Too Clean for Silent Hill? Townfall Splits Critics

A prepaid electricity card. That's one of the first puzzles critics encountered during a 30-minute hands-off demo of Silent Hill: Townfall at Summer Game Fest 2026. Not a Grim Reaper's list of names, not burning pork liver to reveal a hidden path. A leckie card you top up at the local newsagent. It's the most authentically Scottish thing I've ever heard of in a video game, and it's also the detail that crystallises the divide forming around Screen Burn's entry in Konami's horror franchise.

Townfall is set on the fictional island of St. Amelia, off Scotland's north coast, in 1996. Players control Simon Ordell, a man who wakes on the island's damp docks with no memory of how he arrived, medical tubes still dangling from his hand. The game is entirely first-person, a deliberate break from the series' traditional third-person camera, and it launches September 24 on PS5 and PC. Konami and co-publisher Annapurna Interactive confirmed the date during Sony's State of Play earlier this year.

Visually, nobody is arguing. The cobblestone streets, the white-walled houses stained by decades of coastal rain, the patterned wallpaper you can practically feel through the screen; St. Amelia is one of the most convincing environments I've seen in a horror game. VGC's Jordan Middler, who is actually Scottish, called it "perhaps Scotland's most authentic depiction in a video game." Screen Burn director Jon McKellan's team clearly poured obsessive detail into the setting, right down to running in-game footage through analogue video equipment to nail the look of the portable CRTV that replaces the series' iconic radio.

Where the Fog Lifts

The problem, according to some critics, is that all that realism might be working against the game's identity as a Silent Hill title. GamesRadar's preview was blunt: the demo was "laden with Silent Hill's trappings, milky fog and scabby monsters, but it's missing the cigarette-burned soul." The protest signs littering St. Amelia's streets, reading things like "We Need The Truth" and "Whatever Heart This Town Had Has Stopped," drew unfavourable comparisons to Dead Space's on-the-nose environmental graffiti. The concern is that Townfall's surface-level grounding, its commitment to historical and architectural accuracy, comes at the cost of the surreal, almost poetic strangeness that defined the best entries in the series.

I think there's a real tension here, and it's one Screen Burn seems aware of. McKellan told press that the first-person perspective was chosen because third-person "does more to coddle you from horror," and there's truth in that. Playing Resident Evil in VR is a different experience from playing it with tank controls. But the counterargument is strong: third-person lets you watch your protagonist suffer, connecting their psychological torment to your inputs. Silent Hill has always been about tormenting a specific character, not jump-scaring the player. Stripping that observational distance is a gamble.

What gives me some hope is that Screen Burn isn't a studio without pedigree in this space. Their previous games, Stories Untold and Observation, were built on exactly the kind of old-tech tinkering and signal-hunting that the CRTV mechanic represents. The idea of tuning a portable television to reveal enemy positions, hidden messages, and scattered video fragments is a natural fit for a team that's spent years making analogue interfaces feel unsettling. Enemies aren't locked to patrol routes either; they dynamically explore their surroundings, which should make stealth encounters unpredictable rather than pattern-memorisation exercises.

The game also features melee combat as a last resort, multiple endings, and a healing system tied to the medical tubes still attached to Simon's hand. A deluxe edition offers two days of early access starting September 22, with the game available on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Whether Townfall's grounded horror can coexist with the franchise's supernatural DNA is the split that will define its reception, and after Silent Hill 2's remake and Silent Hill f both landed well, Screen Burn is walking into a fanbase with newly raised expectations.