The review embargo for Silent Hill: Townfall lifted this morning, and the first scores are good. The PlayStation 5 version sits at 81 on Metacritic from 47 reviews: 35 positive, 11 mixed and not a single negative. The game launches on 24 September on PS5 and PC, costs 49.99 dollars on Steam, and Digital Deluxe owners at 59.99 get in from 22 September.
That makes three well received Silent Hill games in a row, after the Silent Hill 2 remake and Silent Hill f, both at 86 on Metacritic. This one comes from neither Bloober Team nor NeoBards. The developer is Screen Burn of Glasgow, formerly No Code, the team behind Stories Untold and Observation, with Konami and Annapurna Interactive publishing.
The scores so far
- Digital Spy, 100 out of 100. The top score on Metacritic. The review likens it to Alien: Isolation and the first-person Resident Evil games, wrapped in Silent Hill's rust and fog.
- PC Gamer, 89 out of 100. Elie Gould finished it in 13 hours on a PC with an RTX 3070, a Ryzen 5 5600G and 16 GB of RAM, and calls it the right mix of old and new: classic psychological horror plus the CRTV, a handheld TV that shows monsters through walls.
- GamesRadar+, 4 out of 5. Properly scary, with superb atmosphere and sound. The downsides are heavy reliance on stealth and too few enemy types.
- Push Square, 7 out of 10. The coolest of the big reviews. It likes the Scottish island but finds the new ideas underdone: the CRTV is underused and combat loses its tension.
Where critics agree and where they split
Nearly everyone likes St. Amelia, the invented town on a Scottish island. Fog, old streets, a hospital and offices, and past them a stretch of new builds that PC Gamer found more unsettling than the monsters because it felt so familiar. The CRTV is the other shared highlight, used both for puzzles and for staying out of sight.
Stealth splits opinion. The game asks you to hide far more often than it asks you to fight, and GamesRadar+ and Push Square both say that wears thin towards the end. PC Gamer also warns about a pipe room late in the game, where levers have to be turned following a clue that looks like Morse code. The reviewer admits it took a long time to crack.
Should you buy it
If the older games with fog, radio static and puzzles are what you loved, the reviews say Townfall delivers that, just in first person. If you want action, wait for player impressions: there is little combat, and it is the weakest part. Steam Deck support has not been rated yet, PC Gamer lists it as unknown.
Sources
Metacritic critic reviews. PC Gamer. GamesRadar+. Push Square. Steam store page. Screenshots from the official Steam gallery.
