Silent Hill: Townfall Developers Explained Why Scotland Is the Setting of a New Spin-Off Title

This autumn, following the success of last year's Silent Hill f, which took players to Japan, a new franchise spin-off, Silent Hill: Townfall from Screen Burn, launches on PC and PlayStation 5. The developers chose an unusual setting for this one—1990s Scotland—and recently explained the thinking behind that choice.

As reported by HobbyConsolas, Silent Hill: Townfall game director Jon McKellan spoke about the studio's approach to the new game's setting. According to him, the developers wanted to build as realistic a town as possible, one that creates a real emotional connection with the player and its residents. He also joked that Scotland's full of monsters and mist, making it the perfect fit for Silent Hill. You can check out his fuller response below:

“I think there's some kind of meme where people look out the window, see fog, and say, 'Oh, Silent Hill again,' you know. But I think the most important thing for us was to be able to build a town that was extremely authentic, you know, and it felt like it was a place you could believe existed, a place you could worry about. It's an important aspect of the story that the player feels some empathy for the people and understands what they've been through.

And you write about what you know and know these communities; we grew up in them, so we have a deeper understanding. That's why it seemed to us that, if we were going to set it somewhere, it would be almost false to do so in an American city somewhere we would never have known and knew nothing about. So, uh, and again, without giving anything away, there are a lot of reasons why it's this kind of place and this kind of town. I wanted it to be something that seemed as believable as possible, and that was the best way to achieve it.”

Recently, the first reviews for Silent Hill: Townfall have also started coming in, and they have been mostly positive so far. Gaming outlets have highlighted the first-person perspective that fits perfectly in the game series, along with the horror atmosphere, engaging puzzles, and the mechanics built around the CRTV—a device that works kind of like the radios from the previous franchise games. It's also been confirmed the game will feature five endings (three main, two bonus), with a runtime somewhere between 10 and 14 hours. Additionally, Screen Burn released system requirements for the PC version of the game.

Silent Hill: Townfall is set in 1996, in a fictional Scottish town called St. Amelia. The main character, Simon Ordell, finds himself in a place he cannot remember how he ended up in, and he has to find a nurse named Zoe, whose fate turns out to be tied not just to the town but to Ordell himself.

The game will release on September 24 for PC and PlayStation 5.