// PC GAMER — GAMING
Silent Hill: Townfall is the first horror game to make me feel bad for using a shotgun
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Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience, especially if you're like me and love tormenting yourself with stealth, limiting the use of any kind of weapon. I spent almost all of my first playthrough forgoing any pipe or plank, or even pistol in favour of my trusty CRTV and top-notch strategy. But my pacifist run stopped dead in its tracks when I got my hands on the shotgun.
Every horror game fan will know the liberating power of getting your hands on a shotgun in a game where you've done nothing but cower and run from danger—finally, you get to be the danger. Turns out the horrors are trapped inside this game with you, not the other way around.
I may have embodied this a bit too much when I got my hands on the shotgun in Richard's section of Townfall. Tasked with making it to the top of a 10 story office building, you need to solve puzzles and clear the way all while fending off a new kind of Silent Hill monster: the widow.
These are bloodied creatures with shrouds of flesh covering their faces. They'll hide behind doors, under desks, or just anywhere that's a bit shadowy. They'll jump out at you, stab you with a knife, and then run off to yet another hiding place. It didn't really bother me at first, their attacks don't deal a massive amount of damage, so I just kind of decided to live and let live, for a short while at least.
Before I knew it I couldn't take a step without one of these widows hurling themselves out of the shadows and attacking me. The final straw was when they interrupted my loot hunting—a precious pastime that I hold very dear—so I decided to make use of the shotgun and the very large stock of ammo I'd built up.
Eventually I'd cleared out every floor. I actually went out of my way to ensure I could walk freely around the office building without being pestered. But then I looked closer at the piles of dead bodies lying at my feet. Uh oh, I have succumbed to my inner rage and have perpetrated the same cycle of anger and death that got us stuck in this situation in the first place, becoming the true monster of Silent Hill again. Whoopsie.
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On further inspection these widows had the photos of their deceased loved ones stapled to their bodies. Precious people that my character had indirectly, but essentially killed due to his own greed and hubris. No wonder they're angry.
On reflection I did also notice that some of the monsters were perhaps hiding from me. And hunting them down with a shotgun probably wasn't the most empathetic thing to do to people who were simply enraged by the loss of a loved one. Dammit—this is why I keep getting the bad ending.