Silent Hill: Townfall rewrites the series as first-person horror

Silent Hill: Townfall is the product of an unlikely collaboration — Konami, the franchise’s long-dormant owner, and Screen Burn Interactive, the Edinburgh studio behind Stories Untold and Observation. Together with Annapurna Interactive as co-publisher, they are bringing one of survival horror’s most influential series back from a 13-year absence. The studio’s choices are immediately striking.

The most striking of those choices is the camera. Every mainline Silent Hill game since 1999 has placed the player at a third-person distance from the protagonist — close enough to feel the threat, far enough to take in the landscape of psychological dread. Townfall abandons that entirely. You inhabit Simon Ordell, a new character, in first-person view, as he investigates St. Amelia, a remote Scottish island sealed off by fog and seemingly abandoned — but, as the game establishes early, not at rest. The year is 1996.

What Ordell carries into that fog is the CRTV, a handheld television that doubles as the game’s primary survival tool. It detects threats not visible to the naked eye, receives signal fragments that reveal pieces of St. Amelia’s history, and glows with an unnatural warmth in cold, wet rooms. Survival horror games have been searching for a good second-screen mechanic since 2005, and most have produced what amounts to a HUD in a different costume. The CRTV appears to be something genuinely different — a device that makes the player hold something up to the world in order to see it more clearly.

The collaboration between Konami and Annapurna is the signal worth reading most carefully. Annapurna has spent the past decade funding games that major publishers passed on — What Remains of Edith Finch, Outer Wilds, Stray — and its presence alongside Konami suggests the franchise holder is genuinely interested in what a smaller studio can do with Silent Hill. Jon McKellan, Screen Burn’s founder who directed the game, has described the project as respectful to the source material while deliberately offering a different approach. The first-person shift, the isolated Scottish setting, and the standalone narrative all support that framing: this is not a sequel, not a remake, but a self-contained chapter written by someone who wanted to try a different form.

Anthony Scott Burns and Pilotpriest — both known for electronic film scores — composed the soundtrack. Audio has always been central to what Silent Hill does, and the choice of composers associated with slow, pressurized electronic sound suggests the game will not abandon that tradition even as it shifts almost everything else.

The unknowns are real. Screen Burn’s longest game before Townfall was Observation, which ran around five hours. Whether the studio can sustain a full survival horror experience — with the pacing, enemy variety, and environmental design that Silent Hill demands — across the length of a complete game remains to be seen. The trailers confirm melee weapons, firearms, and stealth as core mechanics, with DualSense controller feedback on PS5 adding tactile detail. What they cannot confirm is execution. The game’s scope is clearly narrower than a mainline entry; the question is whether that narrowness is a feature or a constraint.

Silent Hill: Townfall launches September 24, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and PC — available via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Pre-orders are open on both platforms.

Tags: gaming, Annapurna Interactive, Konami, Screen Burn Interactive, Silent Hill, Silent Hill: Townfall