Silent Hill Townfall

This game was an interesting journey for me.  It helped affirm a realization I've been having recently.  This being my feelings on stealth horror games.  This comes as almost a surprise to me but I now see it as something I've been in denial about for a while.  I say this because since I played Amnesia The Dark Descent, I've had a huge interest in this style of horror.  I always saw myself eager to experience more of these games and even built up my back log with many but haven't tried most of them.  The excuse I had was always something else I was playing and wanting to give whatever game a try later.  The main thing that would get me to explore these games would be overwhelming positive word of mouth from people online, content creators and reviews.  I recently tried playing Alien Isolation and got annoyed with an early game stealth section of it and found that I just wasn't having fun.  What got me to try it was anticipation for Townfall because I heard some of the devs were the same for both games.  In spite of how I felt about Alien Isolation, I still had a lot of hype for Townfall.  Here are my thoughts on the order of playing the game.

This game stands out from the remake of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill f as it has so much of its own character and soul. At times it makes me feel like this was more inspired by PT and is proposing what a Silent Hill game may have been like if Hideo Kojima had made one or finished Silent Hills. I felt this because early on in the game it felt the uncanny dreamlike qualities that are normal for the series were appearing earlier than normal and made it feel like something I might have seen in Death Stranding.  This helped create a vibe for the game that immersed me into it right from the jump.  The atmosphere also helped with this as it gave this real feeling of going through this ghost town and feeling isolated.

The fine tuning with CRTV and the radio where you use the motion controls of the controller and hold specifically in place to press d pad and then hold r2 was annoying af and was making me think of not wanting to replay this game. I found an option to turn off motion controls and mentions it’s only on for controllers that support it so hopefully this makes future instances easier.  Writing now after playing the game in response to this one, it made it so much easier.  I hate motion controls for games so make sure to check your settings to turn this off, not just with this game but with any game.  Motion controls are trash, they were cool for a total of the first five seconds I first played a Wii when I was a kid.

And here came the first major turn: I really don’t like stealth horror games. I love the vibes of this game and the story is interesting to me especially as it seems to be developing around the concept of work trauma which is a new path for the series. But the stealth mechanics and lack of combat had made me debate early on if I wanted to continue playing. I also got Control Resonant which from everything shown is the polar opposite with it having a greater focus on action mechanics. But as I progress, Townfall pulls my interest back into it. So one thing I would like to give credit to the game is building such an interesting game, that in spite of this, I kept coming back to it.

In playing more I find that I do enjoy stealth horror games in the way that I find them absolutely terrifying but there’s is a point where the love can turn into hate when waiting a long time or the enemy AI feels more like it’s just toying with you and waiting at the one narrow escape you have and no matter how quiet you are they always know exactly where you went and hide at the same narrow pocket which at that point the immersion of the horror is broken and it just feels like I’m trying to outsmart the triggers programmed for the enemy not based on actually discovering my character but rather triggered by the location I moved to. It reminded me how I played the Amnesia games in smaller doses due to fear but now I feel like playing this game in smaller doses but not due to fear but rather boredom and loss of patience. Sitting and waiting for a while over and over game honestly just isn’t fun to me. This makes me yearn to play Metal Gear Solid as with that there’s more options that allow you to be stealthy like using tranquilizer to pick enemies off but not kill them but that would be weird to do that with monsters in a Silent Hill game. 

The one hit guy in the middle of the other world medical center was annoying. Thankfully I could turn down the difficulty for the rest of the game but this part was extremely difficult mainly due to its one hit mechanics and even when using a revive it’s a gamble on if he is standing next to you ready to one hit you again. After playing the game, I'm thankful to say there's only a small amount of encounters with this guy in the game.  I'd also say there was only one part where he was completely unbearable and that was more because of the narrow level design but I also learned that you can literally walk so close to him without him hearing which I would never have thought to do but I'm glad I eventually tried.

There is a part in the middle of the game that is definitely my favorite part of the game.  It involved a lot more exploration along with the scares that got me the most in the game.  It also gave opportunity for the game to be played with a little more action making it go smoother than the stealth parts in the game.  But most of all the sound design at this part is so creepy like when exploring the houses as it makes sounds that literally sound like something is running up the stairs, it had me double and even triple checking so many times.  It really was phenomenal with bringing the immersion back in such a real way that made me forget the feelings I had with the previous stealth parts I criticized before. 

I feel Townfall is a great stealth horror game but for me since that genre is not a preference it has it rate lower for me compared to other horror games.  Even though the gameplay was back and forth with how I felt, I mostly enjoyed it, especially since playing on the easy difficulty allowed the game to function with more action than stealth but the stealth parts were still difficult especially the one in the middle. Overall, I am definitely wanting to play the game again sometime but would like to give it time, since in the end it is still stealth horror which I can only have in doses.  But more importantly, this game actually makes me want to give Alien Isolation another chance.  Maybe I'll like it more when trying it again.  But that won't be for a while and honestly I feel I'll sooner play Townfall again and try to get one of the other endings.