Silent Hill's Boldest Reinvention Yet Is Set in Scotland

A foggy coastal town in Scotland. A man climbing out of the ocean with an IV wire dangling from his arm. Protest signs about a company called C.E.G. Scattered around a deserted square, and a police station notice that reads: "Nothing we can do. Stay safe." This is not the Silent Hill you grew up with, and that appears to be entirely the point.

Silent Hill: Townfall, developed by Screen Burn Interactive (formerly No Code, the studio behind Observation and Stories Untold) and published by Annapurna Interactive alongside Konami, is set in a fictional 1990s Scottish town called St. Amelia. Multiple outlets went hands-on with the game this week, playing between three and five hours of its opening, and the picture that emerges is of a first-person horror game that has almost nothing in common with the rusty industrial corridors and Bubble Head Nurses the franchise built its identity on. According to The Herald, St. Amelia takes direct inspiration from the real Scottish village of St Monans.

Writer and director Jon McKellan told press during a group interview that the Scottish setting was a deliberate creative choice rooted in authenticity. "We wanted to build a town that felt extremely authentic, felt like this was a place you could believe existed. A place you could care about," McKellan said, adding that the team grew up in communities like St. Amelia. "It felt like if we were going to set it anywhere, it would feel almost disingenuous if we were to set it in an American town, somewhere that we've never experienced and wouldn't know."

I love this reasoning, and I think it signals something important about where Silent Hill is heading as a franchise. Konami's strategy of handing the keys to developers around the world, letting them build horror from their own cultural and geographic DNA rather than forcing everything through the lens of a single fictional American town, is the smartest thing the publisher has done in years. Silent Hill f already proved the concept by relocating to 1960s Japan. Townfall pushes further by not just changing the setting but changing the perspective to first-person and grounding its horror in the specific texture of a declining British coastal community.

St. Amelia's Dread

The details coming out of these previews paint a picture of environmental storytelling that leans hard into place. Players control Simon Ordell, an American who washes ashore in St. Amelia with no clear memory of how he got there. He's searching for a nurse named Zoe Ellis, and the town he finds is frozen at a specific moment of crisis: shops shuttered, For Sale signs everywhere, a local clinic that suspended services "in light of the current situation and its lasting effects." Boats along the shoreline bear children's names. An organ-donation box sits in plain view. Something catastrophic happened here, and the game seems to want you to piece together what it was through observation rather than exposition.

The CRTV device, Simon's portable radio-like gadget, sounds like the mechanical heart of the experience. It serves triple duty: showing fragmented video clips that guide you toward objectives instead of waypoints, functioning as a proximity detector for enemies across different channels, and feeding into puzzle solutions that require you to match what's on screen to objects in the environment. One preview described a pharmacy puzzle where colour-tuned clips showed seemingly unrelated close-ups of objects, each representing a digit in a combination lock. No hand-holding, no objective markers. McKellan's team at Screen Burn clearly has lineage with Alien: Isolation, where McKellan worked and directed DLC, and that DNA shows in the emphasis on vulnerability and stealth over combat.

What strikes me most is how McKellan talked about subverting expectations. "We are leaning into those expectations. We will be massively subverting those expectations, too," he said. "We want people to feel familiar with it, but leverage that. It's leveraging that familiarity to build something new." The setup deliberately echoes Silent Hill 2: a man with a foggy memory enters a foggy town looking for a woman. McKellan acknowledged this with a laugh, calling it "so far, so Silent Hill." But everything surrounding that familiar skeleton, from the 2:35:1 cinematic aspect ratio to the first-person perspective to the very specific 1996 British setting, suggests Townfall is using the franchise's iconography as a trap door rather than a foundation.

As someone who has been covering horror games for years and constantly arguing they deserve more mainstream attention, this is the kind of announcement that gets me fired up. Screen Burn is a small studio with a track record of atmospheric, systems-driven horror, Annapurna is one of the best publishers in the industry at letting developers be weird, and Konami appears to be letting them run with it. Silent Hill: Townfall doesn't have a confirmed release date beyond its reveal trailer shown during State of Play, but based on what previews are describing, this could be the entry that proves Silent Hill works as an anthology franchise rather than a single recurring nightmare.