Silent Hill: Townfall brings a comic to its launch week

Silent Hill: Townfall is out on 24 September. Konami dates it for PlayStation 5, Steam and the Epic Games Store, with physical copies limited to PS5, and the Deluxe Edition's digital pre-order adding 48 hours of early access on top of a digital artbook, a digital soundtrack and Simon's alternate outfit. The Standard pre-order bonuses are a 'CRTV Style: Rusted' item and a 'Beach Edition' variant that is exclusive to PS5.

The premise is deliberately underpowered. Simon Ordell is called back to the fog-bound island of St. Amelia to put things right, and his most sophisticated tool is a pocket CRTV television, which he uses to find fragments of the island's past. Evasion, not firepower, is the default; the combat that does exist is described as frenetic, and the puzzles are narrative rather than mechanical.

A Scottish studio on a Japanese horror franchise

Townfall is being made by Screen Burn Interactive, a Scottish studio, and co-published by Konami and Annapurna Interactive, which gives the series its first entry with a European development lead. The franchise has been farmed out before, but rarely to a team this new and rarely with a setting this specific: Konami's own material describes a windswept isle and a residential town sitting quiet beneath a heavy fog, which is a long way from the American small towns the series usually rents.

The island's history, on paper first

For anyone who wants the world before the game gives it to them, Silent Hill: Townfall - The Dock House is an official prequel comic written by Jon McKellan — Townfall's game director and lead writer — with art by David Roach, whose credits include Nemesis the Warlock. It runs in 2000 AD's Prog 2500, on sale in the UK from 16 September and globally from 30 September, in comic shops through Lunar Distribution and Diamond UK, and digitally through the 2000 AD webstore and app.

The story follows Douglas, a harbour master who has spent decades maintaining St. Amelia's dock house, and who finds an impossible staircase descending beneath the harbour. It is a companion piece rather than a prologue that spoils the game, which is the right instinct: the comic exists to thicken the fog, not to lift it.

The atmospheric horrors of SILENT HILL are a great fit for 2000 AD, so when we were approached to publish a special tie-in story for SILENT HILL: Townfall, it was something I knew the readers would thoroughly enjoy immersing themselves in

— Matt Smith, editor-in-chief, 2000 AD

The date worth checking before you book an evening

One small snag for the launch-night planners: Konami says 24 September, while the Steam UK store page currently shows 23 September and lists the game at £44.98. Regional unlock times and the way the Deluxe early-access window interacts with them are the sort of detail that decides whether you are playing on the night or the following morning, so it is worth re-reading the store page rather than assuming either date is the whole story.

Our opinion

Townfall is the most interesting thing Konami has done with this franchise in years, and it is interesting for the least expensive reason: it took the guns away and hired a studio that knows how to build dread out of a coastline. A horror game whose protagonist carries a broken television instead of a shotgun has to earn its scares with sound, sightlines and the patience of its level design, and the brief moments of gameplay Konami has shown suggest the team understands that trade. If it works, the lesson is not that Silent Hill needed Scotland; it is that it needed restraint.

The 2000 AD partnership is the more quietly clever part of the announcement. Handing a prequel to the game's own director and letting a British institution like 2000 AD publish it is a cheap way to prove the studio has more than one story to tell, and it gives the comic crowd a reason to care about a game they might otherwise skip. Plenty of franchises bolt a tie-in comic onto a launch as an afterthought; this one was written by the person holding the script. That is the difference between marketing and world-building, and it is the sort of decision that makes a launch week feel like a beginning rather than a deadline.