Silent Hill: Townfall builds its horror around an unusually convincing place. Developed by Glasgow studio Screen Burn and published by Konami, the game is set in St. Amelia, a fictional Scottish island town during the mid-1990s.
Its damp air, weathered stucco, compact homes and signs of coastal life are designed to feel specific rather than generically eerie. At a Los Angeles preview event earlier this month, writer-director Jon McKellan and series producer Motoi Okamoto discussed how the team turned real Scottish references into the setting.
Two Scottish influences shaped St. Amelia
The harbour seen near the beginning of Townfall draws from St. Monans, while the wider feeling of isolation comes from Shetland, the island community in the North Sea roughly 150 miles from the coast. Screen Burn researched both places extensively, including locations visited along Scotland’s North Coast 500 route.
The research focused on the small observations that give a town its identity: building materials suited to local weather, faster rust near the sea and the ordinary objects that accumulate in lived-in spaces. The team repeatedly stopped to photograph locations and capture them with LiDAR, sometimes documenting details as small as an ashtray while curious locals watched.
Small homes make a big difference
That approach extends indoors. Some of the American partners working with the team initially thought the houses looked implausibly small. McKellan’s response was that Scottish homes really can be that compact.
The decision to use a first-person viewpoint helped preserve those proportions. Unlike a third-person camera that needs extra room for the character and viewing angle, first person can occupy the exact space the player is meant to inhabit. The team measured drawer depths and kitchen-counter heights, while retaining low cabinets, tight rooms, hissing radiators and unexplained household noises.
Those details are intended to make players question whether the creaks, pipes and other sounds are ordinary features of an old house or something more unsettling. The result is horror built as much from domestic familiarity as from supernatural threat.
A household chore becomes a puzzle
One early sequence requires electricity to be restored before a computer can be used. The solution is not a straightforward fuse replacement: players must search a nearby pharmacy for prepaid electricity cards, then use them on a meter in a ground-floor crawl space.
For people familiar with older UK homes, the process can feel like an everyday memory. For players who did not grow up with prepaid meters, it becomes an unfamiliar but believable piece of world-building. McKellan said the team wanted the sequence to feel nostalgic to some players and newly discovered by others, without turning the detail into a gimmick.
That balance is central to St. Amelia. Its geography, architecture, maintenance problems and domestic routines give the fictional island a culture of its own, allowing the setting to carry tension before the horror fully takes over.
Release details
Silent Hill: Townfall is scheduled for release on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC on 24 September.
For more coverage of games and arcade culture, visit the RETROCADE Arcade Blog. Readers planning a dedicated gaming setup can also compare upright arcade cabinets, explore compact bartop arcades or browse the arcade machine buying guide.
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