Silent Hill: Townfall Hands-On Pushes First-Person Horror Into Foggy Scottish Streets

Konami just let four outlets into a Los Angeles preview room for Silent Hill: Townfall, and the early word reads like a dare. Screen Burn, the Glasgow studio that used to be No Code, has built the first first-person Silent Hill game that actually fights back, and Konami is shipping it to PlayStation 5 on September 24. After three to four hours with Simon Ordell wandering into the abandoned Scottish port of St. Amelia, IGN, Polygon, Game Rant, and the PlayStation Blog all walked out saying the same thing: this is the most uncomfortable the series has been since 2.

A fishing town that forgot how to be alive

Townfall drops Simon onto the docks of St. Amelia in 1990s Scotland with a hospital bracelet on one wrist and an IV line feeding dark fluid into a port on his hand. He is not from St. Amelia, but the locals seem to know him, and a nurse named Zoe Ellis is calling him through a battery-powered portable CRT television called the CRTV. The CRTV replaces the static-spewing radio of past Silent Hill games, and it does a lot more than hint at monster proximity. Tuning certain frequencies reveals short clips of the buildings, alleyways, and rooms Simon needs to visit next, which forces players to actually look at the streets instead of chasing waypoints. There is also a physical paper map that updates itself as Simon uncovers story clues, a charming choice that pays off when the fog rolls in and you cannot see ten feet past your nose.

Polygon captured the opening sequence with real precision. Simon wanders from the harbor through shuttered shops into a central square dominated by an obelisk reading The Heart of St. Amelia. Protest signs about CEG Widows flutter on lamp posts. A pay phone rings, a voice says help me, and Simon dials a number scratched into the phone that reads save yourself. He turns around and sees something the preview hands refuse to describe in detail, which is precisely how you want a Silent Hill game to introduce itself.

Stealth first, guns a last resort that bites back

Combat is the part every preview flagged as deliberately unforgiving. The default melee weapon is a scrap plank of wood, which can absorb one or two fights before it splinters. Blocking is mapped to L2, strikes to R2, and Simon can be cornered fast if more than one mutant closes in. A revolver shows up later, and the PlayStation Blog preview calls it a liability: it kills quickly, but the reload is a manual affair with each cartridge pressed into the cylinder individually, and every shot draws more of the strapped, axe-bladed creatures prowling the cobblestones. The other option is throwing bottles or bricks to distract patrols, or turning on radios and televisions in the environment to lure enemies away so Simon can slip past.

That is why the CRTV matters so much. Tuning it to the right signal lets Simon see monsters through walls and fog, and once a target is locked, he can cycle through marked enemies on the frequency bar. IGN noted that tracking which mutant was which on that bar got messy once four or five of them were in range, but the same preview also admitted it gave stealth players a fighting chance at planning a route, instead of memorizing patrol lines the old-fashioned way.

Puzzles that tell the story

Director Jon McKellan, who previously worked on Alien Isolation at Creative Assembly before co-founding No Code and renaming it Screen Burn, told outlets that Townfall's puzzles are not standalone brain teasers. They are story beats. The pharmacy section stands out: the lock to a key item uses a four-digit combination, and the CRTV displays what look like unrelated close-ups of objects around the shop. Each clip maps to one digit, and the answer only emerges if you actually study the environment. A separate escape-room-style section leans on photographs, journal entries, and a calendar to open a single locked door. None of it is random, and none of it holds your hand, which fits a series that has always trusted its audience to keep up.

Underneath the puzzles sits Zoe's story, and the preview hands were emphatic that it stays deliberately obscure. A nurse who vanished from her job, a city that seems to have been hit by a medical outbreak, a portrait of Simon hanging in Zoe's upstairs hallway. Screen Burn visited and photographed real Scottish coastal towns to recreate St. Amelia, and the PS5 Pro edition uses PSSR upscaling and ray tracing to push a 2.35:1 cinematic aspect ratio that fills the screen with fog and rain. DualSense haptics carry the weight of combat, and the gyroscope lets players physically tilt the controller to tune the CRTV and to line up revolver headshots. It is the most PS5-native Silent Hill yet, which is a polite way of saying it leans hard on the hardware Konami is publishing for.

CriticalPixel take

A first-person Silent Hill that makes melee weapons feel disposable and turns a portable TV into the most important tool in the game is the direction this series needed after the polished-but-safe Silent Hill 2 remake and the well-received but narratively dense Silent Hill f. The setting shift from Maine to a fictional 1990s Scottish port is more than a coat of paint, because the fog, the rain, and the seaside emptiness feed the dread in ways Team Silent only hinted at. Five endings and a 10 to 12 hour runtime suggest Screen Burn is going for replay value rather than a one-and-done scare tour, and the fact that Konami is letting an indie studio drive a numbered-feeling Silent Hill release on PS5 says more about where horror gaming sits in 2026 than any marketing slide ever could. Pre-orders open with a CRTV Beach Edition skin bonus for PS5 players, and PC copies go through Steam and the Epic Games Store on the same September 24 window.

If Screen Burn can keep the back half of Townfall as tense as the opening hours on show, this is the horror game of the fall, and a real argument that Konami's decade of silence was worth the wait.