Silent Hill Townfall: the series is coming to Scotland, but what dangers will it bring? | | Sports

A A man washes at the dock of a small coastal village, his memories are unclear, a dark sea fog swirls around him. For starters, this could no longer be Silent Hill – a loner drawn to a remote town to find out why. But this time, we’re not in the Pacific Northwest of the original game or the Japan of last year’s great Silent Hill f. We’re on an island off the north coast of Scotland, and it’s 1996. Leading man Simon Ordell knows the place, but he doesn’t know how – and why does he have an IV cannula in his hand?

Also announced for 2022, Townfall is the work of Glasgow-based studio Screen Burn, which has previously overseen horror titles Stories Untold and Observation. Like silent Hill f, moves away from Silent Hill itself: St Amelia is a fishing town, led by St Monans and many other coastal towns that the group visited and took many pictures.

Why are you making that change of location? “We felt that the players were getting a little tired,” says series creator Motoi Okamoto. “Silent Hill was a little repetitive, we used the same place, the game felt the same. We wanted to refresh the series and create a new experience by defining Silent Hill not as a real place but as a phenomenon, a state of mind.”

At Konami’s preview event in Tokyo, we played the game for about two hours, and it’s clear that this is a lot of Silent Hill action, but with a fun British twist. The visual detail is amazing. As Simon, you walk along the harbor with its piles of crab cages, and reach the town itself, mud houses, gray stone walls worn by sea water, small tat shops on the beach, an old British Telecom telephone box in the town square. It is familiar and strange because as soon as you arrive, you realize that everything has been abandoned. Home buyer signs are on every street, the houses are dark, the lights flicker ominously. There is a sense of anger at the organization called CEG – street protests have taken place. He wrote to the police saying there was nothing they could do until help arrived.

For the opening hour you’re free to explore, enter any house with an unlocked door, and find old PCs, creepy bathrooms and Formica-clad kitchens, and the habit makes it even more terrifying. As you go, strange details come out – Simon was staying in a nearby hotel, but his room is full of medical equipment. People have been sick, some have disappeared. A male voice on the phone thanks you for coming back and asks for help. Some time ago, I watched a video of a woman named Zoe who told Simon: “You can’t come to this room, you have to come to me.” I have a slow burn for the best Silent Hill titles – highlights are removed from the world in small words.

Right from the start, it’s clear that all of the time and features have been wonderfully crafted into this game. In the first picture you need to use the PC in Zoe’s house to check her emails, but to do this, you need to restore her electricity by taking a prepaid card from the local newsagent and inserting it into the meter. It is something that many UK game developers will recognize, especially if they were there in the 90s – although it seems, it confused the American and Japanese journalists. Elsewhere, the portable radio from the previous titles, used to detect incoming enemies, is now a small handheld video, designed to look like one of those Casio mini TVs. In some places you can adjust it to see blurry, saturated images or videos that act as highlights; but when monsters are close, they can trace their tracks through walls.

The obsession with aging is a common theme in previous Screen Burn titles. “The performance is the main reason,” says Jon McKellan, director and writer of Townfall. “It’s going to be our calling card and Screen Burn has never worked before Guest: Isolation and there was a lot of analogue VHS tapes. I love marrying these visual concepts with story and UI design. Analogue technology is fragile, it’s imperfect, it feels like it could break at any moment – and all these things work best with fear. You worry that the tools in front of you can’t save you from whatever is out there. I think that if Simon was traveling with a cell phone and Google Maps it would be very different. “

As your hunt around town takes you from homes and shops to local hospitals, some kind of evidence of great things lurks. And naturally, the monsters arrive – strange, tortured people with ax heads in their faces, their arms tied with leather straps. At first you have nothing but wood to defend yourself with and a battle is needed: you can block or attack, but the creatures are fast, deadly and difficult to take down. There’s no parry or dodge so if you commit, you’ll need excellent timing. The other option is stealth – the CRTV shows you where the enemies are, while the tracking mode lets you peek from cover to learn how they move, and the first-person mode means you rely on these things a lot.

Our time with the game also took a slightly futuristic dimension in a hellish, phantasmagorical underworld of sewers, barbed wire and ominous red lighting. It might be under the town or it might be in Simon’s brain, but it’s part of Silent Hill. This time, however, along with the psychological risks, there are also political problems – the CEG has destroyed and destroyed the village, recalling the problems of towns such as Grangemouth and Mossmoran at the hands of the petrochemical giants. Simon’s story is set up to accomplish this.

“We wanted to look at the relationship between a person and the people they live with,” says McKellan. “What does it mean to be in a town like this and be affected by it – what do you do with that? I believe that at the end of the game, people are coming to terms with the decisions, and some of the things that Simon went through. You start to release and process it, and show your fear, your inner turmoil to the world around you obviously Hill is Quiet.”

There are questions that will need to be answered before accepting Townfall as the next successful step in the renewal of the series after Silent Hill f. So far, the enemy figures we’ve seen are familiar Silent Hill archetypes and it’s hard to judge how this new stealth/peek system will play out. But the situation is well realized, while the premise of the story of Silent Hill 2 – a man looking for a woman with whom he seems to have had an affair – is interesting, and from what we have seen, it can be messed up in a bad way. These are unpleasant things.

“There’s a lot of personal pain — things that have happened to me or to members of the team,” says McKellan. “We try to portray real life because it’s often less interesting and more formal than Hollywood, and for me that’s where it gets really scary.

Silent Hill: Townfall will be released on 25 September