Silent Hill: Townfall Is Out on PS5 and PC — Here's What Critics Think

Silent Hill: Townfall launched on September 24, 2026, for PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. Developed by Screen Burn Interactive—formerly known as No Code, the studio behind Stories Untold and Observation—and published jointly by Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive, it's the first major new Silent Hill entry to come from an outside developer under Konami's franchise revival push.

It currently holds an 81/100 on Metacritic and an 89% critic recommendation rate on OpenCritic. That's a solid reception for a horror game taking genuine creative risks—but there's a catch for PC players.

Setting and story

Townfall is set in 1996, on the fog-wrapped Scottish island town of St. Amelia. You play as Simon Ordell, a corporate safety engineer who wakes up in the town with no memory of how he got there. Two others are trapped with him: nurse Zoe Ellis and CEO Richard Shaw. All three are bound together by the same catastrophe—a North Sea oil rig disaster that killed 95 workers, which Simon helped cover up in exchange for a life-saving heart transplant.

It's classic Silent Hill territory: guilt made architecturally manifest. St. Amelia reshapes itself around what each character is running from. The purgatorial structure, the psychological horror, the idea that the town knows more about you than you do—it's all here, and reviewers who engaged with it found it genuinely effective.

How it plays

Townfall is first-person and built around stealth. You carry a handheld device—styled like a battered CRT—that detects nearby enemies through ambient sound and interference patterns. Direct confrontation tends to go badly and quickly. The game asks you to observe, hide, and move carefully.

Endings branch based on cumulative choices woven through the experience rather than binary dialogue menus. Replaying it to discover what shifted and why is apparently part of the design intent.

Games Radar called it "unrelentingly dark and disturbing horror." Siliconera noted it can test patience in its early hours—the stealth is punishing and the game doesn't hold your hand—but said those who push through find a deeply realized world. The town of St. Amelia received near-universal praise, with Gaming Age calling it "one of the best settings in a horror game."

The PC problem

Steam user reviews are currently "Mixed." The issues are performance-related: crashes and frame rate instability on high-end hardware, even on systems that should comfortably run it. Konami has confirmed a patch is in development. The PS5 version is unaffected.

If you're planning to play on PC, waiting a week or two for the patch is probably the right call. If you're on PS5, there's no reason to hold off.

Part of a bigger comeback

Townfall is part of Konami's broader Silent Hill revival strategy, which has included remakes and remasters alongside new entries from licensed studios. For a franchise that spent the better part of a decade in limbo, 2026 has been a genuinely strong year for it. Townfall earns its place in the series—not despite its ambition, but because of it.