Hero image: Silent Hill: Townfall Deluxe Edition art. Image: Konami, via PlayStation Australia
I will admit I expected the wheels to come off by now, because Konami has been putting out Silent Hill games at a rate that would have seemed like a fever dream a few years ago (Ascension in 2023, The Short Message and the Silent Hill 2 remake in 2024, Silent Hill f last year, and now this, which by Maxi-Geek’s count makes five in four years), and a publisher rediscovering a franchise that quickly usually ends with the franchise being worn thin. So it is a little disorienting that the review embargo for Silent Hill: Townfall lifted this week and the general mood is not exhaustion but something closer to relief, with Game Informer calling it a continuation of the series’ return-to-form streak and GamesRadar admitting it got under their skin in a way horror games mostly no longer manage.
The pitch is a first-person one, which is the part I was most sceptical of, set on a fog-bound Scottish island town called St. Amelia in 1996, where Simon Ordell keeps waking up at the docks with no clear reason to be there and a pocket television (the CRTV, which is the series’ old static-spitting radio reimagined as something you hold up and tune) as his main way of reading the danger around him. Scottish studio Screen Burn Interactive developed it, Konami and Annapurna Interactive co-publish, and the story branches into multiple endings, which the reviews suggest you will want to see.
Here is the honest caveat, and it is one the reviewers raise themselves rather than something I am inferring from a distance: GamesRadar describes it as a slow burn that leans heavily on hiding and punishes you hard for being found, and says outright that it almost certainly is not going to be for everyone. Separately, a full 14-hour playthrough leaked onto Bilibili on 20 September, and Notebookcheck reports that early viewers flagged frequent puzzles and thin in-game guidance, which is worth knowing if you are the sort of player (and there is no shame in it) who wants to be pointed toward the next door rather than left in the fog to find it.
Then there is the price, which is where I get a bit stuck. The PlayStation Store has it at $69.95 for Standard and $84.95 for the Deluxe Edition, and Steam is $69.94, but the physical Day One Edition carries a $99.95 RRP, with EB Games at $99.95, JB Hi-Fi at $94 and Amazon at $89.95, while Big W and Target were both sitting at $79 when Maxi-Geek checked. So the disc costs more than the download almost everywhere, which feels backwards, and if you do not care about the box on the shelf the digital Standard Edition is plainly the better deal. If you have liked the last two, I would probably buy it, but I would buy it knowing it is going to ask for patience, and I would not pay the full disc price for the privilege.
Silent Hill: Townfall unlocks at midnight AEST on Thursday 24 September on PS5 and PC.
Source: Game Informer, GamesRadar+, Notebookcheck, Maxi-Geek, PlayStation Australia