Silent Hill Townfall Review – A Horror Masterclass Victim to Stealth Gameplay

There are very few horror games that truly make you rethink every decision while encasing you in this unbearably odd feeling that everything is going down the gutter. Silent Hill has always been one such franchise that thrived in peaking our uneasiness with out-of-the-box storylines.

And they have done it yet again with Townfall, crafting one of the most visually appealing brain twisters that completely leaves you stunned by the end of it. But even the best stories can have their fair share of terrible moments in direction, and Townfall has them plenty. So, before you decide to play Silent Hill Townfall, here’s our in-depth review.

A Hauntingly Beautiful Town Hides a Messy Story

Silent Hill Townfall is undoubtedly one of the best visually stimulating games I have played this year. The game’s atmosphere completely hooks you from the very first minute, and the shift to first-person only heightens the uneasiness so common in the franchise.

The game takes place in St. Amelia, a fictional coastal fishing town where something awful happened. How do I know? Well, the very first second you step into the town square, you see placards filled with protest signs or messages about deceased loved ones. The very first feeling you have when entering the town is that something terrible happened, but what?

That’s what you, as Simon, need to investigate. However, Simon is not a detective; he himself is part of the puzzle. We find him on the shores of St. Amelia, with an IV line hooked into his hand, and having completely lost his memory. We control him into the town, which has now been encapsulated in the Silent Hill classic “Fog.”

Silent Hill Townfall’s biggest strength is its visual storytelling. The atmosphere completely hooks you from the get-go and never eases its grip. It uses many normal events to create a sense of realism and unease at the same time. One example is how players have to dial ‘100’ on a working telephone to save the game. The same telephone can be used to dial other numbers, which gives story clues.

Simon has a CRTV that catches frequencies to show ‘memories,’ also acting as a quest guide. It also helps reveal monsters around Simon. Similarly, other playable characters, like Zoe, have similar instruments that are very rooted in reality, while also acting supernaturally. It almost made me remember the camera in Fatal Frame II Crimson Butterfly remake.

Another example is how Simon uses a scalpel to cut open ‘chests’ inside doors to unlock them. The first time I saw it, I definitely had a knee-jerk reaction and couldn’t stop speculating about the connection between medical patients and St. Amelia.

The game also masterfully changes colors to emphasize a change in pacing or story importance. Many times, the world starts to flash red, while other times it remains a silent gray. Along with the creepily composed music that continues to make you feel unease, the game creates the perfect horror background for us.

That is until the first monster shows up, and the game changes from an investigative horror to a poorly made stealth game.

Townfall Has the Fun Sneaking Out the Back Door

Unlike Silent Hill f, which had too many combat scenarios, Townfall instead fully relies on sneaking around. Normally, this makes sense in a horror game, especially as sneaking only heightens the fear. However, Townfall takes this to an annoyingly high degree, making it feel highly repetitive and annoying.

I already had enough of sneaking around by the end of the third act, especially because of how terribly unfun it felt. The sneaking did not add anything new. It followed the same pattern we have already seen in hundreds of games, like running around monsters in circles by crouching, or using environmental items to distract enemies.

It’s the same thing, overdone to an annoying degree that I forgot which genre I was even playing at one point. Some entire acts only had sneaking. For example, the entirety of Act 2 and most of Act 3 had very few puzzle scenarios and investigation. Instead, the map was simply filled with mindless monsters that had the same running pattern that you had to run circles around by figuring out their movement pattern.

You may be wondering why sneak when we can fight. Yes, you can fight the monsters in Silent Hill Townfall, but doing it feels much worse than sneaking around. The combat mechanics in the game are terribly designed, boiling down to only blocking and hitting enemies with a plank.

At one point, you do end up having a gun, and that does make combat a bit quicker; however, it never feels enjoyable until the very end. The combat of Silent Hill Townfall requires absolutely zero skill. It was more of a hassle fighting the monsters than sneaking or running away to a safe place.

Compared to that, Silent Hill f was a much better experience and even felt justified having so many enemies to fight through due to the decent combat mechanics.

A Little Too Puzzling

One of my favorite gameplay features about the Silent Hill franchise is puzzles. The franchise has time and time again showcased its strength in crafting some incredibly well-made puzzles. Silent Hill f included some very well-made Japanese-centric mind twisters, so I had big hope from Townfall as well.

Sadly, Silent Hill Townfall fell quite short in that regard as well. The game does have some good puzzles, but some had overly complicated solutions that felt unfair. For example, the Shorefront Shop puzzle required that players find a code to open the locker.

But unlike finding a normal code, the game makes you look at five completely different things around the shop to come up with a code, like ‘three for three hands of a clock’. The only clue you have in this puzzle is a CRT recording that showcases the different elements around the room, which end up having the codes, in a very vague way.

Now, some of the elements do have a clear number, like 5 on a poster of 5 reasons to wash your hands. But things become dicey when you have to count fingers shown on a poster to find the number ‘6.’ Why a locker code would have a number based on the amount of fingers displayed on a wall poster is beyond me.

Even though I figured the puzzle out after spending a huge chunk of my time thinking about it, the solution at the end did not leave me satisfied at all. This is true for many other puzzles in the game. Either they are too easy to solve, or they are so overly complicated that the solution makes zero sense.

Performance: St. Amelia Has Problems but My PS5 Doesn’t

Silent Hill Townfall is one of the most visually appealing games in the franchise, and it ran seamlessly on my base PS5. The game gave a constant 60 FPS throughout on Performance mode; however, it did lock at 30 FPS in Quality mode. The upside is that shifting from Quality to Performance did not lead to a huge difference in visual quality, making the change much less bitter.

As already mentioned earlier, Townfall is a very graphically stimulating game. It perfectly uses the new first-person view to immerse players in the heart of all the trouble in St. Amelia. Although there is never much to look at in Silent Hill games due to the omnipresent fog, Townfall does a fairly great job of presenting every location with clarity.

Although St. Amelia is a small town, it never feels like you are roaming around the same place due to the change in colors and tone, which also brings fair changes to the map. Overall, I had zero qualms with the performance on my PlayStation 5 and did not run into any bugs for the entire 12-hour playtime.

Verdict: A Great Silent Hill Story with Some Seriously Loud Problems

Silent Hill games have always been about storytelling, and Townfall has one of the best story designs in the franchise. I cannot emphasize enough how good the storytelling is in this game, especially through the use of old-school technology like pages, telephones, and CRT recordings. Till the very end, I was unable to guess what was happening, and it was the only thing that kept me playing the game.

However, I do not see myself replaying Silent Hill Townfall due to the sheer amount of senseless sneaking I’ve done in it. Even though the game has multiple endings and it’s always best to play multiple playthroughs of any Silent Hill game, I cannot see myself going through the same ordeal of running circles around mindless monsters for hours.

Townfall also falls drastically behind when it comes to puzzle imagination, and that creates a much worse gameplay loop. More puzzles and less sneaking would have hugely upgraded my experience of the St. Amelia, and I expect the same feeling from others as well.

Overall, Silent Hill Townfall has one of the best story designs and a visually stimulating world, but its tiring stealth gameplay and poorly made puzzles make it hard to recommend to die-hard fans, as well as to those new to the franchise.