A fog that never quite lifts, a Scottish island missing from every map, a pocket television picking up signals it shouldn’t receive. That’s the setting our August 20 article announced for September 24, 2026: Silent Hill Townfall launched that day on PS5 and PC, through Steam and the Epic Games Store.
Five days later, the game shows two faces. On Metacritic, the PS5 page adds up 75 reviews for a Metascore of 81, rated « Generally Favorable. » The user score, on the same page, drops to 7.2 out of 396 votes, rated « Mixed or Average. » On Steam, positive reviews swing between 68 and 71% depending on when you check, a figure that keeps moving. According to Gagadget, the gap between critics and players is the widest the franchise’s revival has ever seen.
What the press saw in Silent Hill Townfall
The studio behind the game is Scottish: Screen Burn, the team that made Observation and Stories Untold under the name No Code before rebranding. Annapurna Interactive publishes the game under license from Konami. The story unfolds in 1996, on the fictional island of St. Amelia. Simon Ordell returns « to put things right, » carrying a CRTV, a pocket television that picks up unstable signals. The game is played in first person: escape, combat, narrative puzzles.
It’s this first-person view, specifically, that reviewers keep coming back to. Checkpoint Gaming, under Jarrod Harrison’s byline, published its review on September 27 and calls it a « terrifying success. » The Scottish atmosphere, the puzzles and the story win over the critic; Harrison adds that good things come in threes, after Silent Hill 2 Remake and Silent Hill f. The Metascore of 81 gathers this kind of praise across 75 reviews.
What players are criticizing on Steam
On the game’s Steam page, roughly 900 reviews had piled up on launch day, at 68% positive. Gagadget counts 71% on its side. Either way, nearly one player in three advises against the game.
The complaints keep coming back: the stealth sections are judged « repetitive and underdeveloped, » the combat lacks punch, the optimization leaves something to be desired. The price weighs on the comparison too, next to Silent Hill 2 Remake. One review picked up by Gagadget sums up part of the audience’s mood: « Konami is selling another indie horror under a famous brand. » Yet the same players praise the atmosphere and art direction without reservation.
Why fewer players than Silent Hill f and the Silent Hill 2 remake
Opening weekend: according to Notebookcheck, Silent Hill Townfall drew nearly two-thirds fewer simultaneous Steam players than Silent Hill f and the Silent Hill 2 remake did at their own launches. The outlet gives no absolute figure, only this relative gap.
The price doesn’t help the comparison: $49.99 for the standard edition, $59.99 for the deluxe edition. It’s the argument that keeps coming up from unhappy players, that of an indie-sized project sold under a major brand rather than a full-scale sequel like the two previous episodes. Availability is tighter too: Silent Hill Townfall launches only on PS5 and PC, with six months of console exclusivity. Xbox and Nintendo Switch 2 versions won’t arrive before March 2027. That same September 24, Control Resonant, from Remedy, also launched, on an already crowded fall calendar.
What this says about Konami’s strategy
Konami hands its Silent Hill games to outside studios, and for Townfall the license even runs through a third-party publisher, Annapurna Interactive, with Screen Burn at the helm. Checkpoint Gaming ranks Silent Hill Townfall as the third act of a strong run, after Silent Hill 2 Remake (October 2024) and Silent Hill f (September 2025): three games in two years, three teams, three formats.
Another launch that same month flips the script. Wolverine sold 1.9 million copies in three days despite a Metascore of 77, lower than Silent Hill Townfall’s. The press-versus-players gap cuts both ways: here the press carries the game while players hold back, elsewhere players buy despite a cooler press.
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