by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $12.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
… fitfully entertaining …
Silent Hill, as a series, has been through a number of reinventions and reinvigorations recently. The long-running survival horror franchise got a real shot in the arm with 2024’s excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, an extremely faithful update of what is arguably the best game of the lot. However, that wasn’t quite enough for the folks at Konami and the very next year they released Silent Hill f, a bold new chapter that changed location to great effect, albeit with a few niggling issues. Now, just a year later, we have another entry, Silent Hill: Townfall which changes the gameplay and point of view to great effect. Sadly, this fresh take on the material also features glaring issues that will likely be dealbreakers for many, but more on that in a bit.
Silent Hill: Townfall is (mainly) the story of Simon, an ordinary bloke who wakes on the Scottish island town of St. Amelia with no memory of how he got there. As if Scotland isn’t scary enough already, the island is also wreathed in a thick fog and crawling with monsters slightly more threatening than Edinburgh wide boys on a bender. Simon must evade these nasties, collect clues and solve the mystery of just what the hell is going on with nothing more than his wits and a small CRTV to help him.
On the surface, Silent Hill: Townfall is a classic entry. You’ve got a central mystery which involves trauma and guilt, you’ve got a number of creepy monsters, and you’ve got puzzle solving under duress. The devil, however, is always in the details. This time around the action takes place in a first person POV, which works, but the combat has been drastically reduced and replaced with a stealth system where you spend much of your time hiding from the unpleasant beasties. This can work, in theory, just look at Alien: Isolation. However, Townfall suffers from one of the weakest, most limited and clunkiest stealth systems in recent memory. It’s slow, sluggish and the enemy AI is wildly inconsistent. What ends up happening is you spend an inordinate amount of time in cupboards only to get pinged because the enemy apparently sensed your scrote pubes growing and leapt atop you. The first time it’s scary, the second it’s slightly annoying, and by the tenth time, it’s just boring and frustrating. All sense of tension and atmosphere is lost, replaced by irritation and a deep desire to glass the telly.
Even if you manage to slog through the combat by lowering the difficulty and bruteforcing your way through, the enemy variety is lacking, the scares scant and the eventual reveal all too predictable. It’s such a pity too because the puzzles are genuinely good and there are isolated moments that are really effective. However as a whole, Silent Hill: Townfall just doesn’t feel good to play.
On the one hand, it’s laudable that Silent Hill keeps trying out new things. On the other, Silent Hill: Townfall is an only fitfully entertaining misstep for the series and hopefully in the upcoming entries its additions are left back on that miserable Scottish island.
