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SILENT HILL: Townfall

Konami's next Silent Hill is out. Deluxe buyers got a 48-hour head start on September 22; the standard edition unlocked on Steam on September 23 and PS5 buyers got it on September 24, the date Konami's own listing carried. It is first person the whole way through, it is set on a Scottish island in 1996, and the old portable radio is gone.

What is live right now

The early access window is the reason the Steam page looked busy before the release date. Deluxe buyers got 48 hours of head start, and by mid-morning UTC on September 22 the game had 164 user reviews on Steam, 138 of them positive. Nearly everyone writing was between one and five and a half hours in, which is exactly the range where a horror game shows you its setting but not its story.

Once the standard edition opened on September 23, the numbers changed shape, and they kept moving in the same direction. Steam now shows 3,148 reviews with 2,051 positive — 65%, which is Steam's "Mixed" band, down from the 84% the Deluxe buyers had posted on day one. English reviews on their own sit at 1,873 with 69% positive. The most upvoted review on the page arrived from someone who finished it, 24.9 hours in with 1,318 votes, and it opens "Initially I was going to give this game a thumbs up, but, having finished it, I just can't recommend it to anyone who values their time." The one that led the page for the first week is still up there at 1,108 votes — a negative at 1.7 hours that opens "I hate giving bad reviews over performance, but despite trying everything, UE5 won this round" and ends with the writer refunding. A player on an RTX 5080 refunded at 1.0 hours for stutter on high settings, and the loudest complaint that is actually about the game is a 13.9-hour reviewer: "if your not into sneaking around A LOT dont buy this. its 70% sneaking."

Pre-ordering either edition gets the CRTV Style: Rusted cosmetic, and the PS5 pre-order adds CRTV Style: Beach Edition on top. Console prices match PC: $49.99 and $59.99, no discount running on either one. There is no Xbox version and no Switch version.

The studio is the reason this one is worth watching

Screen Burn has made exactly two games you might have played, both under its old name. No Code was founded in Glasgow in August 2015 by Jon McKellan and Omar Khan. McKellan came out of Creative Assembly, where he had been working on Alien: Isolation, and the pair shipped Stories Untold in 2017 through Devolver Digital, an anthology of four horror games built around 1980s home computers. Then came Observation in 2019, a thriller where you play the space station's own AI, made by a core team of eleven. It took the BAFTA for Best British Game at the 2020 awards, the first time a Scottish studio had won it, beating Codemasters, Frontier Developments and Creative Assembly in the category on the night.

The studio was announced as the developer of a Silent Hill project in October 2022 and then went quiet for years. It rebranded to Screen Burn Interactive in July 2025 and confirmed the game was still alive. This is the first project where Konami and Annapurna Interactive are on the box together. Screen Burn has also said St. Amelia is modelled on St Monans, a real fishing village on the Fife coast with a harbour small enough to walk in ten minutes, which is a fair hint at the scale of the map.

First person, no dodge button, and a handheld TV instead of the radio

Simon Ordell is called back to the island of St. Amelia to "put things right", which is Konami's own phrasing, and he arrives with a patient wristband on and a blood bag tube running out of his wrist. From the first minute you are looking through his eyes, and he is not a fighter. Melee weapons like pipes and planks wear out, ammunition is scarce, and enemies react to being spotted instead of walking fixed patrol routes. Several early reviews describe the loop as watching from cover, deciding whether a room is worth crossing, and leaving fights unfinished. His early goal, per the reviews, is finding the nurse.

The CRTV is the piece that defines the game. It is a handheld analog television and radio that replaces the static radio from the 1999 original. You raise it to scan for creatures, tune across frequencies to collect story fragments, and compare the grainy footage it picks up against the buildings around you to find where to go next. There is no conventional HUD, and the handheld screen does the job that markers and arrows usually would. Puzzles are built around reading the environment rather than inventory combinations. The options menu splits difficulty into five choices: three for the game and its enemies, and two for the puzzles, so you can keep the puzzles gentle while the creatures stay nasty.

Simon spends the whole game with an IV line in his wrist. The medical imagery is not subtle, and it is not decoration either.

"Like the intravenous needle permanently jutting out of its hero's wrist, Silent Hill: Townfall gives this long running series a welcome shot in the arm." That is IGN, scoring it 8/10.

IGN, September 21, 2026

The embargo lifted on September 21 and the scores came in high. OpenCritic has it at 82 with 86% of critics recommending it. PC Gamer gave 89/100, Eurogamer 4/5, PlayStation LifeStyle and GameRant both 9/10, and Tom's Guide called it the best Silent Hill in 25 years. The recurring criticism is tuning rather than quality: GameSpot, which liked the game, said the final third hands out enough resources to make some encounters trivial, and the stealth comparisons the studio keeps earning are to Alien: Isolation, a game Screen Burn's director worked on at his previous studio.

Three things to fix before the game starts

These come from players who spent their first hours in menus instead of the town.

Performance, in other people's numbers

The pattern in the negatives is consistency rather than severity: it is a very good-looking Unreal Engine 5 game that stutters when it streams, and it stutters more if your CPU is the weak link in the build. Players on current high-end cards report it settling down, and one review at 3.3 hours on a Steam Deck OLED described it as running surprisingly well for UE5 outside the loading dips.

Half the cast you meet on St. Amelia is holding something back. The game takes about 10 to 14 hours to finish once.

How long it is, and how many endings

A first playthrough runs about 10 to 14 hours. There are five endings in total, and two of them only unlock in New Game Plus, so a single run will not show you everything the island is hiding. Konami describes the endings as shaped by what you do rather than chosen from a menu, and GameSpot's reviewer worked out there is a hidden tracker behind the scenes and started avoiding fights partly so it would not judge him for it. The structure is deliberately old-fashioned: large areas start closed, and keys, parts and items you pick up reopen them, which is the loop the early games in the series used. If you bounce off slow first acts, this one is slow on purpose, and the reviews keep mentioning its pacing as both the strength and the complaint.

PC requirements

Mac and Linux are not supported. Steam lists single-player only, full controller support, DualSense support, adjustable difficulty, cloud saves and family sharing. There is no co-op mode and none announced.

Straight answers

Watch and buy