Townfall’s Creepy British Homes Are More Terrifying Than Its Monsters

Silent Hill: Townfall is a game about a Scottish island, but it might be more interesting for what it shows of British homes than for anything its monsters do. That is the argument made by a writer who grew up in the UK and now finds the game’s setting strangely unsettling — not because of the fog or the creatures, but because the houses look exactly like the ones he remembers from his childhood.

The game drops players into St Amelia, a fictional coastal island rendered with a specific sense of time and place. The writer describes it as “1996” in its atmosphere, with video rental shops, bunting hanging sadly from buildings, and a run-down fishing-town feel that rarely appears in video games. The comparison to other series is telling: Kamurocho in Tokyo, New York, and the small-town settings of Alan Wake or Silent Hill 2 all offer glamour or dreaminess. St Amelia offers something else entirely — a quiet, unremarkable corner of the British coast that few games bother with.

Glasgow’s Screen Burn

The studio behind the game is Screen Burn, based in Glasgow, and the writer credits them with a clever trick. By using the Silent Hill franchise as a “trojan horse,” they smuggled in a location that likely would not exist in a mainstream game otherwise. Given the state of the games industry, the writer says, it is unlikely anyone will ever again be given the budget or time to craft an authentic British newsagent or storefront for a fish and chip shop.

That attention to detail extends to the interiors. The kitchens, the heaters, the wallpaper, and the appliances are all rendered with forensic accuracy, the writer says. These are the kinds of houses that were last renovated in the ’70s or ’80s and have not been touched since — maybe because the residents were too old to want to redecorate, or because they could not afford to. Stepping into these homes in Silent Hill: Townfall, the writer’s gut response is simple: “I’ve been here before and I hate it.”

The ’70s Detail

The artists at Screen Burn did not just capture 1996. They pinpointed the environmental details that were already old by then. The writer credits ancient Argos catalogues for helping with this. Game director Jon McKellan told the writer at Gamescom that some genius had scanned every Argos catalogue for the last 30 years, and the team used them as reference. “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,” McKellan said.

The writer sent screenshots to his mother, who confirmed that the first two images showed her parents’ house — a terrace somewhere in the Midlands. “We all huddled round that gas fire,” she said. That personal confirmation is the heart of the piece. For many British players, the familiarity of these homes adds an extra layer of nightmare. Seeing a world you know you have visited before but that is now totally lost is uniquely unsettling.

Why It Works

The writer fixates on this feeling because it echoes something they have experienced elsewhere. Watching old British TV shows like the ultra-cursed Tales of the Unexpected or Threads produced the same mix of nostalgia and dread, but never in a game. The 1996 setting may satisfy McKellan’s love of analogue tech, which is also front-and-centre in Stories Untold and Alien: Isolation. But these interiors feel like the result of a hundred artistic choices.

The specificity in the environmental design, the writer argues, is quietly the best thing about Silent Hill: Townfall. Even games that romanticise British life, like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture or Atomfall, tend to soften the emptiness of their rural settings. Silent Hill: Townfall blots out any warmth by surrounding the houses with fog, towering walls, and monsters, and making them the backdrop for a gnarly psychological horror story.

A Generation’s Memory

To the parents of the writer’s generation, these houses are just the places they grew up in. The writer’s mother finds ’70s interior design quite warm and comforting. That contrast — what feels warm to one generation and unsettling to another — is the core of the piece’s thesis. The writer’s theory is that whatever ordinary place seems old to you is inherently unsettling. The things that seem normal now will seem otherworldly, grim, and strange to future generations.

The writer draws a parallel with the recent hit film Backrooms, where children found an empty Woolworths retail unit terrifying. To the writer, that fear is a younger audience’s version of what they are experiencing here. Any empty space that is supposed to have people in it can be eerie, but the basis of an entire online mythology and a $400 million movie? That was strange to the writer.

What Comes Next

The writer predicts a future where a horror game sets its scene in a strip mall with a gorgeously rendered bubble tea shop, vape shop, and Apple Store. To the writer, that will not be a horror game at all. It will be a documentary. The point is that the fear comes from the gap between what is normal now and what becomes alien later.

The Verdict

The writer’s conclusion is warm and generous. The actual game bit is enjoyable, even if the stealth sections draw swearing. The interiors, though, are the standout. They are a portrait of memory and loss, rendered with a care that few studios bother with anymore. The writer’s reading of the game — that it is a horror story about what gets left behind — is the kind of insight that turns a product into something worth thinking about.

The game’s success depends on the player’s own history matching the textures on screen. For someone who grew up in the UK, the dread is real. For everyone else, it is still a very good horror game.

Source material: “The scariest part of Silent Hill: Townfall? It's not the monsters—it's British interior design,” PC Gamer.

British homes · game review · horror games · Silent Hill · Townfall