Inside iconic horror game Silent Hill's Scottish makeover

As I creep through the heavy fog of Silent Hill: Townfall, I'm met by an oddly familiar sight amid the terror - a sign for a Sunday roast.

For the first time, one of gaming's biggest horror franchises - created in Japan but traditionally set in the US - has come to the UK, set on a fictional Scottish island.

Jon McKellan, director at Glaswegian developers Screen Burn, told me taking on the mega brand was an "absolutely terrifying" prospect for the relatively small team.

As a fan of the games, I was keen to find out what one of the most iconic survival horror series looks like in Scotland - and whether it can live up to its legacy.

I played Silent Hill: Townfall, which was released on Thursday, on my PlayStation 5, and it ran well, though there have been some reports, external from others of performance issues.

Set in 1996, the game follows the plight of an American man called Simon Ordell, who washes up on St Amelia with a red hospital ID band around his wrist and an IV drip in his arm.

As is to be expected from the Silent Hill games, the real reasons why you're there and what's going on are teased as you progress through the story in a typically vague fashion.

The team took inspiration for the setting from the tiny fishing village of St Monans in Fife.

For those concerned the game might lean into any typical Scottish stereotypes, McKellan told me he wanted it to feel "authentic and natural".

"It's not tartan everywhere, but if you grew up in a working-class town in the 90s, you will get a lot of the references," he said.

In Townfall I walked past film-quality models of red pillar boxes, 20 mph speed limit signs and charity collection boxes shaped like guide dogs.

Not since 2006, when I had to storm Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man, have I felt an oddly patriotic attachment to game areas or objects.

To save the game, I had to use a phone, which often meant stepping inside a "coins and card" telephone box - a sight instantly familiar to anyone old enough to remember them on British streets.

Meanwhile, a level set in a council estate leans into the concrete starkness of the area's looming grey buildings.

While some may question why the main character is American rather than Scottish given the setting, there are narrative reasons why Simon is more of an outsider to this community, which are slowly drip-fed into cutscenes and in-game documents.

For the most part I was intrigued by the story, which, like many of the previous games, explores themes of trauma and guilt sensitively. This edition also touches on ideas around the impact of big corporations on small communities, which brought added relevance to the setting of an isolated seaside town.

I soon had to face the island's monsters - gnarled, fleshy beings with axe-like heads or mangled faces.

While St Amelia's inhabitants might not quite live up to the heights of Silent Hill 2's mannequins for sudden frights, their speed and general nastiness were still enough to make me want to run away as fast as possible.

Even when I picked up weapons such as a plank of wood or a steel pipe, a series staple, there was never much sense that I had the upper hand.

These all degrade over time, and though I did eventually get a gun, bullets are scarce, meaning I still had to sneak around rather than face threats head-on.

"We don't do jump scares, really," said McKellan - although I can think of a few alarming times playing the game I vehemently disagreed with that statement.

The fear is dialled up an extra notch by Byron Bullock's rich sound design, with the music swelling almost unbearably intensely when spluttering nasties stumbled closer.

Composer Pilotpriest, also known as Anthony Scott Burns, deserves recognition too for his hauntingly bleak soundtrack.

I think it says a lot that I closed every door I opened behind me in the game, in the naive hope it might stop monsters following - even at moments when there were none around.

Simon soon picks up a handheld CRT device to help with sneaking - a clever updated version of another staple of the Silent Hill series: the crackling radio.

This piece of retro tech - basically a small portable TV - gives you a fuzzy image of nearby monsters on its screen, so you have some idea of where they are in order to avoid them, though it can get a little fiddly if there are several nearby.

"I think it lends itself well to horror when the technology is a bit frail, a bit outdated," said McKellan.

"You don't feel safe when those kinds of things are fragile."

Later sections where you rely on even cruder tech to spot enemies ratchet up the tension further, at the expense of making the gameplay much slower.

Thankfully, there are often other cues as to the whereabouts of your fleshy foes, such as flickering lights and their awful, gurgling cries.

Reviews of the game have championed its atmosphere, with IGN's Tristan Ogilvie calling it "oppressively ominous".

Silent Hill: Townfall has three difficulty settings for combat - easy, normal and nightmare (there are also two settings for puzzles, with one giving more hints).

I played on normal, though there were one or two sections with a new, super-strong and fast single enemy where I considered changing to easy.

These were the most aggravating parts of the game for me, despite having played and loved Alien: Isolation, a game McKellan also worked on, which has a lot of challenging bits where you have to avoid the powerful Alien.

Chris Scullion, deputy editor at Video Games Chronicle said these moments were "deeply frustrating" and caused the game, which he otherwise found "outstanding", to come "grinding to a halt".

Townfall is not the first time the series has strayed away from the original game's location in America, 2025's Silent Hill f was set in 1960s rural Japan.

This sparked a conversation about whether a game can be part of the series yet not be set in or around the fictional eponymous town.

The series' lead producer at Konami Motoi Okamoto told me the team were looking at various areas to potentially set the next games, from "other parts of Europe" to "Latin America".

Games journalist and self-proclaimed "Silent Hillian" Vikki Blake told me the latest game exceeded her expectations, though she's still not convinced these newer games truly fit under the Silent Hill name.

After my playthrough, I can see why Konami are pushing ahead with the idea to let other studios breathe new life into the franchise and take it to different destinations.

Townfall is a brutal, grim journey - uneven in parts, but clever - and full of immense tension and inventive game design, the kind that is needed to push a nearly 30-year-old franchise forward.

Okamoto has also expressed his desire, external to release a Silent Hill game every year - whether that be a remaster, remake, or entirely new material.

If more new studios can keep the games feeling as fresh as this, we may eventually become like one of the series' many troubled protagonists – forgetting why we ever needed the titular town at all.

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