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The right setting is key to making an impactful horror game. Houses filled with dolls, graveyards, abandoned theme parks, smoke-filled forests – there are tons of classic tropes that are ripe for scare potential. For Silent Hill: Townfall, Screen Burn and Konami have decided that the inherently scary place they’ll use is… Scotland.
Bear with me, and them. Having spent more than an hour of hands-on time with the game at Gamescom, I think it’s an inspired choice. I also spoke to Motoi Okamoto, Silent Hill Series Producer at Konami, and Jon McKellan, Silent Hill: Townfall’s writer and director, about why they think it works so well.
From the moment the game begins, you’re exploring a sleepy seaside town in the Highlands. Newsagents, pubs, bed and breakfasts, and ice cream shops are the sights to see, while mist obscures anything more than 20 feet in front of you. It’s quiet, eerie, and creepy – Screen Burn has done an incredible job of making somewhere inherently normal feel unsettling. McKellan told me that they wanted “the player to really connect to the environment around” and that the decision to make the game in first-person was a key part of that from the initial pitch to Konami.
With your peripheral vision reduced and focus drawn on what’s immediately in front of you, Screen Burn is able to be more precise with the scares and ensure the atmosphere builds to increase the tension.
The choice to set the game in Scotland specifically is an interesting one. They could have easily made the setting a quiet American fishing village, or a deserted island somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. The kind of thing we’ve seen countless times before. That would have allowed for the same sense of seaside unease, but Scotland is something new. “If it feels nostalgic and familiar to us, it’s really weird for players,” McKellan said.
While locals, which Screen Burn’s developers are, will feel comfortable in the space, exploring small shops and alleyways, that’s not a feeling everyone around the world will share. As someone who spent a large chunk of their childhood in small seaside towns in southern England, I knew what I was getting myself into, to a degree. I understood what to expect from the town’s layout. But as strange things started to happen with regularity, the usual Silent Hill horror was present.
The developers have included references to their own lives in the setting, too. I asked the team if there were real-world shops around the town in-game, and McKellen said that they worked hard to “go try and find reference for it” and to “scan it and measure” places in their local area to get them right in Townfall. They even scanned the history of Argos catalogues to ensure they got the technology and furniture right in the 1996 world they recreated.
It’s a brilliant way to make a simple setting feel authentic, lived-in when it’s deserted, and new to a lot of players at the same time.
Screen Burn didn’t go so overboard with the Scottishness as to make it a caricature. It’s a setting that’s of a place, but also familiar in enough ways. “There’s no bagpipes in there,” they told me when I asked about the excellent music in the game. You won’t be killing monsters to the tune of The Proclaimers, which is a smart choice. Instead, the music uses “percussion elements that you would normally use in traditional Scottish music, but then chops that up and makes it weird.”
I have to agree with McKellan in his assertion that Townfall “would be a really good entry point” to the Silent Hill series. It has a strong narrative focus, but the setting’s mix of familiar and strange is something that’s easy to latch on to. Setting a new game in a long-running series in Scotland is a smart decision that’ll prove to be one of its biggest strengths.
