Over the last couple of years, Konami has been experimenting with Silent Hill, as seen in the most recent installment in the franchise, Silent Hill f, which put players in the shoes of a young girl. The publisher is back at it again with another fresh take on the series, this time teaming up with Annapurna and the studio Screen Burn Interactive for Silent Hill: Townfall. Ahead of its release date, Kotaku was invited to go hands-on with the upcoming game for four hours. During that time, I often screamed in terror while going toe-to-toe with various monsters as I tried to figure out what was happening to the town around me.

My time with the game started at its very beginning, with my character Simon Ordell climbing out of the ocean to the surface of St. Amelia. The first thing I noticed was a weird IV plugged into my arm and how cinematic the game was. This was because it was shot in a 2:35:1 aspect ratio rather than the usual 16:9 used by most games. The first-person POV only elevated that.

In every way, Simon is an outsider to the town of St. Amelia; one of the clearest examples of this is that Simon is a person of color. This was a decision the team had landed on early in development.

“Simon is not from St. Amelia. He’s not from Scotland,” Jon McKellan, writer and director at Screen Burn, told me in a group interview. “We wanted to have a character that felt like they were in the same position as a player [who] is visiting a town he’s never been in for the first time.”

As soon as I got off shore, I made my way through the town, and that’s when things started to get a bit tense. This was because the Scottish-inspired town I was walking through was entirely deserted, with each shop locked up.

McKellan went on to explain that making a Silent Hill game in a Scottish town was fairly easy because it was where a good portion of the team grew up.

“Having grown up there, we have heavy fogs that roll in. We used to joke that if you took a photo of the window, it looks like Silent Hill today. That’s kind of a common thing. So it didn’t feel like a big leap to imagine the towns we grew up in to be in Silent Hill.”

Still walking through the desolate town, the only thing I could do was answer a phone ringing in the middle of the town square. It was surrounded by protest signs calling the town out for disregarding its people. After dialing in a specific number to save the game, things started to get a bit weird, as one might expect. Before I knew it, I was teleported underground and was making my way through a series of tight hallways and debris. Even though by all accounts I was alone, it never felt that way. Each corner felt as if something was looming in the shadows, waiting to attack.Â

Eventually, I found myself in a room filled with stuff from Simon’s past. I quickly learned that he was having some issues in his love life. It was here that I received a mobile CRTV that would show me hints on where to go if I scrolled to the right channel. The screen would show me vague things like a chair, a date, or even a poster. Paying attention to what was being displayed was important because it would often be useful to solve whatever clue was ahead of me.

In this case, it was knowing an exact date. After taking a couple of quick notes, I was able to determine the correct date/month/year to open the path ahead of me, which led me to an elevator that went up. As soon as I called it to pick me up, my CRTV was making noises. I learned that, in addition to telling me where to go, it would also double as a mini-map showing nearby enemies. But the catch was that I was limited to seeing only one monster per channel. Meaning that if I were in an area with a lot of them, I would need to constantly switch back and forth to see where they were hiding.Â

So I did what any sane person would do in that situation: I found a nice little hiding spot, and the second the doors to the elevator opened, I ran like my life depended on it to reach safety. This is where things got a bit more interesting. The second I made it to the surface, I found myself back in the town square with a man standing still and a tube down his throat. Shortly after pulling it out, I caught a glimpse of a Kaiju-like monster, and I was told that whatever was happening in town was fixable.

This is where the game opened up. Even though parts of the town were still locked down, I now had a sense of direction on where I needed to go. After watching a series of vague videos and exploring a coastal ghost town, I ended up in an abandoned house filled with helpful items, like a flashlight and clues to solve.

As with every major location I encountered, the house was filled with clues that pushed the plot forward. It never felt as if I was solving clues for the sake of solving them; each one felt important to the story. In this case, I learned that someone in the house I was in had forgotten to pay their electricity bill, but of course paying the bill for them required me to do a series of puzzles. In an attempt to turn the power on, I walked around town and found a shop that had prepaid cards. As soon as I found a shop that had a card, there was a monster guarding the area.

It was a human-like figure with no arms and an ax-like head. The second it got close enough to me, I would headbutt to death. What was really interesting was the number of different ways I could deal with this monster. Shortly after it appeared, I was given a wood plank that I could kill it with. But if I didn’t want to do that, I could sneak around it or try to bait it into certain areas and hide in a specific place to avoid being seen. Doing that proved to me a lot harder than I thought it would be. I don’t know if it was because I was simply bad at it, or because I was getting in my own head thanks to the music and sound design, which did a good job of keeping me scared the whole time.Â

When I was in a fight, there were a couple of things I needed to pay attention to. The first was my heart bar, and the other was my arsenal of weapons. The latter often proved more important than the former because if my health ran out completely, the wood would break, leaving me defenseless. If I did die during a fight, Townfall had safeguards in play to ensure I wouldn’t suffer too much. Black liquid would be shot into my arm, and I would pop back up outside of combat with a third of my health remaining.

After paying the light bill, I was sent across town to find out where Simon’s love interest had been. Doing this required me to often open doors by using a scalpel and cutting through human flesh, and hiding from every monster that was in front of me. I quickly noticed that a major theme in St. Amelia was hospital care. Once I found her rough location, I found myself in the center of town again.

This time things were different. The town now had a red filter over it, and large industrial pipes had begun to block off various areas, forcing me to take one path. Perhaps the most important thing was that I now had a pistol. Despite having limited ammo, I learned that the hills were no longer silent, and that was because I was blasting off rounds at monsters every other second.

Having a gun did make things a bit easier, but getting around still proved challenging. Not only did the town look scarier, but I was now going through backyards that were extremely tight with little to no room to run. To get around this, I would turn on radios or throw bottles and rocks to lure the monsters into one corner or another.

After doing a bit of backyard brawling and hiding, I ended up in an apartment. It felt like every time I entered a new room or hallway, there was some kind of monster waiting for me; learning their movement patterns became essential to survival because, by this point, I was out of ammo and wood to fight back. Thankfully, I made it out alive in one piece, and when I headed to the building I was supposed to go in, I found Simon’s love interest.

As soon as the two reunited, I noticed a few things. The first was that she was dressed in a nurse’s outfit and fit the hospital theme of the entire game so far. The other was that the second he saw her, the CRTV went off, making a noise it only makes when enemies are near. That’s where my time with the game concluded.

By the end of the demo, I learned a few things. The first is that once the game comes out, I’m definitely getting the bad ending because of the many monsters I killed. I also learned that, like the lead characters in most Silent Hill games, Simon is going to learn a lot about himself by the time the credits roll. We won’t have to wait too long to learn alongside him, as Silent Hill: Townfall is scheduled for release on September 24 for PlayStation 5 and PC.