Silent Hill: Townfall Review Roundup: Every Score, the Stealth Debate, and Whether the First-Person Gamble Works

The verdict is in: SILENT HILL: Townfall opens to a Metacritic average of 81 on PS5 from more than 60 critic reviews — not a single one negative — with the PC version matching it at 81 and OpenCritic averaging 82. That is a clear step down from Silent Hill f's 86 and the Silent Hill 2 remake's 87, and it makes Townfall the weakest-reviewed entry of Konami's three-year Silent Hill revival. It is also, and this matters more, a game with zero negative reviews in a launch window where most big releases ship with at least a few.

The embargo lifted on Monday, September 21, three days ahead of the September 24 launch, and the first wave is remarkably consistent in shape rather than in number. I read all thirty first-wave reviews for this roundup, and I can't recall a horror launch where the praise and the criticism lined up this neatly. Almost every reviewer praises the same three things — the town of St. Amelia, the CRTV scanning device, and a story that handles shame better than any Silent Hill in decades — and almost every lower score blames the same thing: a stealth-first structure that repeats itself in the back half. Below is the full record: every score we tracked, where the consensus actually sits, and a should-you-buy verdict for each type of player.

Release and Embargo Schedule

Townfall launches Thursday, September 24, 2026 for $49.99 on PS5 and PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), published by KONAMI and Annapurna Interactive. The rollout looks like this:

If you are still deciding between editions, our pre-launch guide breaks down the Deluxe Edition contents, unlock times, and PC system requirements in detail.

The Scores at a Glance

The aggregate picture first, then every individual score we tracked from the first wave:

Every Review Score We Tracked

Twenty-eight outlets from the first wave. Scores are listed in each outlet's own scale:

What Critics Agree On: St. Amelia and the CRTV

The near-universal praise lands on two things, and they are the two things Screen Burn was always going to be good at.

The first is the town itself. Townfall moves the series to St. Amelia, a fog-bound fishing town on a Scottish island in 1996, and reviewers from British outlets in particular ran out of superlatives describing it. Eurogamer's Matt Wales, in his four-star review, called it "a world of such convincing detail — the very British street signs, the blinking crossing lights, the cheery bunting, the local noticeboard ads — that it's engulfing even before you've stepped away from its weather-battered seafront into its cobbled market square." The Guardian went further on the specifics: cars modelled on boxy 1990s Volkswagen Golfs, phone boxes with logos that "narrowly escape the attention of copyright lawyers at BT Group," and a town based on the real fishing communities of the East Neuk of Fife.

The second is the CRTV, the pocket television that replaces the series' classic radio static. Rather than a vague proximity warning, you tune the handheld into individual creatures to get a scratchy X-ray view of them through walls — and each enemy type sits on its own channel. That twist turns threat detection into constant active work, and reviewers loved it. It also doubles as the interface for the game's puzzle design, which drew the strongest individual praise of the cycle: IGN's Tristan Ogilvie, at 8/10, called them "some of the most cleverly designed and challenging puzzles I've experienced in any horror game in recent memory, many involving impeccable recreations of technology from yesteryear."

The immersive-simulation touches earned their own mentions. Saving requires physically dialing a number on an in-world landline. Pulling out the map does not pause the game. PCGamesN's reviewer highlighted the coin vortex machine and guide dog donation bins, and noted Screen Burn scanned real shops and even period Argos catalogues to get the 1996 furniture and technology right.

The Stealth Divide

This is where the 10/10s and the 3/5s part ways, and unlike most review cycles the disagreement is about structure, not quality.

Townfall is the most evasion-focused Silent Hill ever made. Weapons break quickly, ammo is scarce, gunfire attracts everything within earshot, and GameSpot's Mark Delaney — who scored it 8/10 — estimated he went through about three-quarters of his playthrough without firing a shot. The result is a game built on hiding behind garden walls, throwing bottles to trigger car alarms, and reading enemy patrol routes.

The defense: DualShockers' 9/10 frames the stealth pivot as genuine series innovation, noting that previous protagonists like James Sunderland simply had no mechanism to slip past a threat, and that Townfall's approach refreshes the formula "without changing the core themes that make Silent Hill what it is." Sirus Gaming's 9/10 made the same argument. Radio Times, at 100, called the tension of moving through an increasingly crowded town the core of the experience.

The prosecution: VGC's Chris Scullion, at 3/5, singled out instant-death stealth sections built around a creature called The Weight, writing that "it's rare that I find sections in a game that hit a brick wall and kill the momentum dead like Townfall does." Gfinity's 70 summed up the middle-of-the-road position: "a masterclass in atmosphere and puzzle design undermined by exhausting stealth mechanics and uneven narrative payoff." Push Square's Liam Croft, at 3.5/5, went hardest on the design's ceiling: the new ideas feel undercooked, the CRTV is underused, and Townfall "will not become a classic."

Polygon's Elijah Gonzalez landed the most interesting negative take, and it was not about stealth at all: the story lays out its themes — corporate colonisation, worker exploitation, a town drained by an absent energy company — too plainly, and in doing so "lacks the spiraling dread of games like Silent Hill 2, where sudden truths clanged like a steel pipe smashing a skull."

The Story: Three Characters, One Town's Guilt

The narrative consensus is warmer than the mechanical one, and it is the main reason the review set contains zero negative scores.

You arrive as Simon Ordell (voiced by Jovan Adepo of The Leftovers), an outsider washed ashore in a town where most residents vanished after a local disaster. But the story is bigger than Simon: Zoe, a nurse (Kezia Burrows, who did motion capture for Amanda Ripley in Alien: Isolation), and Richard, the CEO of the energy company that promised the island prosperity (Terry O'Quinn of Lost), both get playable chapters. PC Gamer's Elie Gould, at 89, argued this triple structure is the game's best idea, "adding enough diversity for an incredibly rewarding story and analysis of its characters."

The thematic reading critics keep circling is guilt at civic scale — what an abandoned company town does to the people left in it — rather than the purely personal trauma of earlier entries. Radio Times read it as a deliberate echo of the pandemic's "fever-dream-like space in our collective memories." GameSpot's verdict captured the tone best: Townfall is arguably the most hopeful Silent Hill, and it earns that "not by trading away its unease, but by letting a little light into the dark." My own recommendation, having now read the full story beats through these reviews without playing the leaked build: go in as blind as you can. This is the rare horror game where the review discourse itself gives away the shape of the ending, and the ambiguity Polygon wanted is exactly what you preserve by skipping the think-pieces.

Practically, the story runs 13 to 15 hours for the main path — PC Gamer finished in 13, a leaked pre-launch walkthrough put it at 13 to 14, and PlayStation LifeStyle estimated 15 — and it ships with five endings, two of them locked behind New Game Plus. Our endings and Platinum guide maps the full behavior axis without spoiling the conclusions.

Performance: Better Than Most PC Ports This Year

The PC performance reports in the first wave are unusually good for a launch-window horror port. PCGamesN's reviewer ran a Ryzen 7 5800X with an RTX 3070 Ti and 16GB of RAM — half the 32GB recommended spec — and reported very few issues, with only occasional frame drops on first triggering a cutscene and some muddiness and flickering from DLSS frame generation. PC Gamer's Elie Gould finished the game on an RTX 3070 with a Ryzen 5 5600G and 16GB of RAM.

Both reviews make the same practical point: the game is well optimized, and 16GB is workable even though the store page asks for 32GB. Steam Deck verification is not rated yet, so handheld players should wait on that verdict.

Where Townfall Lands in Silent Hill's Comeback

Three entries in three years, three well-received games, and a clear pattern in the scores: the Silent Hill 2 remake opened the revival at 87, Silent Hill f pushed toward action at 86, and Townfall's atmospheric, stealth-heavy experiment lands at 81. That is the mildest reception of the three, and Polygon's roundup framed it exactly that way — broad welcome for Konami's commitment to new locations and new perspectives, less critical heat than last year's entry.

Two forward-looking notes from the cycle are worth carrying. First, the annual cadence is almost certainly continuing, with a remake of the original Silent Hill confirmed in development and the series rotating between new settings and remakes. Second, Townfall quietly proves the franchise survives genre experimentation — a first-person, stealth-first, Scottish entry with zero negative reviews is not the outcome anyone would have predicted for this series five years ago.

Our take: an 81 slightly undersells it. The complaints are concentrated in a repeatable stealth pattern in the final third, and everything around it — the town, the CRTV, the puzzle design, the sound, the story — is being rated at 85 and above by the same reviewers. If Screen Burn's next game tightens the back half, this studio's second Silent Hill is a serious Game of the Year contender.

Should You Buy SILENT HILL: Townfall?

Frequently Asked Questions

The bottom line: Townfall is the third straight well-received Silent Hill and the boldest of the three, an 81 that the same critics rate 85-plus on everything except its repetitive stealth stretches. Read the 10/10s if you are here for atmosphere and puzzles, read the 3/5s if you need combat in your horror, and buy accordingly.