While we didn’t attend the Silent Hill: Townfall hands-on event, plenty of other outlets and content creators did (Not that I’m jealous), and the early word coming out of it is good. Really good.
To be clear up front: everything below is secondhand. These aren’t our impressions. We went through the written and video previews that came out of the event so you don’t have to hunt them all down yourself, and pulled together what the people who actually played it are saying. Take it for what it’s worth, and keep in mind these previews get into story details, characters, enemies, puzzles, and locations you might want to discover blind. Proceed accordingly.
What the Previews Are Saying
Every outlet zeroed in on something a little different, but a few things kept coming up over and over:
- The switch to first-person is working. Exploration reportedly feels tighter and more claustrophobic than past entries, which, for a horror game, is exactly the point.
- St. Amelia, the fictional Scottish town, is getting praise for its atmosphere. Environmental storytelling seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
- The portable CRTV isn’t just a reskinned version of the classic radio. It’s locating enemies, pulling up recordings, and factoring into puzzles, making it more of a toolkit than a warning system.
- Combat exists, but ammo is scarce and melee weapons break, so avoidance is apparently the smarter play more often than not.
- You can distract enemies with bottles, radios, car alarms, and TVs, the usual survival-horror toolbox, but it sounds like it’s actually useful here instead of a gimmick.
- Puzzles are tied to the story and the history of the town rather than existing just to slow you down, which is the kind of thing that separates good horror puzzles from padding.
- Sound design and limited resources are apparently keeping tension high even in the quiet stretches, which, honestly, is the hardest part of horror game design to get right.
It’s not a flawless picture. Some previews flagged overly sensitive enemy detection, and a few found the melee combat stiff or awkward. Limited autosaving came up more than once too, which could mean redoing chunks of a level after a death. That’s never a fun surprise in a horror game where tension is already the whole point.
Even with those caveats, the consensus is that Screen Burn Interactive has something real here. This isn’t reading like a side project or a franchise placeholder to keep the lights on. Based on what’s being described, the studio is trying to build its own take on Silent Hill while still holding onto the psychological dread and vulnerability that made the series matter in the first place.
I’ll reserve actual judgment until I’ve played it myself. “Promising previews” has burned plenty of games before this one, and I’m not about to pretend secondhand impressions are the same as hands-on time. But the noise coming out of this event is louder and more consistent than I expected, and that’s worth paying attention to.
Silent Hill: Townfall Written Previews
Same spoiler warning applies here, so read at your own risk.
Silent Hill: Townfall Video Previews
Silent Hill: Townfall is in development at Screen Burn Interactive and lands September 24, 2026, on PS5 and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Add it to the pile. September’s already shaping up to be a fight for your money and your free time.
And for Silent Hill content that is from us, check out the following:
