Silent Hill: Townfall review – shame and suffering on the Scottish coast

You spend a considerable portion of Silent Hill: Townfall in a kind of foetal position, cowering behind objects that will be eerily familiar to anyone who lived in the UK during the 1990s. Cars seem to be modelled on the era’s boxy Volkswagen Golfs; logos adorning phone boxes should narrowly escape the attention of copyright lawyers at BT Group. (For millennials, the deja vu will likely intensify the horror, as if stepping back into a childhood nightmare.) Simon, the nerdy, unassuming star of the game, pokes his head around corners to catch a glimpse of the demonic entities that wish to maim him, before shrinking back down again with a downwards motion of the analogue stick. In such moments, it’s easy to imagine him wrapping his arms around his knees, clasping his eyes shut and wishing himself away from this place.

The game’s setting, St Amelia, is based on the fishing communities of the East Neuk of Fife. The terror lurking here is wonderfully specific: absent lairds, island poverty, an oil-drilling corporation. Anguished beasts lumber down quaint streets lined with sandstone houses and fluttering bunting.

This venerable horror series may have shifted to Scotland, yet we remain firmly in classic Silent Hill territory – weather and all. St Amelia finds itself suffused in supernatural fog and the vast majority of its inhabitants have vanished following some kind of mass tragedy. The artful, evocative presentation is such that you can almost taste the in-game air, the briny seaside tang diluted by rainy mist.

Visually, this scuzzy, grotty take on Silent Hill from Glasgow studio Screen Burn leans on bold juxtapositions of colour, shadow, and ominous silhouettes. Sometimes the stricken town is bathed in blood-red moonlight; often, pitch-black interiors are illuminated by harsh white torchlight. The arresting imagery brings to mind found-footage horror films such as Rec and the spine-tingling camcorder sections of UK classic, The Descent.

Simon soon finds a portable television with strange, arcane power: it receives odd, elliptical messages from a nurse called Zoe, and tracks nearby monsters whose outline appears in scratchy low resolution on its small screen. The action is slow-burning and absorbing: Simon lopes about town, hiding from depraved monsters and occasionally bludgeoning them to death with a pipe. To enter some buildings, he has to make an incision with a scalpel in a fleshy door opening as thick, fresh blood oozes out.

Gradually, Simon’s reason for visiting St Amelia in the first place becomes clear: guilt. But he’s not the only one racked with it. Zoe, voiced with terrific glassy distance by Kezia Burrows, has her own hangups.