Checklists
At first glance, Silent Hill: Townfall may look like your average Silent Hill game, just with a first-person makeover. Upon experiencing the island of St. Amelia for yourself, however, you’ll find that Townfall has a lot of unique elements that sets it apart from the previous entries, while still feeling true to the franchise as a whole. Having said that, there are some elements to the game that would have been helpful to know going in, so here are 8 things we wish we knew before playing.
8 Things We Wish We Knew Before Playing Silent Hill: Townfall
- How Puzzle Difficulty Works
- Maximize Your Leaning
- Fight…
- … Or Flight
- Distractions
- Keeping SILENT
- Healing
- Letterbox
How Puzzle Difficulty Works
In true Silent Hill fashion, you have separate difficulty options for both gameplay and puzzles. Unlike other Silent Hill games, however, the difference in puzzle difficulty is whether or not you’d want any hints, as opposed to completely different solutions.
You might be wondering, how far does this hint system go? Well, if you have this option enabled, important documents may highlight information with red text that will be relevant to some sort of puzzle near you. In a game where documents have a lot of variables inside them, this can be very useful.
For people who worry that this is a bit too intrusive, don’t worry, even as a veteran of the franchise, some puzzles had me scratching my head for longer than I’d like to admit. If you want a completely unguided experience, you can toggle it at any time in the settings menu.
Maximize Your Leaning
One of the more impressive features in Townfall is its intricate leaning system. First person games that allow you to lean often lock you into set angles as you peer around corners. The default setting in Townfall gives you a lot of flexibility on where and how much you’d like to lean.
This is incredibly useful for a multitude of reasons. If you are trying to stay out of a monster's sight as much as possible, you can crouch, then lean even further down into the ground. If you want to peek over a large fence or gate, you can lean upwards to basically stand on your tippy-toes. Be careful, if you lean too far out of view, an enemy will spot you.
If an enemy barely spots you, it will stare at you for a moment before going into a full alert. If you are quick on your feet and you are able to get into a safer position, you can avoid full detection. If you aren’t quick enough, the music will change, and you better be ready for fight or flight. Speaking of which…
Fight…
Each melee weapon in Townfall has a durability meter, which is incredibly harsh. The standard wooden plank will only allow you to take out at most 2 enemies before it breaks, and you can only have 1 melee weapon on you at a time.
While certain enemies, like the very first type you encounter, may overwhelm you with quick attacks, they can be dealt with by alternating between blocks and counterattacks.
While you do eventually get firearms, notably much later than you’d expect, ammunition is also quite limited. This is all to say, Simon isn’t exactly equipped to fight everything he encounters.
… Or Flight
Given your limited combat options, when confronted with an enemy, it’s often best to hide. You’ll find many hiding spots throughout the town, and I’d recommend making a mental note of where a close one is when exploring.
Finding a hiding spot is especially important before picking up a key item, since this game loves to spawn enemies the moment that item is in your inventory. It doesn’t have to be a dedicated hiding spot, you can just run into a room that has a lock on its door.
Enemies are fast in this game, but they don’t take corners well, and it takes time for them to open unlocked doors. Make sure you use those weaknesses to your advantage. If they see you go into your hiding spot, they will attack you, but their range of vision to the hiding spot seems much more generous than other stealth games.
One thing to note, it’s hard to plan your next approach while in a designated hiding spot. While you can pull out your portable TV, you cannot pull out your map inside that hiding spot. If you want to look at your map in an area where you are constantly being stalked by enemies, it’s best to do it behind a closed door. Also, you cannot open a door while your portable TV is out. If you’re running from an enemy, make sure you put that away.
Distractions
If you need to find a route around some monsters, you can throw bricks or glass bottles to make noise. That’s not the only way to make noise to alert enemies, however, as you can melee the cars around town to set off their alarms. You can also combine the 2 methods by throwing a bottle or brick at a car to set off its alarm from a distance.
Throughout some of the more enclosed spaces, you will find radios that will make noise, too. You can use those to your advantage, but be careful you aren’t near the radio once the enemy investigates.
Keeping SILENT
Unless you are doing some sort of challenge run, at some point, you will be firing a gun. If you do, a tooltip message makes you very aware that the sound of gunfire can alert nearby enemies to your position. Surprisingly, the range of gunfire alerting enemies was much smaller than I expected, at least on normal mode. Essentially, don’t automatically assume every enemy will know your position after you fire your gun.
If you are planning to take out an enemy knowing that there are even more around, and you have the time to think about your approach, you should check your portable TV before firing your weapon. That TV gives you a pretty decent gauge at how far an enemy is from you. If you recently heard that distinctive chirp noise coming from your TV, that’s your sign that you have a new signal to display, and that new signal is often an enemy.
Enemies are alerted by more than the sound of gunfire. Doors also make noise when you open them, so make sure you don’t open them super close to enemies. If you need to tail an enemy briefly to get around them, make sure you crouch walk in an effort to muffle your footsteps.
Healing
At the start of Silent Hill Townfall, it appears as though healing resources are incredibly scarce, just like how weapons and ammo are. It’s easy to feel bad using your limited resources, especially the IV bags that act as a free revive.
I’m sure using them may convince some to reload a save unnecessarily. Let me tell you that by the end of the game, I was swimming in healing items, so I wouldn’t stress being overly conservative with healing on a first playthrough.
Letterbox
If you have been following the news around Silent Hill Townfall since its announcement, you’d notice that a letterbox masking the aspect ratio has been present in all its promotional material.
While this letterbox presents a more cinematic experience, potentially enhancing the feeling of claustrophobia for some players, it’s not for everyone. Thankfully, there is a toggle option in the menu if you’re the type that wants to see every pixel in your display working in its full glory.