REVIEW – Konami had the guts to release the next installment in the Silent Hill franchise right in the middle of September’s release frenzy. Granted, that worked for Silent Hill 2 as well, which launched on PS2 exactly 26 years ago today, on September 27, 2001. But there is one major change here: the story takes place not in the United States, but in Japan and Scotland. It has its good and bad elements, but Konami has still delivered an acceptable product.

Much like Silent Hill f, this story is also about grief, regret, and loss, and several concepts from the franchise appear here as well… in other words, it delivers what is expected of it.

St. Amelia Welcomes You With Open Arms

We find ourselves in a small Scottish fishing village, playing as Simon Ordell, who has no idea how he ended up here even though the locals somehow know him. A phone, a small television, and events begin to unfold immediately. Amnesia is a cliché, but the franchise has not really used it yet. Another innovation is that this is a first-person adventure. It takes some getting used to, but during exploration it proves to be an effective choice.

True to the franchise, there are plenty of little monsters around, although perhaps fewer different types of them. They are more closely connected to disease and body horror, somewhat reminiscent of the first game. The game certainly does not lack style, and that may be precisely why SH:T has become one of the strongest installments in the franchise on this front. The combat experience is fundamentally tense and forces you to play cautiously. Although fighting is genuinely unavoidable in some places, the game prioritizes survival-horror elements over action. Encounters are often cramped and usually catch the player in tense situations — you rarely feel that you are overpowering the monsters; instead, every single encounter feels dangerous. Attacks are relatively slow and cumbersome, making it clear that the protagonist is not an action hero but an ordinary man suddenly forced to face horrors.

Of course, there are places where you eventually have to fight, and there are improvised weapons of the sort we have seen before. The classic metal pipe is one of them (it was also in SH1…). Firearms are available as well, but they need to be used carefully: the noise can attract the attention of many other monsters, which makes stealth a distinctly more useful option on more than one occasion. Overall, combat is more about survival than heroic confrontations: the sense of danger is constant, the game does not shower you with ammunition or medicine, and every encounter therefore demands serious consideration. The rear triggers let you peek around corners, and you can throw bottles and even chunks of concrete as distractions.

The game borrows something from Dino Crisis: if we die, there is an item that allows us to continue immediately – intravenous medicine fills that role, although using it can be risky when monsters are nearby. Its capacity can also be upgraded, so toward the end it can restore our entire HP bar. Sometimes we need it, because if one particular enemy type spots us, we cannot properly fight it until the end of the game, and before that such encounters can often end in death.

The problem is that at times it is difficult to tell when this enemy can see us and when it cannot. It felt rather unpredictable to us, and the noise generated by hiding places can sometimes be more harmful than useful. Oh, and we can watch the same animation from that particular enemy again and again. If we are clumsy enough, it can become so deeply burned into our brains that we will start dreaming about it (and calling that poetic exaggeration may not even be entirely accurate…). But overall, how is the stealth? It can mostly be described as good, but far from perfect. The puzzles also fall into two extremes: some are simple, while others genuinely leave us scratching our heads. One of the easier puzzles, for example, involved opening a combination lock where all we had to do was read several numbers scribbled on walls or replay a radio message containing the correct sequence – hardly a serious obstacle. By contrast, there was also a much more difficult puzzle in which several objects in a room had to be used in the exact correct order while the necessary steps had to be pieced together from diary entries scattered across different parts of the world. That one genuinely required some thought, and an inattentive player can easily get stuck. Fortunately, this kind of varied difficulty has been one of the franchise’s trademarks from the very beginning.

Abandon All Brain Cells, Ye Who Turn on the TV Here

All right, it is not quite that bad, but it was a clever idea to make us solve some puzzles with the help of the little television, and yes, experimentation really is necessary. Can you get stuck? Certainly, here and there, although perhaps not to the same extent as the piano-melody puzzle in SH1. In several cases here, the world itself hides the clues needed to solve it.

We have not talked much about the story so far, even though we probably should – it turned out surprisingly well! Different narratives are presented from different perspectives, and it may genuinely take two playthroughs to understand what is happening in St. Amelia. Exploring the world can be genuinely useful here, because simply calling the events chaotic does not even begin to describe them. There is replay value as well, since the game has five endings, two of which once again nod toward the franchise’s past (one is somewhat humorous/bizarre, while another is decidedly otherworldly, and let us leave it at that…). Both the documents you discover and the number of times you kill play a role in this.

The voice acting adds even more to the experience. It turned out great! I especially liked Simon’s voice, but Richard and Zoe also deserve a thumbs-up. Performance is good on PlayStation 5, but unfortunately, PC players can run into several problems, which is regularly criticized on Steam. Larger scenes and certain areas can suffer from stuttering, with the frame rate even dropping below 60 FPS on more powerful machines. Unexpected FPS drops can occur, while several graphical bugs, such as textures failing to load or flickering shadows, can also make life more difficult. In a few cases, players have also reported the game randomly closing or freezing. Most of these problems do not make the game unplayable, but they do hurt the atmosphere a little, especially for anyone particularly sensitive to technical issues. The graphics themselves are surprisingly good, so Unreal Engine 5 has once again become more of a nuisance specifically on PC.

If You Liked Alien: Isolation…

Why did we bring up what might be the best game of 2014? The answer is simple: Jon McKellan, one of the founders of Screen Burn, the development team behind Silent Hill: Townfall, worked on Alien: Isolation. That makes the heavy emphasis on stealth a COMPLETELY understandable decision. The game itself does an honest job: it fits the Silent Hill formula perfectly and therefore deserves a nice round score.

It is not perfect; that much is certain, but it could be an excellent choice for Halloween (the other candidate might be Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival). It is atmospheric, replayable, and stylish, but perhaps a little short, because it can be completed in eight hours, possibly even less. Although the game is not particularly long, replayability is genuinely one of its strong points: the five different endings, several important decision points, and the number of documents we find all significantly influence the story’s direction and the conclusion we ultimately reach. Each ending closes Simon’s story from a different perspective; some are extremely dark, while others take a more surreal or even humorous turn. That makes another playthrough genuinely worthwhile, because not only does the story gain additional shades with every run, but we can also discover new secrets and background information that may easily have been missed the first time. Our hero looks a little like 1990s Gordon Freeman… but that is more of a subjective, slightly gonzo observation to end on!

-V-

Developer: Screen Burn Interactive
Publisher: Konami
Genre: first-person survival horror
Release Date: September 24, 2026