Silent Hill: Townfall Review: Inspired Yet Lumbering

Silent Hill: Townfall, from developer Screen Burn, is an often inspired, if slightly lumbering, trek into the fog. The review from Rock Paper Shotgun states the game tells a story of a fictional late 90s Scottish island community through the intersecting lives of three people.

Simon is a bespectacled and bemused Black American who arrives on the pier. He is here to do something for Richard, a grave white American who communicates via a chunky pocket TV. Simon is also searching for Zoe, a local white English nurse carrying a world of hurt. The island of St Amelia has weathered a disaster. Roads are blockaded. A memorial is covered in pictures of the missing. Monstrous concrete walls block routes inland.

The Nature of Trauma

The cast move as though half-asleep, trying to escape each other's dreams. They are consummate Silent Hill characters, beings of interwoven trauma. Their wincing efforts spawn temporal ruptures. These replace St Amelia's streets with a radiant blue and scarlet labyrinth of pipes and concrete. Simon orbits between the pier and a hotel room. Zoe is a prisoner of the people she couldn't save. Richard can never quite reach the tenth floor of an office.

The temporal mechanics of trauma extend into the game's puzzle and location design. This often consists of rites of suffering and abortive catharsis. In one house, the days have become tabulated bodycounts on cassette. In Zoe's nightmares, Simon searches for blood donors among patients cast in concrete.

Puzzles and Period Technology

Townfall's puzzles are often compelling. A sizeable chunk consist of finding or figuring out 3 or 4 digit keycode puzzles. The best are believable extensions of location and story themes. They are deviously facilitated by period technology. You will fire up beautifully beige, alt-historical desktop computers to comb a primitive email system. You will call obscure numbers at careful recreated payphones, which also let you save the game.

Screen Burn remain adepts at recreating older hardware and infusing it with menace. The most sinister devices are generally medical instruments. During its opening half, Townfall often feels like a meditation upon the early months of the Covid pandemic. Zoe's narrative explores the brutalising of British NHS staff.

A Tale of Corporate Arrogance

Later on, Townfall evolves into a tale of banal corporate arrogance and neglect. This is specific to the late 90s, at the peak of North Sea oil production. The game includes a playable cross-section of a big company's callous attempts at reputation management. You move between layers of damage control. You trace evidence of greenwashing in wrecked media departments. You read memos about using "restructuring" to get rid of troublemakers.

If all this is fascinating, the price is spending a lot of time lurking behind cover. All major objectives involve a journey across town. You will meet creatures called "Others." You can fight them with a salvaged plank or pipe, but it's not advisable on normal difficulty. Melee weapons break after a couple of KOs. Guns are scarce. It's better to stay low and use closets. You can lob bricks to distract enemies.

The stealth is easier if you're Simon. His magic pocket TV can be tuned to track an individual Other. When aiming right at an adversary, you see a fizzy video image revealing distance and orientation. Zoe gets an LCD pager with bars that work like a compass, tracking several enemies at once. The reviewer found pinning down one foe's proximity more helpful than keeping tabs on several.