Silent Hill: Townfall Preview: The TV Knows You’re Screwed
- Niels Gys
- 8 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Silent Hill: Townfall looks less like an action-heavy reinvention of Silent Hill and more like a slow, nasty first-person survival horror game built around exploration, puzzles, avoidance and one deeply suspicious portable television.
The important bit is that we now know considerably more about what you actually do.
You explore the abandoned Scottish island of St. Amelia. You hunt for clues. You solve puzzles that expect you to remember information rather than wait for the game to illuminate the correct cupboard in radioactive yellow. You use a CRTV to tune into signals, detect nearby monsters and understand things the environment isn't exactly volunteering.
And when something horrible finally finds you, Townfall would generally prefer you not solve the disagreement by becoming Doomguy.
Excellent.
Because Silent Hill has always been at its best when entering another room feels less like progression and more like accepting a legally questionable medical procedure.
If Townfall has put you in the mood for people making catastrophic decisions in badly lit places, our SAW: Genesis preview has traps, a playable Judge and all the workplace safety standards of an industrial blender.
This Is First-Person Silent Hill, Not Silent Hill With A Gun Camera
The obvious comparison is Resident Evil 7.
Not because Townfall suddenly turns Silent Hill into a Louisiana family argument involving chainsaws, but because moving the series into first person fundamentally changes how close everything gets.
Simon Ordell isn't tearing through St. Amelia like someone has installed a Monster Murder Loyalty Card in his wallet.
He moves cautiously.
The opening is deliberately slow. Exploration matters. Environmental information matters. Puzzles can rely on things you've discovered earlier, meaning Townfall expects you to actually look at its horrible little world instead of sprinting through it while mentally checking whether DoorDash delivers to cursed islands.
That matters enormously for horror.
First-person games live or die on whether looking around feels necessary. Once every corridor becomes merely the inconvenient tube connecting Combat Room A to Combat Room B, horror dies and comes back wearing a tactical vest.
Townfall appears to understand this.
The island isn't just scenery wrapped around encounters. You're reading it, interpreting it and trying to work out what the hell happened here.
Unfortunately, what happened here appears to include monsters the approximate size of local government buildings.
The CRTV Is Actually A Mechanic
The portable CRT television initially looks like exactly the sort of object Silent Hill would hand you because somebody in the art department correctly decided that old televisions are inherently sinister.
Put static on one and suddenly everyone assumes a murdered child is about to crawl through it.
But the CRTV isn't just goth luggage.
It detects nearby danger.
It can pick up signals, including transmissions connected to Zoe. It helps uncover information. It contributes to puzzle solving. It can even reveal creatures through walls and fog.
That makes it one of the more interesting ideas in Townfall because it connects several parts of the game instead of existing in its own isolated Gameplay Mechanic Display Cabinet.
You're not merely carrying a monster detector.
You're carrying something that helps you navigate, investigate and survive.
Which also creates a lovely horror problem.
If the television tells you something is nearby, congratulations: you now possess more information and considerably less happiness.
That's exactly what a good horror mechanic should do.
Prefer your horror with less psychological fog and more “we built a theme park and then started eating the customers”? Our My Cannibal Family preview explains why hospitality management has finally reached its natural conclusion.
Yes, You Can Fight. No, You Probably Shouldn't Start A Union About It
Combat exists.
Simon can use melee weapons. He can block and counterattack. Those weapons can break. A revolver is available. Enemies can react to gunfire.
This isn't a helpless walking simulator where encountering a monster means hiding inside a cupboard until Satan loses interest.
But the available hands-on evidence makes one thing fairly clear: combat is not supposed to turn Simon into the apex predator of Scotland.
Avoidance matters.
Hiding matters.
Distractions matter.
Weapons are limited enough that violence carries consequences beyond making something briefly stop screaming at you.
That's much closer to where Silent Hill belongs.
The minute the player begins viewing every monster as a walking ammunition reimbursement scheme, you've lost something important. Silent Hill creatures should feel like problems invading your environment, not piñatas containing crafting materials.
There is one reason for caution here.
Combat has already produced mixed impressions from hands-on sessions. The atmosphere and overall structure have landed better than the actual fighting for some who played the Gamescom build.
That doesn't make the combat bad.
It does mean we probably shouldn't start engraving its name onto the Survival Horror Hall of Fame trophy while the game is still wearing its preview-build trousers.
St. Amelia Already Sounds Horrible
The setting may be Townfall's strongest weapon.
St. Amelia is a remote Scottish island, and the game seems determined to exploit the isolation rather than merely use Scotland as decorative misery wallpaper.
Exploration is slow enough that spaces get time to breathe.
Fog obscures things.
Buildings have to be searched.
The CRTV feeds you information without making the environment completely legible.
And at least one hands-on session encountered a gigantic creature moving through St. Amelia while remaining partly obscured.
That's good monster design before we've even properly judged the monster.
Showing the player every square inch of the enormous horror immediately would be the videogame equivalent of introducing Dracula by making him stand under fluorescent supermarket lighting holding his driving licence.
Let the bastard remain unclear.
The frightening part isn't merely knowing there is something huge nearby.
It's knowing there is something huge nearby and not having enough visual information to calculate precisely how doomed you are.
The Biggest Question Is Whether Townfall Can Keep This Working
The opening structure sounds extremely promising because its systems reinforce one another.
Slow movement makes exploration feel dangerous.
Exploration feeds puzzles.
Puzzles encourage observation.
The CRTV helps observation while simultaneously warning you about threats.
Those threats encourage stealth and avoidance.
Combat exists as a possible answer, but apparently not the answer you should enthusiastically underline three times.
That's a coherent horror loop.
And coherence matters more than having fourteen mechanics fighting inside the same trench coat.
The unresolved question is longevity.
A CRTV that feels wonderfully strange during hour one could become supernatural admin by hour eight if every puzzle starts requiring Tune Frequency, Detect Thing, Walk To Thing, Repeat Until Scotland Ends.
Likewise, deliberately restrained combat is only effective if avoiding enemies remains tense rather than becoming routine crouching followed by prolonged appreciation of furniture.
We don't know yet.
And that's fine.
Townfall doesn't need a final verdict before release. It needs to demonstrate that its strange machinery actually belongs together.
Right now, it increasingly looks like it does.
For the rest of CRIMENET’s weekly haul of crime games, horror, villainy, GTA money and industry disasters caught wandering unattended, read This Week in CRIME. Consider it your underworld briefing before somebody respectable gets involved.
So, Is Silent Hill: Townfall Worth Watching?
Absolutely.
Not because it's Silent Hill.
Silent Hill has produced enough historic brilliance to earn attention, but nostalgia is not a transferable warranty.
Townfall is interesting because its actual gameplay identity is becoming visible.
It's a first-person psychological survival horror game built around careful exploration, environmental puzzles, CRTV-assisted investigation, stealth, threat detection and combat that seems deliberately less attractive than simply staying the hell away from whatever is breathing nearby.
That's a far more exciting proposition than “Silent Hill, except the camera moved.”
Silent Hill: Townfall launches September 24, 2026.
If the full game can sustain the tension its opening systems are creating, St. Amelia could become exactly the sort of place Silent Hill desperately needs.
Remote. Hostile. Difficult to understand.
And equipped with a television that somehow makes knowing what's in the next room worse.
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