Silent Hill: Townfall Review
“Face your Fears in the Static” Written by: Hunter (@ReaperHunter23)
The resurrection of the Silent Hill series has been a fascinating thing to witness over these past few years. It’s an impressive feat to go from being dead to releasing once a year and have the games still be pretty good on top of that. When it was revealed, Silent Hill: Townfall was the biggest question mark from my perspective. More details would be revealed once it was Townfall’s turn on the marketing cycle. The big takeaway was that it was going to have a first person, analogue horror kind of angle to it. I liked that since it immediately sets itself apart from the other recent releases. So let’s take a look to see what manner of horrors Silent Hill: Townfall’s new perspective can offer.
Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive, Konami, Screen Burn
Silent Hill: Townfall follows the story of Simon Ordell. He’s been called to the coastal Scottish town of St. Amelia for reasons he doesn’t understand. Upon his arrival, Simon makes a few discoveries. The first is that the town is abandoned due to some manner of disaster. The second is a phone with a voice on the other side saying that Simon has been called back to the town to set certain things right. And the third discovery is a handheld T.V screen with a recording of a woman also beckoning Simon’s return.
Townfall does a good job at pacing its mystery. The beats are all given a pretty appropriate amount of gravitas. I found the arcs of Simon and especially Zoe to be potent. And the environmental story telling when it comes to uncovering St. Amelia’s sordid tale was plenty effective. There were a number of files to read, especially near the end, that were staggering.
Townfall actually has a remarkably straightforward story once you get a handle on what is happening. I actually don’t mind it though. The way in which the story was told still made it effective in spite of the fact that I pieced most of it together pretty early on. As a matter of fact, when a story deals with themes such as corporate nihilism, I welcome the game taking a stance on it. I do think that this does a good job at feeding into the idea that Silent Hill can be something that means different things to different cultures. It opens up the possibilities for the other themes that the series can explore in a way that I find compelling.
Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive, Konami, Screen Burn
As mentioned before, Silent Hill: Townfall takes a more analog horror approach. This comes in part from the change to the first person point of view and also the usage of the CRTV. The CRTV is the little gizmo that Simon carries around. It lets you track the movements of the monsters around town. One of the cool bits of give and take with the CRTV is that you can only track one monster at a time. This leads to having to shuffle back and forth between the various frequencies in order to keep tabs on everything that is happening around you.
The game does provide you with combative options such as planks and pipes for melee attacks. As well as a gun later. To be honest, I didn’t find them to be all that helpful. Even once they gave me the gun I felt like I couldn’t kill an enemy if I had tried. This did have a knock on effect of enhancing the stealth gameplay.
In addition to the CRTV the game also provides a number of hiding spots to aid in your survival. There are also bottles and bricks dotted around St. Amelia to throw as distractions. Enemies can open doors, so this places a fair amount of importance on whether or not the room you are in has a lock on its door. All of these elements mesh together to make Townfall one of the most deliberate and methodical game play experiences in the series. I found it all to be very engaging in the first half of the game.
I found the level design to be reasonably engaging throughout most of the game as well. The game did a good job at dangling the carrot at the end of the stick to move me from place to place. A few other times the puzzle I needed to solve to move forward was open enough that I could do it in whatever order I felt like but it still presented me with what I needed to do and made figuring out how to do it my problem.
Unfortunately, I feel like the whole cycle of the stealth gameplay peaks about halfway through the game. It’s around the halfway mark that Townfall introduces the pursuit enemy of the game. This is probably the most I’ve disliked a creature of this archetype in a while. It’s whole thing is that if it gets you, that’s an instant kill. No healing items to help you out, unless you get lucky and it walks away while an IV bag resurrects you.
My problem with the latter portion of the game is twofold. First: the previously described pursuit enemy didn’t really serve as that much of a shake up for me. My play style was already very all or nothing. If a regular monster caught me I was reloading the previous checkpoint more often than not. The second and more underlying issue is that the gameplay cycle is too passive. When you get to the later parts of the game and monsters start showing up by the fistful, I feel like there needs to be more ways to manipulate their behavior besides just throwing a bottle into the opposite corner of the room. Because when all you can do is hide and hope that you thread the needle between the movement patterns of five different monsters, the game goes from being methodical to being tedious.
Granted, this was all a very death of a thousand cuts kind of experience for me. There’s a segment late in the game that provides a nice reprieve from the core gameplay that had been occurring up to that point. So it took until the final area of the game for me to truly lose my patience. But once it happened I was certainly ready to be finished with the game. I just needed the stealth to evolve a little more throughout the experience. Maybe let me trigger a distraction radio remotely with the CRTV at the cost of being able to use it as a monster radar for a period of time. Maybe let me incite the massive pursuit enemy into killing a standard monster by throwing a bottle at the standard enemy getting caught in the crossfire. Just something that would let me feel like I would be able to create opportunities instead of just waiting for one very specific opportunity.
Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive, Konami, Screen Burn
Presentation is where Silent Hill: Townfall excels. The visuals, the creature design, the music. All of it does wonders to elevate the game. One of the first things I noticed was the sound design. At the start of the game you’ll pass down an abandoned street. And the game absolutely nails the sound of the streetlight humming. It’s an oddly specific sound but it is so spot on. The sounds that the CRTV and the save point phones make are very gratifying and tactile .The menu sounds are all made in a way that befits the mid 90s time period the game is set in. The use of specific sound cues also really ratchet up the tension of the gameplay. If a monster wanders into frame, it will be accompanied by a scare chord. If one is nearby a tense droning sound will cue up, and another if a creature is looking right at you.
The music in this game is excellently unsettling. It's made up of mostly discordant piano notes. Whenever there’s a song with a more melodic element it still sounds like it has to fight through the static to exist. All of it inspires a feeling akin to looking at your reflection through the pieces of a shattered mirror.
A smirk crossed my face when I saw that the game was letterboxing its camera. It’s a presentational flair that would make even the most pedestrian of screengrabs from this game seem like a pivotal dramatic moment. It really compliments the setting. The narrowing of the camera really works with the number of narrowed side roads you are skulking through at the start of the game. There weren’t many monsters in this game, but I think most of them hit the mark design wise. The axe faced creature was reasonably threatening. And I think the second monster with all of the tubes swimming inside of it is a rather harrowing bit of body horror the more that you dwell on it.
I was really impressed by this game’s Otherworld. The brutalist take on the environment sells the corporate nihilism theme with an unmatched level of clarity. When you peel back the town’s facade of a polite society, what's underneath is : damp concrete, flimsy chain link, and pipes running nonsensically through the town like veins. The Otherworld also really shows off how impressive the lighting in this game is. When the world is bathed in the harsh red light and something like a blue or white light has a source competing against it, seeing where the two light sources intersect is a visual delight. A thematic detail I really enjoy is that the CRTV screen is lit with red light. So it’s as if Simon is always taking a peak into the Otherworld in order to keep tabs on the dangers around him.
Image Credit: Annapurna Interactive, Konami, Screen Burn
Summary
I recommend Silent Hill: Townfall if you enjoy horror games. I really respect what this game is going for artistically. It opens up a new branch of the series that can be refined and explored further. The methodical stealth oriented mechanics make for some of the most tense gameplay in the series. While I do think the tedium of most of the late game holds it back from reaching its full potential; the art direction, sound design, and storytelling all make it a worthwhile experience.