a decision the team had landed on early in development.
“Simon is not from St. Amelia. He’s not from Scotland,” Jon McKellan, writer and director at Screen Burn, told me in a group interview. “We wanted to have a character that felt like they were in the same position as a player [who] is visiting a town he’s never been in for the first time.”
As soon as I got offshore, I made my way through the town, and that’s when things started to get a bit tense. This was because the town I was walking through was entirely deserted, with each shop locked up.
McKellan went on to explain that making a Silent Hill game set in a Scottish town was fairly easy because it was where a good portion of the team grew up.
“Having grown up there, we have heavy fogs that roll in. We used to joke that if you took a photo of the window, it looks like Silent Hill today. That’s kind of a common thing. So it didn’t feel like a big leap to imagine the towns we grew up in to be in Silent Hill.”
Still walking through the desolate town, the only thing I could do was answer a phone ringing in the middle of the town square. It was surrounded by protest signs calling the town out for disregarding its people. After dialing a specific number to save the game, things started to get a bit weird, as one might expect. Before I knew it, I was teleported underground and was making my way through a series of tight hallways cluttered with debris. Even though by all accounts I was alone, it never felt that way. Each corner felt as if something was looming in the shadows, waiting to attack.
Eventually, I found myself in a room filled with stuff from Simon’s past. I quickly learned that he was having some issues in his love life. It was here that I received a portable CRTV that would show me hints on where to go if I scrolled to the right channel. The screen would show me vague things like a chair, a date, or even a poster. Paying attention to what was being displayed was important because it would often be useful to solve whatever puzzle was ahead of me.
In this case, it required knowing an exact date. After taking a couple of quick notes, I was able to determine the correct date I needed in order to open the path ahead of me, which led me to an elevator that went up. As soon as I called it to pick me up, my CRTV started making noises. I learned that, in addition to telling me where to go, it would also double as a mini-map showing nearby enemies. But the catch was that I was limited to seeing only one monster per channel. Meaning that if I were in an area with a lot of them, I would need to constantly switch back and forth to see where they were hiding.