“Silent Hill: Townfall” Gets Fogged in by Frustrating Gameplay

Konami’s “Silent Hill: Townfall” opens so promisingly. Sure, a first-person “Silent Hill” game feels very weird at first, but the atmosphere of the game’s setting, along with its early few hours of gameplay, place it atmospherically right in the heart of the series. It’s foggy, creepy, mysterious, and you can lock doors this time! A blend of stealth mechanics and puzzle-solving make the first two chapters of “Townfall” truly engaging. And then the air comes out of the tires.

Not only is the end of the third chapter of this game one of the more numbingly frustrating bits of stealth level construction I’ve come across in decades of gaming, but the game never really recovers narratively, losing much of its personality as the story diffuses across multiple POVs with increasingly unengaging emotional beats. No one is happier than this critic that “Silent Hill” is back as a prominent gaming franchise—three in three years, including last year’s “Silent Hill f“—but that excitement is now haunted a bit by this dip in quality.

“Townfall” takes place in 1996 in a fictional Scottish town called St. Amelia. You first play Simon Ordell (Jovan Adepo of “Babylon”), who wakes up in the water, climbing to a dock and then walking into what looks like a city that’s been abandoned after some sort of supernatural incident—in other words, very Silent Hill. There has been a lot of debate online about whether this is a “true” SH game, and that’s patently silly. It has a confused protagonist in a fictional, fog-shrouded town, evading nightmare fuel creatures and solving puzzles. So, yeah, it definitely is, even with the over-reliance on stealth and first-person POV. In fact, expanding what it means to be a “Silent Hill” game with a title that feels inspired by Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima’s notoriously disappeared “P.T.” is a great idea. The execution is another matter.

As Simon begins his exploration of St. Amelia, we learn a few things about the place and his history. He’s seeking someone named Zoe Ellis, who was a nurse during a time of great crisis. There are signs and recordings about staying indoors and avoiding public spaces, hinting at a pandemic, possible riot-protests, or perhaps something more Lovecraftian. Of course, that’s about when the monsters come out, starting with a being that looks like it has a sideways axe blade in its face, and he likes to headbutt you with it. While you get a plank to use as a melee weapon relatively quickly, the game’s design clearly favors stealth. Not only are these enemies resilient to a plank that breaks after a few uses, but you’re given a handheld CRTV that reveals their location. The developers have said that this device is the main reason the game is in first-person: So you can see the CRTV in your left hand and use it to track enemies to sneak around them.

Simon is contacted by a mysterious man named Richard, who becomes the third point of a triangle with Zoe and our first protagonist. You will end up playing as all three, although the gameplay doesn’t vary much between characters. Zoe is even less stocked with weapons than Simon, and her enemies seem even more able to eradicate you with a single sighting; Richard’s chapter centers speedier bad guys but you get a shotgun to take em out in a way that almost feels like a different game.

For all three, “Townfall” relies on two elements: Stealth and puzzles. You’ll need to be a huge fan of the former to proceed through most missions. One enemy known as The Weight is a particular nightmare, and as he hunts Simon at the end of the third chapter, goodwill towards what “Townfall” did well for its first hours begins to leak. No one minds a well-done stealth mission in a survival horror game, but the first mission that includes The Weight is a soul-sucking drain, punctured by bad level design and inconsistent mechanics. The Weight will alternate from just standing in your way endlessly to wandering to the corner of the map only to spot you down the hall and begin chase. It’s almost impossible to determine when you’re sufficiently hidden. And if the character and level design were stronger, none of this would feel like such a chore. It’s a boring basement level that goes on forever. And then the game basically brings it back in the final chapter.

What will likely keep gamers, especially hardcore “SH” fans, pushing through the faulty mechanics and ultimately repetitive enemies—there’s a shockingly small variety of bad guys—is the storytelling. As it unfolds, the connections between Simon, Zoe, and Richard become clearer as all three seem trapped in this space between reality and H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares. It’s all related to an investment by Richard’s company, Chapman Energy Group, and their cover-up of a fire that killed dozens of their workers, leaving Simon as the only survivor. Zoe was the nurse who treated him, and it gets much darker and weirder from there. Without spoiling, choices made in the real world by Simon, Richard, and Zoe have trapped them in this deadly space.

Within the frustrations, there are admittedly ingenious puzzle designs. Zoe’s major puzzle involves medical procedures on an unknown patient, including finding the right drugs in a medical centre occupied by monsters and even calibrating an X-ray machine. It’s an unexpectedly clever chapter, one of the strongest in the game. And Richard’s journey through CEG Headquarters late in the title includes some clever bits, especially one involving employee records that shows how great this series can be with dark humor.

A foggy town that seems to have emerged from Hell to help a protagonist process grief and guilt? “Townfall” is definitely a “Silent Hill” game and the market is better when its staple franchises like this one are robustly producing new titles—just look at how much attention the resurgence of “Resident Evil” has done for the industry. So while “Townfall” is a disappointment, it’s encouraging to see Konami actively expanding the legacy of their franchise. Sometimes when you swing for the fences, you strike out. But I still can’t wait to see the next at-bat.

The publisher provided a review copy of this title. It is now on PS5 and Windows.

from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/NxHGz1Y