Psychological horror Silent Hill: Townfall ratchets up the scares — and frustrations

Simon, voiced by Jovan Adepo, is the main character in the psychological horror game Silent Hill: Townfall, out Sept. 24. (Screen Burn/Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive)Social SharingResident Evil and Silent Hill, two foundational series in video game horror that continue to release new games today, both emerged in the late 1990s on the first Sony PlayStation.

But Silent Hill's psychological take on the genre has found a relatively niche audience compared to the crowd-pleasing Resident Evil.

Instead of police officers and secret agents cracking wise in the face of a zombie outbreak, Silent Hill threw civilians into oppressive settings, dripping with unreliable narrators and metaphors for facing past trauma or sins.

Silent Hill: Townfall, published by Konami and developed by Glasgow-based Screen Burn Interactive, has moments that reach the pinnacle of horror in gaming today. But with a grab bag of mechanics that at times seem at odds with one another, it's likely you'll love one part of the experience, but loathe the next.

Townfall's first note is an odd one. The year is 1996, and we see American Simon Ordell (voiced by The Leftovers' Jovan Adepo) wash up ashore in St. Amelia, an abandoned Scottish fishing village, with no idea of how he got there. He's got an IV bag strapped to his arm, its tubing plugged into his left hand.

Protest signs cover the town's square, hinting that a corporation is behind some kind of disaster. Simon answers a ringing payphone and speaks to a man named Richard (Lost's Terry O'Quinn), who tells him to search for a nurse named Zoe Ellis (Kezia Burrows). She knows Simon, though he has no memory of her.

The fishing town, once bustling with everyday folk, is now populated by fleshy, humanoid monsters that moan and growl despite lacking facial features.

The eerie, seemingly abandoned Scottish fishing town of St. Amelia is the setting for Silent Hill: Townfall. (Screen Burn/Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive)Key to Simon's survival is the CRTV — a handheld portable television that resembles Sony's Sport Watchman. Tuning the device shows enemies' shivering silhouettes amidst a scratchy red screen, allowing him to hide and skulk past them unscathed.

Cryptic messages come through the fuzzy screen — glimpses of your intended destination like Zoe's house, or clues to help you open a rusty locker in a pharmacy's back room, sometimes with snippets of messages from Zoe or Richard playing through its low-fi speaker.

Your other tools for dealing with enemies are meagre at best: tossing a bottle can distract their attention; a rotting wooden plank can withstand one melee, but cracks in half before long. A handgun is a powerful last resort, but you'll rarely have enough bullets to fill its six chambers.

All of this evokes a feeling of dread and helplessness, forcing you to avoid fights whenever possible.

The CRTV, a portable handheld television device, lets the player find clues around the world and track enemies' movements. (Screen Burn/Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive)First-person stumblesIn a series first, Townfall is played entirely in first-person perspective, meaning you see everything through the eyes of Simon (though a few chapters put you in Zoe or Richard's shoes).

Since you can only see what's immediately in front of you, you'll constantly dart your gaze left and right and use sound cues, as well as your CRTV to follow the threats around you.

The player runs into a clinic and locks the door just in time to prevent a gruesome creature from attacking. (Screen Burn/Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive)That change has come with some growing pains, though; button prompts will appear when you approach an interactable object or item you can pick up, but the symbols and text that appear onscreen are often too small to read very quickly.

Too often while scrambling to find a closet to hide from a monster's hunt, I lost critical seconds panning around for the "X" button prompt to show up. Sometimes, while trying to avoid an enemy in a cramped hallway, I jammed on the button thinking I was picking up a first-aid item — only to slam a door shut in my face, leading to my demise.

Simon is looking for Zoe Ellis (Kezia Burrows), a nurse who might have answers about why he's found himself in St. Amelia. (Screen Burn/Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive)Masters of unlockingSilent Hill: Townfall is at its best when you're exploring a chunk of the town like it's a giant puzzle box, searching through spooky homes and alleyways to reach the next destination.

You'll consult your paper map, marked in red to denote locked doors and areas you've already searched, planning your next route, making a mental note of enemies and taking a deep breath before setting out for the next trinket or clue. Each step is just close enough that you're compelled to follow the crumb trail for up to hours at a time.

You'll look through old emails and programs on floppy disks using old '90s-era computers in Silent Hill: Townfall. (Screen Burn/Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive)You'll also spend a lot of time staring at '90s-era computer screens, checking answering machines for messages next to landline phones or searching for floppy disks and cassette tapes along the way.

This fascination with vintage tech is a signature of developer Screen Burn, formerly known as No Code, who have used the unease you might feel from hearing a monitor's low capacitor hum to great effect in 2017's sleeper hit Stories Untold.

Things get really dangerous (and metaphysical) when St. Amelia is plunged into an alternate world, possibly manifesting a part of Simon's psyche. This world is bathed in a blood-red light. Black iron pipes block pathways that were once clear and enemies stalk you in greater numbers.

This is a signature of Silent Hill games, made even more menacing by the introduction of The Weight — a larger grotesque that can kill you the instant it catches you.

The "hide from the big bad" element is common in horror video games, and Screen Burn's team includes people who have worked on Alien: Isolation, one of that subgenre's high points.

Silent Hill: Townfall is at its most dangerous when it throws you into a haunted alternate version of St. Amelia, bathed in blood-red light. (Screen Burn/Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive)Here, though, it's an exercise in frustration, as The Weight moves too erratically and can sometimes park itself in front of your hiding spot, leaving you stuck for minutes at a time.

Most frustratingly, if it catches you, the game will often respawn you right where you died — with The Weight still standing in front of you, setting off a frustrating loop of death.

And while the sights in St. Amelia's nightmare version are initially impressive, as time goes on the dreary visuals become tiresome.

It's especially a shame because some parts of "normal" St. Amelia stand out in their novelty. A flat in a block of corporate housing shifts and transforms seemingly at the whim of a series of haunted cassette tapes. Later, Richard attempts to climb an office tower infested with monsters, snatching precious shotgun shells dropped by the bodies of those who unsuccessfully came before him.

After a gruelling 18-plus hours in Silent Hill: Townfall, I reached the story's conclusion — or one of them, anyways. The game has at least five alternate endings, each (hopefully) shedding light on the tragedy of St. Amelia — and Richard, Zoe and Simon's part in it.

The series is known to focus on vibes more than a coherent plot, but even then I felt frustrated by how few questions were satisfyingly answered — or how many more times I'd have to play it to uncover new details.

A grim situation faces Zoe the nurse in Silent Hill: Townfall. (Screen Burn/Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive)The excitement I felt exploring the town was at odds with the agony I felt hiding from The Weight — to the point where it might be only the most die-hard Silent Hill fans, or those who truly love every contradictory flavour of horror in video games, who will have the stomach to finish the entire journey once, let alone many times over.

Jonathan Ore is a writer and editor for CBC Radio Digital in Toronto. He regularly covers the video games industry for CBC Radio programs across the country and has also covered arts & entertainment, technology and the games industry for CBC News. You can reach him at jonathan.ore@cbc.ca