After several years away from the spotlight, the Silent Hill franchise has regained a prominent place in the horror video game landscape. Silent Hill: Townfall, a new episode developed by the Scottish studio Screen Burn and co-published by Konami and Annapurna Interactive, continues the series' return. Tested on PC using a digital version provided by the publisher, the game was announced for the first time in 2022. Silent Hill: Townfall represents a new interpretation of the universe imagined by Konami. Instead of revisiting the famous town of Silent Hill, the game takes players back to 1996 on the isolated island of St. Amelia, off the Scottish coast. Developed by Screen Burn Interactive, the title adopts for the first time in the history of the series a fully first-person view, with the ambition to enhance immersion and renew the psychological horror codes that have made the franchise's reputation. The player takes on the role of Simon Ordell, a man recalled to the island to set things in order. Upon arrival, he discovers a city shrouded in thick fog, silent and apparently abandoned. Yet something lurks in the streets of St. Amelia, while traces of its former inhabitants and fragments of a buried past begin to resurface. Simon will then have to understand what connects him to this strange community and why he has been brought back here. To progress, Simon has access to the CRTV, a strange portable television capable of capturing unstable analog signals. Spiritual heir to the iconic radio of the series, this device also allows the detection of certain threats, as well as the discovery of clues and fragments of narrative. Silent Hill: Townfall thus aims to tell an independent story around themes dear to the franchise: mystery, guilt, and tragedy. With Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn Interactive takes a particularly bold stance: abandoning the third-person camera in favor of a fully first-person view. This change serves not only to enhance immersion. It also changes the way St. Amelia is explored, since the player must constantly observe their environment, check blind spots, and remain attentive to the slightest noise. Searching a room, opening a door, or consulting the map thus becomes potentially dangerous, since it is impossible to know what may be found outside of our field of vision. The true core of the gameplay revolves around the CRTV, the portable television that serves here as an especially ingenious evolution of the series' iconic radio. By adjusting its frequency, the device allows the detection of certain enemies through the fog and obstacles, but also to capture signals containing narrative information or clues necessary for certain puzzles. The CRTV is therefore never a simple gadget: it is directly integrated into exploration, puzzle-solving, and survival. Its use nevertheless involves regularly diverting one's gaze from the real world, creating an interesting tension between what the screen reveals and what may approach while consulting it. Fighting occupies a deliberately secondary place. Simon has access to several makeshift melee weapons as well as firearms, but their limited resources encourage more fleeing and discretion than systematic confrontation. It is possible to hide behind certain elements of the scenery to observe the surroundings, distract the creatures, or simply take to one's heels. On paper, this approach works particularly well with the DNA of Silent Hill: the player is never completely in control of the situation and must regularly ask themselves if fighting is really the best solution. Unfortunately, when Silent Hill: Townfall requires us to fight or infiltrate, its gameplay shows more of its limitations. First-person combat sometimes lacks precision and dynamism, while certain encounters can give the impression of heaviness. Stealth can also become repetitive when the game requires waiting or circumventing the same threats. The behavior of some enemies is not always easy to understand, which can transform a sequence meant to be anxiety-inducing into a moment of frustration. The gameplay of the title works effectively when it asks us to observe, think, and avoid danger, rather than when it asks us to confront it directly. Its environmental puzzles and the use of the CRTV constitute its best ideas. Conversely, combat and certain infiltration phases struggle to maintain the level of demand of the rest of the experience. A regrettable weakness, but which does not prevent the game from offering a coherent gameplay loop and one quite different from that of previous episodes. Visually, Silent Hill: Townfall generally succeeds with honors. The work done around St. Amelia is even one of the main successes of the title. Its deserted streets, its dilapidated buildings, and its thick fog give the village a particularly oppressive atmosphere. Light and shadows also contribute greatly to this feeling of isolation, while passages in the Otherworld benefit from more radical visual choices, including this dominant red and industrial decor that contrasts with the atmosphere of the real world. This visual success, however, is not always enough to transform Townfall into a true terror experience. The game clearly relies more on narrative, discomfort, and the progressive discovery of its story than on pure fear. The experience seeks less to multiply startles than to maintain a heavy atmosphere and gradually understand what happened in St. Amelia. An approach that works on the narrative level, but which can leave fans of a more nightmarish and visceral Silent Hill wanting. The creatures are somewhat unimposing despite their appearance, the low variety of enemies not helping to renew the threat throughout the adventure. It would, however, be unfair to reduce the bestiary to this weakness. Townfall occasionally offers some particularly tortured designs, often linked to the themes developed by the scenario. Some disfigured silhouettes or some corporeal creatures possess a genuinely disturbing dimension, with visual discoveries that know how to provoke discomfort. The problem lies more in their repetition and in a human character design that is uneven: where the settings display a true personality, the character models appear sometimes more generic and slightly in the background. The soundtrack adopts a relatively minimalist approach, but particularly refined. Pilotpriest, who succeeds here to Akira Yamaoka, prefers melancholic and ethereal soundscapes that accompany moments of solitude without constantly seeking to dominate the image. The sound design is also effective, particularly in the treatment of ambient noises, creatures, and enclosed spaces. The dubbing is also a sure value. The interpretations bring enough credibility and emotion to the various protagonists, especially in the most dramatic passages. The game also offers a complete dubbing in English and Japanese, the only two languages with full voice acting, with texts available in French. Regarding playtime, Silent Hill: Townfall is in a reasonable range for a production of this type. A first part generally requires a dozen hours, with estimates ranging around 10 to 14 hours depending on the player's pace. A more methodical exploration can however push this duration towards 15 to 20 hours. With its five endings, the game also has an additional interest for those who wish to push the experience further, with about 25 to 30 hours needed to discover all of them according to several estimates. Finally, it is difficult to talk about the production without mentioning the technical state of the PC version. Townfall can be very successful visually, but its use of the Unreal Engine 5 is accompanied by stutters related notably to the compilation of shaders and transitions between different areas, a problem sufficiently marked to disturb the immersion. A patch published on September 30, 2026 has reduced these problems, but technical analyses afterward continue to note fluidity difficulties on certain configurations. It is particularly regrettable for a game that relies so much on its atmosphere: when micro-stutters come to break a movement through the fog or a tense scene, the intended effect is immediately diminished. Silent Hill: Townfall is an imperfect experience, but sufficiently unique to warrant the attention of franchise fans. By favoring narrative, exploration, and a heavy atmosphere over omnipresent fear, the title from Screen Burn takes the risk of dividing, especially since its combat, uneven character design, and PC optimization come to tarnish an ensemble that is nevertheless mastered on the artistic level. Remains an adventure driven by an inspired visual direction, a refined sound atmosphere, some genuinely disturbing creatures, and a story sufficiently intriguing to make one want to know more. Without regaining the power of the best episodes in the series, Townfall nevertheless constitutes an interesting return and a different proposition that could appeal to a segment of players.