Silent Hill: Townfall asks what's real when the fog lifts

In a series built on fog and psychological dread, Silent Hill: Townfall takes a gamble that feels both natural and risky: first-person perspective. I played about four hours of a preview build, and the shift is not just a camera change. It rewires how you navigate fear, how you fight, and how you interpret a story that might not be happening at all.

A foggy arrival

The game opens with Simon, the protagonist, arriving in the Scottish town of St. Amelia. The details are deliberately fuzzy. He might have come by boat. He might have crawled out of the water. A letter calls him back, but nothing about the journey is clean. As he walks through empty streets, he hears shouting and sees flashes of what could be a riot, only to find the square deserted. Is Simon hallucinating? Are dark forces pulling him? The game does not answer, and that uncertainty is the point, the same kind of intentional ambiguity that, in an entirely different field, makes AI claim-auditing so tricky, as seen in OpenAI's own team walking back bold health AI claims.

A ringing payphone pushes him toward a woman named Zoe. Then the world shifts. Red light floods an underground structure, the series' signature Otherworld, and Simon ends up in an apartment holding a hand-held TV. That CRTV becomes the key to everything: tuning signals reveals hints, solves puzzles, and later lets you see monsters through walls.

The story within the puzzles

Writer and director Jon McKellen told us that every puzzle in Townfall is a story beat. The signals on the CRTV are tied to St. Amelia's past and to Zoe's. Visiting her empty apartment shows she was a nurse. Her office has three scales, each waiting for an object that symbolizes a failure. You find her ID badge, a mistaken prescription from the pharmacy, and a broken stethoscope in a coworker's apartment. The stethoscope symbolizes her inability to truly hear her patients. Zoe's story connects to a medical outbreak in the town, and somehow to Simon himself, though he does not know her. These narrative layers reward careful attention over simple item-collection, much like the way AI benchmarks often miss the real-world nuance of a model's performance.

First-person frights

Combat in Townfall is ugly and desperate. In third-person you can dodge, circle, strategise. In first-person you face the enemy head-on or run. The streets are full of faceless creatures wrapped in industrial straps, their faces replaced by axe blades. Later, tentacle-firing monsters appear that can grab and kill you quickly. Weapons are scarce: pieces of wood that break after a couple of fights, and later a revolver that is powerful but loud, reloads slowly, and draws more enemies. The gun is a liability.

The smartest play is stealth. You can hide behind walls, cars, fences. The CRTV lets you see enemies through fog. You can peek around corners with L1. Small spaces like closets and half-open doors offer refuge. Bricks and bottles can be thrown as distractions, and you can turn on radios or TVs to lure creatures away. The game wants you to avoid fighting, and the mechanics are built to reward patience over aggression.

A PS5 Pro-enhanced horror

Developer Screen Burn photographed real Scottish coastal towns to build St. Amelia. The game uses a 2.35:1 cinematic aspect ratio and offers a 30FPS Quality mode and a 60FPS Performance mode. On PS5 Pro, PSSR upscaling and ray tracing make the fog and the Otherworld's red light hauntingly realistic.

The DualSense controller adds physical weight. Haptics sell the smash of a plank against a creature and the jarring block of a counterattack. Motion controls let you twist the controller to tune the CRTV like a real dial, and aim the revolver with a slight tilt. These tactile touches make the horror feel closer, less abstract.

Silent Hill: Townfall launches on September 24, exclusively on PlayStation 5. My preview left me with more questions than answers, but the kind of questions the series thrives on: about perception, guilt, and how much of the horror is real.