Silent Hill is a survival horror game known for the creepy, foggy town of the same name. However, the recent games have taken the setting elsewhere, with Silent Hill f placed in ’80s Japan and the upcoming Silent Hill: Townfall placed in ’90s Scotland. The game is in first person, and players will have access to the CRTV, a device that helps the protagonist, Simon, figure out clues, reach a destination, and locate monsters.
I was able to play four hours of the game at a recent preview event, and it has many of the ingredients of a creepy Silent Hill game, including the eerie monsters, a quiet town transformed into a dark world, a protagonist willing to enter a nightmarish world, and strange puzzles.
Motoi Okamoto is the Silent Hill series producer, and he wanted to make sure that gamers are getting something different for each new game, as fans can see with games like Silent Hill f and Silent Hill Townfall.
“The types of narratives being told in those games are becoming a little repetitive and a little too similar to one another,” Okamoto said in a roundtable interview we were a part of. “We don’t want players to get bored with the types of experiences we can provide. We wanted to try to change things up and provide some fresh new takes, which is why we started venturing towards new horizons; for example, going to Japan, and this time over to Scotland.”
Silent Hill: Short Message helped to push the world of Silent Hill globally.
“In Short Message, I think we introduced the concept of the Silent Hill phenomenon, where similar types of psychological experiences and phenomena take place, and not just within the titular town of Silent Hill,” Okamoto tells Nerd Reactor. “But we introduced that concept to show that similar types of experiences can take place across all parts of the world.”
The game is set in 1996, and gamers will notice it by seeing the types of PCs, phones, and TVs out there in the town of St. Amelia.
“There are other narrative reasons for the time period, but I think the world was kind of on a technology cusp around the mid-90s, where you know the internet was starting to become a thing. But you were too early to have Google Maps in your pocket, right? You don’t have this Magic Bullet for all the problems that might come up. With analog tech, you feel like you can’t quite rely on it. It feels a little bit uncertain.
“And I think that’s a great place to be for horror and a great place for Silent Hill as well. Static radios would not sound quite the same if it were digital radio. You would lose a lot of personality. I think by going to digital, it felt like the right place and time, but narratively, there’s plenty of relevance to the mid-90s in general.”
Silent Hill: Townfall will be released on September 24, 2026, on PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.
