Silent Hill: Townfall Scored an 81 on Metacritic. Critics Are Grading the Wrong Thing

I want to start with the number, because it's the thing everyone's going to search for anyway: Silent Hill: Townfall is sitting at 81 on Metacritic off roughly 68 critic reviews, with a "Generally Favorable" tag and, notably, zero reviews classified as negative. That's a perfectly respectable score for a horror game from a studio nobody outside the genre had heard of a year ago. It's also, if you've read the actual reviews instead of just the aggregate, a number that's hiding a much more interesting argument underneath it — one that I think says more about where horror games are right now than it says about this specific game.

What Townfall actually is, in plain terms

Here's the setup, stripped of marketing language: you play Simon Ordell, voiced by Jovan Adepo, and the game keeps dropping him in the water next to the docks of a Scottish fishing town called St. Amelia, which he has no memory of ever visiting. He has to piece together why the town keeps pulling him back, guided along the way by a nurse named Zoe, voiced by Kezia Burrows, who reaches him through an old CRT handheld device, and pursued by an "enigmatic man" named Richard, played by Terry O'Quinn — yes, Lost's John Locke, which is a genuinely fun bit of casting for a game this committed to 1996 nostalgia. The year matters to the story on purpose. Writer and director Jon McKellan has said he set it in 1996 specifically because that's roughly when home technology, the personal computer, the early internet, started reshaping ordinary life, and Townfall's entire aesthetic leans into that exact moment of analog dread.

The bigger swing is the camera. This is the first Silent Hill game ever told entirely in first person, which is a real departure for a series built around over-the-shoulder tension. It wasn't a gimmick tacked on late — Screen Burn's previous games were first-person too, and the studio has explained that Simon's handheld CRTV, the device you use to track nearby threats, only works as a first-person object. Put it on a HUD in third person and, in McKellan's own words, it starts to feel like a minimap, which is about as far from Silent Hill's DNA as you can get. St. Amelia itself is a fictionalized version of a real Fife village called St Monans, and series producer Motoi Okamoto has been open about why Konami keeps moving the franchise out of the United States: he wants Silent Hill treated as "a phenomenon, a state of mind" rather than one specific town, which is exactly what last year's Japan-set Silent Hill f also did. Structurally, Townfall follows that same playbook too — five different endings, McKellan calls it a "wide linear" game, where small choices accumulate instead of one big fork in the road, and two of the five endings only unlock through New Game Plus.

What critics loved

Read enough of this week's reviews back to back and the praise starts sounding like an echo. TechRadar summed it up as a game you come for the scenery and stay for the gameplay, GamesRadar called the horror itself unrelentingly dark, and multiple outlets singled out the same thing: St. Amelia's puzzle-box exploration and the way the game uses vintage, pre-internet technology to build dread without leaning on gore to do it. That tracks with what I'd expect from a studio whose entire back catalog, Observation and Stories Untold, is built around exactly that kind of slow-burn, object-based tension. Game Informer landed at 8.25 out of 10 and specifically called out the CRTV "peeking" mechanic as one of the game's smartest ideas. Puzzle design also came up again and again as a genuine strength, with reviewers noting the game rarely holds your hand, which after a decade of horror games practically drawing you a map is worth something on its own.

The campaign isn't short, either, which matters if you're deciding whether this is worth full price. One widely cited review clocks a full playthrough north of 18 hours, and with five endings built around accumulated choices rather than one late-game fork, it's clearly designed for at least a second run if the story hooks you the way it hooked most of the people reviewing it.

What critics didn't, and why it keeps repeating

Here's the part that actually explains the messy score. Nearly every negative note in this review cycle traces back to the same handful of specific, nameable problems, which tells me they're real design gaps and not just individual critics having a bad session. The biggest one is stealth. Multiple reviewers reported not being able to reliably tell what actually alerted enemies to their presence — sometimes crouching behind cover was enough, sometimes it wasn't, with no clear pattern either way. That kind of inconsistency has a nasty side effect in a horror game specifically: when a death feels arbitrary instead of earned, players reload more often, and every reload chips away at the exact mood the game spent an hour building.

One enemy in particular, a pursuer called The Weight, draws the sharpest criticism of the entire review cycle. Two separate outlets, working independently of each other, described nearly identical experiences: an enemy that moves erratically, can park itself directly outside your hiding spot for minutes at a time, and respawns you right back in front of it after a death, which turns what should be a tense chase into a repetitive loop. On top of that, several reviews flagged basic interface problems — on-screen prompts too small to read quickly under pressure, at least one instance of a panicked button-mash slamming a door shut instead of grabbing an item. Add in real technical bugs at launch — framerate drops during combat, a black screen during a key cutscene, a puzzle that one outlet reported as flat-out unsolvable due to a bug, plus community reports of PC crashing — and you get a game where the atmosphere critics are describing in genuinely glowing terms keeps getting undercut by systems that just weren't ready.

How Townfall stacks up against the rest of the revival

Townfall is the third game in Konami's current Silent Hill relaunch, and I think it only really makes sense in that context, so I built the comparison myself instead of just quoting one more aggregate score. Same source for every score below — Metacritic — so it's an apples-to-apples read.

Look at that table and the story isn't really "Townfall underperformed." It's "Konami has now shipped three original Silent Hill games in three years, from three different studios, in three different countries, and every single one landed in the 80s on Metacritic." I don't think there's a comparable modern horror franchise that can say that. Resident Evil has had stronger and weaker entries across a similar stretch. Townfall scoring six points below Silent Hill 2's remake isn't a franchise stumbling, it's the riskiest of the three bets, first-person, brand-new setting, brand-new studio, landing closest to the ground of any of them. If anything, that's the outcome you'd predict going in, not a disappointment.

My verdict

If I'm being honest about how I'd rank all three of these games purely on how much I trust the studio going forward, it's Silent Hill f first for how confidently NeoBards balanced combat and story, Townfall second, and the SH2 remake third — not because Bloober's game is worse, it's excellent, but because a remake will always have an easier job than two teams building something from absolutely nothing. Building a new setting, a new protagonist and an entirely new camera perspective from scratch, on a team of 30 people, and still landing in "Generally Favorable" territory with zero negative reviews is a harder trick than polishing a beloved script, and I think that's exactly the part the raw Metacritic number doesn't capture.