The Best Townfall Prep Isn't a Silent Hill Game
This Thursday, September 24, Silent Hill: Townfall arrives on PS5 and PC, and anyone holding the Digital Deluxe Edition gets in 48 hours early, from Tuesday, September 22. It is the first full-length Silent Hill played entirely in first person, set in a fog-bound Scottish coastal town in 1996, and it is going to be a lot of people's first Silent Hill, which raises the obvious question: do you need the old ones?
Short answer: no. Konami's own announcement calls Townfall "a full-length, self-contained psychological horror." You play Simon Ordell, a new character voiced by Jovan Adepo, called back to the island town of St. Amelia to "put things right." The town is fictional, modelled on the real fishing village of St Monans in Fife. Terry O'Quinn plays an enigmatic man named Richard. Nobody from the older games is waiting for you.
The longer answer is more useful. If you want to know what you are actually buying on Thursday, the best homework comes from the studio that made it.
Meet the people behind the fog
Townfall is developed by Screen Burn, a 30-person studio in Glasgow that was called No Code until it renamed itself in July 2025. Jon McKellan and Omar Khan founded it in 2015, and McKellan directs and writes Townfall. Its two best-known games are the reason Konami came calling. Series producer Motoi Okamoto told the PlayStation Blog in July: "I had personally played Screen Burn's previous titles Stories Untold and Observation, and both were fantastic, so I felt confident leaving the project in their hands."
Stories Untold (2017) is a four-episode horror anthology themed after 1980s technology, mixing text adventure, first-person exploration and puzzles. Observation (2019) puts you in the role of SAM, the artificial intelligence of a space station whose crew has vanished, and it won Best British Game at the 2020 BAFTA Games Awards.
Both are games about reading a place through a screen. That is exactly what Townfall's signature gadget does. The CRTV is a pocket television you tune into unstable signals, picking up nearby threats and fragments of the town's past. McKellan told the PlayStation Blog that "the CRTV couldn't work from any other perspective" than first person. Watch ten minutes of Observation and you will see where that instinct comes from.
St. Amelia, through the CRTV
It also sets expectations on pace. Jasmine Gould-Wilson played a Gamescom demo for GamesRadar and came away cool on it, writing that Townfall "just fails to communicate that in a vertical slice demo by virtue of its slow-build horrors being so excruciatingly slow." Konami's pitch leans the same way: a limited set of weapons and tools, with evasion as tense as the fighting is frantic. Our read: if Observation's patient, look-closer rhythm hooked you, Townfall's slow burn probably will too. If it bored you, wait for reviews.
If you want Silent Hill anyway
Horror season is a fine time to catch up, and Townfall does talk to its elders. McKellan, speaking to Game Rant, was upfront about which ones.
Start with Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team's 2024 remake of the 2001 original. It is the most accessible way into the series today, it scored 87 on Metacritic on PC, and Akira Yamaoka came back to score it. It is also the game Townfall is most often measured against. Okamoto told Game Rant there are "definitely many ways" Townfall resembles it, while arguing that Townfall stands out for "its own take on social commentary," exploring an individual, society at large, and the impact of corporations.
Then play Silent Hill f (2025), set in a rural Japanese town in the 1960s. It is proof that the series no longer needs its American lakeside town. Okamoto has said Konami wants to treat Silent Hill "not as a physical location but as a phenomenon, a state of mind," and Townfall's Scottish island is the same idea pointed somewhere new.
Save Silent Hill 3 (2003) for later. It is a direct sequel to the first game, and a Bloober Team remake of that first game was announced in June 2025, so it makes sense to play the pair in order once the remake lands.
P.T. (2014) is history, and McKellan's mention of it is the reason it belongs here. The playable teaser for the cancelled Silent Hills was pulled from the PlayStation Store and has since been blocked from running on PS5. It was always free, and there is no longer a legitimate way to download it, so watch a playthrough instead.
The order we would play them
Start at the top and work down, and you reach Thursday with the right instincts.
None of this is required. Townfall is built to stand alone, and walking into St. Amelia knowing nothing is a perfectly good way to meet it. But if you only have one evening before Thursday, spend it on Observation. It will tell you more about the game you are about to play than any Silent Hill will.
