‘Silent Hill: Townfall’ review: like a folk-horror sequel to ‘Alien: Isolation’

We may pull ourselves from the ocean onto a deserted dock, not knowing where we are, who we are or why there’s an IV drip of strange black fluid in the back of our hand, but Silent Hill: Townfall still feels very much like a homecoming.

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After a sojourn into the myths and architecture of rural Japan on last year’s Silent Hill f, the franchise is called back to the West, although not as far as the rigid blocks of smalltown USA that it’s trudged so many times before. This time our bewildered amnesiac hero, Simon Ordell, finds himself mysteriously summoned to the remote Scottish island of St Amelia, recently mourning a local tragedy and now mist-shrouded and abandoned. Although, to be fair, most remote British villages feel like this after 5pm on weekdays. Except here, the phone boxes work.

The winding backstreets and quaint local shops – stunningly rendered in the soggy matt textures of classic folk horror; this is among the most believable and immersive landscapes in the series so far – are soon overrun with chest-rending monsters, hyperactive axe-heads and a towering creature lost in the fog overhead. To make Simon’s predicament worse, as he attempts to track down a missing nurse and the unknown man who has summoned him here, the place has a tendency, at unexpected moments, to go a bit Hades-y.

You know the eerie-industrial-horror drill, but haven’t played it like this before. In the closest experience yet to Hideo Kojima’s Playable Teaser demo for the much-desired (but ultimately cancelled) Silent Hills project of 2014, Townfall is the first major instalment played entirely in the first person – and in the hands of developer Screen Burn Interactive, it works wonderfully.

Besides our inability to hop over low walls to cut out whole areas of enemies, our willingness to inject ourselves with stuff we’ve found on the floor of a grotty toilet and the bits with the time-travelling tape recorder, realism is paramount. We’re cast back into the clunky technological explosion of 1996, dealing at life-risking lengths with its dial-up internet, unreliable printers and the particular terror of the corrupted floppy disk. Simon carries around a hand-held portable TV device that acts as warning and tracker for enemies – a smart, radio-tech get-around for the whole ‘seeing through walls’ conundrum – and a hub for fine-tuning mini-games that unlock clues to objectives and bizarre postcard collectibles. Saving progress involves literally dialling a number on push-button keypads, lock dials are pleasingly 3D, bullets realistically scarce. Some formerly-human monsters even have pictures of their families clipped to their waists. And, crucially, creeping around dark, abandoned houses, through bleak shopping centres and around a corporate tower block with a PR department that’s almost as big a disaster zone as Ed Sheeran – all in the eye of a single weak flashlight – is everything Silent Hills promised.

There are minor drawbacks to Townfall’s strong believability. Few are the grand, gigantic puzzle walls requiring far-flung artefacts to solve or the elaborately engineered door locks and their cryptic poems on plaques (although these elements do crop up). Instead, many puzzles have you trying to operate the sort of industrial or medical machinery that nurses and engineers take month-long induction courses in, except you’ve got a matter of minutes and a gang of hellfucks biting your a***. Yet, there’s a profound satisfaction to working your way through their very true-to-life methods – and having finished it you’re probably entitled to a City & Guilds diploma or two.

In return, Townfall gives you tension by the bucketload. Its developers have previously worked on Alien: Isolation, and this is the Hebridean equivalent. There’s no shame in Story Mode here, giving you fewer and weaker enemies you can face down with a plank of wood in the more traditional (and arguably more fun) Silent Hill fashion. But on the Normal settings the developers intend, most enemies are one-shotters that require tactical blocking and attacks to dispatch, forcing you into stealth mode for much of the game. Even when Simon gets tooled up with pistols, shotguns and flare guns later on, Townfall will suddenly throw you into a new chapter as an unarmed new character, snivelling behind cover and desperately scouring the back alleys for pipe or gauze. And there are fantastic, unavoidable stealth sections where you’re stalked by an unkillable mega-beast, hiding breathless in cupboards. You might as well be cowering in the darkness from a xenomorph.

Twisting into a kind of rusted horror Groundhog Day as it goes – even replaying in search of the five different endings is written into the concept – Townfall’s story unravels masterfully, underpinning Simon’s journey of despairing self-discovery with issues of corporate greed, environmental collapse and the decay of Britain’s left-behind communities, all laid out in self-contained set piece chapters that keep every creep and peek of its 14-20-hour run-through (depending on how cautious and completist you are) fresh and compulsive. The tense, terrifying Silent Hill reinvention we’ve all been waiting for.

‘Silent Hill: Townfall’ is released September 24 on PlayStation 5 and PC

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