TheRetroArcade
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Joined: Feb 2026
The latest Silent Hill game goes overboard with tiny details of Scottish coastal life.
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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.
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.
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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."
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."
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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...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
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.
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.
View Original
View Original
View Original
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."
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."
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
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...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?