A Prepaid Electric Card Is Townfall's Wildest Puzzle

"Like a grocery store," is how director Jon McKellan described a Scottish newsagent to the Americans in his Summer Game Fest demo session. Anyone who's actually been in one knows it's more like a wall of crisps, cans of Irn-Bru, and rolling papers. But that newsagent is where you go in Silent Hill: Townfall to top up a prepaid electricity card so you can turn the lights on in a house. Not to solve a cryptic occult riddle. Not to burn pork liver on an altar. To pay for electricity.

According to journalists who attended the 30-minute hands-off demo at Summer Game Fest, the sequence plays out exactly as it would have in 1996 Scotland. You find the power box under the stairs, discover the meter runs on a prepaid card, read a note telling you the local newsagent is where you top it up, and head out into the fog to do just that. VGC's Jordan Middler, who's Scottish and lives ten minutes from Screen Burn's studio, called it "the most authentically Scottish part of Silent Hill: Townfall so far." The detail apparently baffled every American in the room.

I love this. I love that a horror game is willing to ground its tension in something so aggressively ordinary that half the audience doesn't even understand the mechanic. Screen Burn's previous games, Stories Untold and Observation, were built on exactly this kind of tactile interaction with old technology, and it's clearly the DNA they're bringing to Silent Hill. The portable CRTV that replaces the series' iconic radio, the analogue video footage the team ran through real equipment to get the distortion right; there's a coherent vision here about how mundane objects become unsettling when the context shifts.

Not everyone's buying it

But the prepaid card also crystallises the tension at the heart of Townfall's design. GamesRadar's preview was considerably less enthusiastic, arguing that the game's commitment to realism strips away what makes Silent Hill puzzles memorable. Their writer pointed to the original game's Grim Reaper puzzle and Silent Hill 3's pork liver sequence as examples of the series using surreal, dreamlike logic to reveal something about its characters. A prepaid electric card doesn't do that. It's just a thing that exists.

I can see both sides, but I think the criticism misses what Screen Burn is actually attempting. Silent Hill 2's apartment puzzles weren't especially surreal either; a lot of them were about finding keys and figuring out combinations. The horror came from the atmosphere pressing in around you while you did it. If Townfall can make a walk to the newsagent feel like the worst errand of your life, the mundanity is the point. The monster with an axe growing out of its head that patrols the streets between you and that newsagent probably helps, too.

Enemies in Townfall aren't locked to set patrol paths. According to the demo, they explore the area around them dynamically, and since Simon has no weapons during this section, stealth is the only option. You use the CRTV to get outlines of where creatures are moving, then try to slip past. Melee combat exists elsewhere in the game, but enemies hit hard and go down in only a few swings, so fighting is positioned as a last resort when stealth falls apart.

Silent Hill: Townfall launches September 24 on PS5 and PC, with a deluxe edition offering two days of early access starting September 22. Screen Burn is co-publishing with Annapurna Interactive and Konami, and the game will be available on both Steam and the Epic Games Store.