Silent Hill: Townfall has a different kind of resonance if you grew up in the UK. Its Scottish island of St Amelia is already my favourite video game environment of the year for how it evokes the atmosphere and time of a place—specifically 1996—and captures the specific details of small town life.
From the video rental shop to the bunting sadly hanging from the buildings, it’s the kind of run-down fishing town you never normally see in a video game. That’s probably because it’s not as glamorous as somewhere like Kamurocho in Tokyo (St Amelia regrettably lacks a Sega World) or New York, and not as dreamy as the Stephen King-inflected small town settings of games like Alan Wake or Silent Hill 2.
Using the Silent Hill franchise as this trojan horse to smuggle in a location that’s clearly of interest to the Glasgow-based development team at Screen Burn was a marvellous idea: given the state of the games industry, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever again be given the budget or time to craft an authentic British newsagent or storefront for a fish and chip shop.
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Still, as eerily authentic as St Amelia’s exterior details are, like the telephone boxes and road signs, it’s the interiors that I find uniquely settling. Here’s why: my grandparents basically lived in the houses in this game.
(Image credit: Konami/Screen Burn)
The kitchen tiling, the heaters, the wallpaper, the appliances—it’s so forensically accurate to a certain type of house. The kind of places that were last renovated in the ’70s or ’80s and haven’t been touched since, maybe because the residents were too old to want to redecorate or because they couldn’t afford to do so. When I step into these homes in Silent Hill: Townfall, my gut response is, “I’ve been here before and I hate it.”
’70s chic
The artists at Screen Burn didn’t just capture 1996 in some of these homes, they pinpointed the environmental details that were old even then. That’s next level visual craft, assisted by things like ancient Argos catalogues.
“Some genius out there had scanned every Argos catalogue for the last 30 years,” game director Jon McKellan told us at Gamescom, “and we were like looking at them and finding out, OK, if we need a TV in ’90s, let’s look at the catalogue from the ’90s and find out which one would be more appropriate.”
I sent the above screenshots to my mum. “That is my parents’ house,” she confirmed about the first two images, talking about a terrace house somewhere in the midlands. “We all huddled round that gas fire.”
To me and many other British players there will be an extra nightmarish layer to the game because of this familiarity. Seeing a world that you know you’ve visited before but that is now totally lost is uniquely unsettling.
Why am I fixated on this? Well, I have encountered this feeling of nostalgic spookiness before when I’ve watched old British TV stuff like the ultra-cursed Tales of the Unexpected or Threads, but never in a game.
Maybe the game’s 1996 setting is just to satisfy director Jon McKellan’s love of analogue tech, which is similarly front-and-centre in the likes of Stories Untold and Alien: Isolation, but these interiors feel like the result of a hundred artistic choices.
That specificity in the environmental design, to me, is quietly the best thing about Silent Hill: Townfall (with apologies to the actual game bit, which I am enjoying even if I’m swearing at the stealth sections a whole lot).
Even the likes of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture or Atomfall tend to romanticise elements of British life in their countryside locations. Silent Hill: Townfall blots out any potential warmth of these empty houses by surrounding them with fog, towering walls and monsters, and making them the backdrop for a gnarly psychological horror story.
Still Wakes the Deep got a bit closer to this feeling, being a ’70s period piece set off the coast of Scotland—but that took place on an oil rig, and living on one of those isn’t exactly a universal experience.
The thing is, to my parents’ generation, the types of houses you explore in Townfall are just the places they grew up in. My mum says she finds ’70s interior design quite warm and comforting. This clicked something else into place for me about why I find these details frightening: it’s probably just an age thing.
When I watched this year’s mega hit film Backrooms, I came out of it wondering why the children all found it so frightening. I’m doomed to know the concept of a ‘liminal space’ from the amount of time I spend online, of course, but what they seemed to be afraid of was basically an empty Woolworths retail unit.
I get that any empty space that’s supposed to have people in it can be quite eerie, but the basis of an entire online mythology and $400 million movie? That was strange to me. But that’s really a younger audience’s version of what I’m experiencing here.
My theory is, whatever ordinary place seems old to you is inherently unsettling. The things that we find normal now will seem otherworldly, grim and strange to future generations.
One day, someone will make a horror game set in a strip mall with a gorgeously rendered bubble tea shop, vape shop and Apple Store. And to me, it won’t be a horror game at all. It’ll be a documentary.
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