Silent Hill: Townfall review — Screen Burn's Scottish horror is the series at its most ambitious

Silent Hill: Townfall is the latest entry in Konami's revived survival horror series, developed by Scottish indie studio Screen Burn — the team behind Observation and Stories Untold. Set in 1996 on St. Amelia, a remote Scottish island in the North Sea, it's a bold, idiosyncratic take that earns its place alongside 2025's Silent Hill f as proof the series has genuinely found its footing again.

Protagonist Simon Ordell washes ashore with an IV bag taped to his shoulder and a guilty conscience written all over him — classic Silent Hill setup, but Screen Burn moves through those familiar beats quickly before pushing somewhere more interesting. St. Amelia is rendered with extraordinary verisimilitude: British street signs, blinking crossing lights, cheery bunting, a post office, a newsagent, a video store. The town expands outward from a cobbled market square into pebbledashed terraced houses, brutalist 70s architecture, tatty pubs, and roadside cafes. The decay was clearly setting in before the fog ever arrived — rows of for-sale signs and closed-for-business notices make that plain. The game blends stealth and meticulous world design with a streak of social realism that gives its horror a grounded, distinctly British texture.

Screen Burn's cultural reinterpretation of Silent Hill's iconography is one of Townfall's sharpest moves. Gleaming American hospitals become cramped NHS wards; spacious malls shrink into stark concrete shopping precincts. It's the kind of shift Silent Hill f pulled off by relocating to 1960s rural Japan — using a specific place and time to make the horror feel genuinely alien rather than generically spooky. Screen Burn has form here: Observation leaned hard into claustrophobic sci-fi dread, and Stories Untold built its horror out of mundane objects and fragmented memory. Both instincts show up in Townfall. The comparison to The Chinese Room's Everybody's Gone to the Rapture — another game that made a very specific corner of Britain feel both achingly real and deeply wrong — is apt.

Townfall isn't a Silent Hill 2 cover act, which was the risk given how quickly it deploys the series' classic imagery. It's something more ambitious: a game that uses those touchstones as a launchpad rather than a destination. With Silent Hill f and now Townfall, the revival looks less like a lucky streak and more like a deliberate creative strategy — hand the series to developers with a strong point of view and get out of the way.