Silent Hill: Townfall ditches tradition and goes full first-person survival horror

The first glimpse of Silent Hill: Townfall at today's State of Play stream—after being announced a a couple of years ago—almost tricked me into thinking it wasn't Silent Hill at all. There was a woman on a radio and some fog, but that was followed by a full minute of club swinging and revolver shooting in first-person. Looks like Konami is pulling a Resident Evil 7.

Screen Burn Interactive writer and director Jon McKellan says the first-person perspective "best matched our narrative, puzzle, and design intentions," in a post on the PlayStation Blog. "This perspective also lends itself well to our new brand of combat, where violence is visceral and nerve-wracking, and there is no third-person perspective separating you from the horrors of the town," he says.

In the trailer, protagonist Simon Ordell smacks an armless monster with a piece of wood and shoots a pistol at a figure at the end of a city street. I think he also used that wood to block an attack too. I wouldn't be surprised if he can parry and dodge like the girl in Silent Hill f.

Everything else looks exactly like a Silent Hill game. There's a haunted town (St. Amelia), freaky monsters, and a woman telling Ordell to come back to her through some kind of retro device that looks like the original Game Boy called the CRTV.

That device, according to McKellan, is a core part of the game and Townfall's version of Silent Hill's radio that tells you when enemies are nearby. You can pull it up at any time and it will reveal things you can interact with in the environment. Some of those things will be distractions you'll need to use to sneak past monsters you can't face head-on. When alerted, monsters will hunt you down, which makes the stealth sound pretty integral to the game.

The trailer ends before anything else about the story or even the gameplay becomes more clear. It's coming out this year though, so we probably won't have to wait long to see more. Even though the trailer only says it's coming out on PlayStation 5, there is already a Steam page with a 2026 release date.