“It’s a tough act to follow, to join a franchise like this,” admits Silent Hill: Townfall director and writer Jon McKellan in an interview with Den of Geek. “It’s nerve-wracking, but not a challenge that you turn down. Within the team, we all had our own stories. I was a teenager when I played Silent Hill 1 for the first time. It was an awakening game because I didn’t know that games could be like this. Younger people in our team discovered it 20 years later, playing retro games, which puts it through a different lens.”As part of a special preview event in Los Angeles two months ahead of its launch, I was invited to sit down and play an early build of Silent Hill: Townfall, the third title since Konami revived its psychological horror series in 2024. A standalone story set in the small coastal Scottish town of St. Amelia in the ‘90s, Townfall follows a new protagonist named Simon Ordell as he awakens in town and tries to learn why he’s there. As with many past classic Silent Hill games, Simon’s presence is tied to deep-seated feelings of guilt and trauma, though details are understandably kept under wraps before the game’s September release. But it was this consistency in theme that got McKellan and the rest of the Scottish development team of Screen Burn Interactive thinking when they were putting together Townfall’s story.“We were trying to find out what were the commonalities between all of us that we associate with Silent Hill,” McKellan continues. “One of the biggest things that everyone was saying was that at the end of playing a Silent Hill game, you end up talking to someone to see if you understood what happened. There is a lot of room for interpretation and ambiguity. For our story, that was one of the yardsticks that was very important to us, that it felt like we orbited the Silent Hill vibe.”One of the hallmarks of the Silent Hill resurgence is that publisher Konami has been working with outside developers to help chart the future of the franchise. For the Silent Hill 2 remake, it was Bloober Team while NeoBards Entertainment took point on last year’s Silent Hill f. All of these projects have been produced by Motoi Okamoto, who also serves as a producer on Townfall, ensuring that the series’ hallmarks remain in place while the game provides its own unique adventure.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});“The throughline that we see within any Silent Hill game is that it needs to have a solid narrative,” Okamoto adds. “As long as we have a consistently strong narrative to deliver, we believe those games qualify as Silent Hill. With the Silent Hill 2 remake, Silent Hill f, and now Silent Hill: Townfall, as long as the throughline of a strong narrative is there, that is what makes up what we believe to make it Silent Hill.”One unique thing that stands out about Townfall compared to previous Silent Hill games is that it’s the first entry in the series to take on a fully first-person perspective, placing players in a much more immersive experience. That also puts players right in Simon’s shoes as he encounters the nightmarish monsters infesting St. Amelia, with the game placing a larger emphasis on stealth than prior Silent Hill games. Players can fight back against these monsters, either with makeshift melee weapons or, later in the game, firearms, but these enemies certainly won’t go down easily.“If you go in swinging, you’re going to have a bad time,” McKellan observes. “You need to figure out when’s the right time to engage and when to step back. There are a lot of things to figure out and it slows things down a little bit and makes it more about tension rather than action. It can be a hard and challenging game, but it’s hard in a different way. It’s not Souls-hard in that way, but it does need you to play in certain ways. There is still quite a lot of room there but maybe not what you expected. You have to assess how you’re going into this.”Before working on Silent Hill: Townfall, a lot of the Screen Burn team had worked on the first Alien: Isolation before forming their own studio. The tension-fueled sensibilities of that game, along with Screen Burn’s subsequent titles Stories Untold and Observation, are evident within Townfall and its moody, analog take on Silent Hill. But for Okamoto, he was particularly struck by the development team’s outside influences and desire for a Silent Hill game with more salient social commentary.“When Jon and the Screen Burn team first provided their pitch, two things stood out that made us realize that Townfall had its own potential,” explains Okamoto. “One was their story was inspired by documentaries and more thought-provoking type of work, I felt that really stood out. The other thing was that it has a more social commentary type of angle. It’s the dynamic between the individual and society at large and corporations. We felt that type of social angle was previously unexplored and had great potential.”Even with these unique qualities, from its change in perspective to its narrative themes, Silent Hill: Townfall definitely feels like a distinctly Silent Hill adventure. And after playing the game for several hours, I’m personally interested to see where the story goes next, along with Simon’s connection to St. Amelia and its undoubtedly tragic history. Silent Hill has always been about broken people facing their trauma in a haunted setting and, with Townfall, that tradition looks to be in good hands with a fresh twist.Developed by Screen Burn Interactive and published by Konami and Annapurna Interactive, Silent Hill: Townfall releases September 24 for PlayStation 5 and PC.The post Reinventing Psychological Horror: How Screen Burn Interactive Brought Its Signature Strengths to Silent Hill appeared first on Den of Geek.