Silent Hill: Townfall Launches September 24 on PS5, Steam and Epic

We have been circling Silent Hill: Townfall since Konami first put it on a showcase calendar, and the waiting is nearly over. The game launches Thursday, September 24 on PlayStation 5, Steam and the Epic Games Store, with the Standard Edition at $49.99 and a Deluxe Edition at $59.99 on the US Steam store. The Deluxe tier is the one to watch this week, because its 48 hours of early access means anyone who bought it can start playing on Tuesday, September 22.

That makes this a strange launch week, with a chunk of the audience in the fog two days before the rest. Steam's listing unlocks the game at 9pm Pacific on September 23, which is midnight on the East Coast on launch day. Konami has not published a full regional timetable beyond the date, so treat anything more precise as a guess until the store pages update.

Video: SILENT HILL (Official) on YouTube

What each edition actually gets you

The Standard Edition is the game plus, if you pre-order, a cosmetic called CRTV Style: Rusted that changes the look of the pocket television you carry through the whole story. PS5 pre-orders add a second skin, CRTV Style: Beach Edition, which Konami lists as exclusive to that platform. The Deluxe Edition stacks a digital artbook, a digital soundtrack and an alternate outfit for Simon on top of that, along with the 48-hour head start. Ten dollars for a soundtrack, an artbook and two days is a fair deal if you were going to buy anyway, and easy to skip if you were not.

Physical copies exist only on PS5. Konami's European announcement mentions a SteelBook for physical pre-orders at select retailers while stocks last, and we have not seen an equivalent promise for North America, so check your shop before assuming. On PC, the Steam page is blunt about the hardware. The minimum spec is a Ryzen 5 3600 or Core i7-8700K, 16 GB of RAM and an RTX 2060 Super or RX 6600, and Konami says that only gets you low settings at 1080p and 30 frames per second. The recommended tier is a Ryzen 7 5700X or Core i7-9700K, 32 GB of RAM and an RTX 3080 or RX 7800 XT for high settings at 4K and 30 frames per second, and even that leans on DLSS, FSR or TSR in balanced mode. The install is 75 GB, and the listed operating system is Windows 11.

A Scottish island, a pocket TV, and puzzles written into the story

Townfall is built by Screen Burn, a Scottish studio, and it is co-published by Annapurna Interactive and Konami. It is first person and self-contained, set in 1996 on an island town called St. Amelia, and you play Simon Ordell, who comes back to "put things right" and finds the place fogged over and apparently empty. The PlayStation Blog post from June adds a nurse named Zoe at a local family clinic as an early companion, and the cast reveal from Konami's Press Start show earlier this month put Jovan Adepo in the lead role.

The hook is the CRTV, a handheld television you tune to read the situation around you and peek into places you would rather not walk into. Konami's own description is that evasion is tense and combat is frenetic, which suggests the fights are rare and loud rather than a steady supply of pipe swings. Screen Burn has said each puzzle was designed while the story was being written, so they sit inside the plot rather than next to it. On PS5 the DualSense adds adaptive trigger resistance on firearms, haptics for creature footsteps, and motion controls for tuning the CRTV, which is the kind of small touch that either sells the fantasy or gets switched off in the first hour.

Our take

A $49.99 launch price for a new Silent Hill from a small studio is the right call, and the modest Deluxe upsell is honest. What we cannot tell you yet is whether the game is good, because reviews are not out yet and the Steam page shows none. If you want to wait for those, the Standard Edition costs the same on Thursday as it does today. Konami's next stop is the free Castlevania: Belmont's Curse demo on October 1, so this is the start of a busy month for the publisher.