Is Silent Hill: Townfall Worth It? Critics vs Players

Evidence-based review · scores read on 26 September 2026. This is a synthesis of published criticism and Steam player reviews, not a hands-on review: AFK Journal has not played the game, and every claim below links to its source.

Silent Hill: Townfall is a good, at times excellent, first-person survival horror game that critics and players are judging on different terms. Critics average 81 on OpenCritic, while Steam players sit at 66% positive across 2,454 reviews, pulled down mostly by PC performance. Our score is 7.7 out of 10: Good.

The score blends the OpenCritic Top Critic Average (70%) with Steam's share of positive reviews (30%), the same formula we use for every review, and the calculation is shown below. Townfall is developed by Screen Burn and published by Konami with Annapurna Interactive; it launched on PS5 and PC (Steam and the Epic Games Store) on 24 September 2026, according to Eurogamer's review.

What do critics agree on?

The setting. Moving Silent Hill to St Amelia, a fictional island town in mid-1990s Scotland, is the most praised decision in the game. Eurogamer credits its "meticulous world design" and a dash of social realism; VGC, the harshest of the major outlets, still calls the world design immaculate and the atmosphere great; Push Square names the Scottish setting as the highlight.

The CRTV. Townfall's handheld CRT device, which senses monsters and doubles as a puzzle tool, is the new mechanic nearly every review discusses. PC Gamer is the most enthusiastic about it as a puzzle and stealth tool. IGN points out the cost: because it lets you anticipate monsters through walls, the opening hours are light on real scares. Push Square found it increasingly underused as the game goes on.

Puzzles and story. VGC calls the puzzles balanced enough to make you think without frustrating you. Tom's Guide praises the way its three perspectives come together in the final portion, and GameSpot describes a story that stays dark but lets a little light in.

Avoid, don't fight. Combat is deliberately limited. Eurogamer describes it as mostly clumsy blocks and wild melee swings, and the reviews broadly agree that sneaking past the sound-sensitive creatures is the intended way to play. GameSpot counts that as a strength: combat punishing enough that you would rather avoid it, as horror should be.

Where do critics split?

The split is almost entirely about stealth. VGC gave Townfall 3/5, headlining it as outstanding horror marred by infuriating stealth. Its complaint is specific: sections built around The Weight, a large and near-invincible enemy, where foes seem to know where you are and a revival mechanic can feed you straight back into repeated deaths. The review argues these stretches bring an otherwise strong game to a halt.

GameSpot (8/10), IGN (8/10), Eurogamer (4/5) and PC Gamer (89) treat the stealth as the source of the tension rather than a flaw, though GameSpot concedes that stealth grows predictable and combat tension fades in the final third. Push Square (7/10) sits in between: it calls Townfall a solid entry that won't become a classic, arguing that combat loses its risk once you master it and that the enemy roster is thin.

What do Steam players say?

Players are markedly cooler. At 09:09 UTC on 26 September, Steam showed 1,626 positive and 828 negative reviews across all languages: 66%, rated Mixed. English-language reviews are warmer at 70% (1,030 of 1,472), while the rest average 61%. The trend is slightly down: when we reported on the launch-week split on 25 September, the figure was 69% of 1,813. Steam's rating already excludes review bombs it judges off-topic, so these are reviews about the game itself.

To see what drives the negatives, we ran a keyword count on the 400 most recent negative English reviews and 499 recent positive ones from Steam's public review API. It is a crude text match, not sentiment analysis, but the pattern is clear: 48% of negative reviews use performance terms (stutter, fps, frame rate, optimisation) and 19% mention crashes. About a third (35%) mention stealth, hiding or lockers. Performance also comes up in 40% of positive reviews, a sign that many players recommend the game despite it.

Story is mentioned in 27% of negative and 36% of positive reviews, and atmosphere, sound or music in 35% of positive ones, which lines up with what critics praise. One caveat: the median playtime at the time of review was 4.2 hours for negative reviews and 6.6 hours for positive ones, so many verdicts are based on the first half of the game.

Interest is not the problem. The r/Games review thread drew 841 upvotes and 346 comments, and the r/gaming equivalent 794 upvotes and 442 comments, while Steam's API counted 3,965 people playing at 09:09 UTC on a Saturday morning in Europe. The gap between critics and players is about how the game runs and how much it asks you to hide, not about whether people care.

How does it run on PC and PS5?

Konami has acknowledged the PC problem. Its Steam notice of 24 September says a patch for performance issues in the Steam version is in the works, with a date to be announced; at 09:10 UTC on 26 September no patch had appeared in the game's Steam news feed. DSOGaming measured 60fps at native 4K with maximum settings on an RTX 5090 but major stutters, and Tom's Guide reported frame drops in hectic fights, a black screen during a cutscene and a bug that made one puzzle unsolvable.

On PS5 the picture is calmer. Push Square played in Quality Mode on PS5 Pro, which targets 30fps (a Performance Mode targets 60fps), and reported no performance issues. There is no console equivalent of Steam's user score, so this review cannot measure PS5 players' opinion directly. If you are on PC now, our Townfall PC settings guide separates the documented fixes from the anecdotal ones.

How we got to 7.7

The critic half is OpenCritic's Top Critic Average divided by ten; the player half is Steam's percentage of positive reviews across all languages, divided by ten, which we use in full for a game's first 60 days. Critics carry 70% of the weight and players 30%. We may adjust the result by up to half a point for problems documented by at least two independent sources.

We did not apply a deduction. The PC performance problems are documented by more than two independent sources, which would allow one, but they already explain much of the Steam half of the score: subtracting again would count them twice. When Konami's patch lands we will re-read the numbers and update this review, and every review is rechecked at 30 days.

Should you buy Silent Hill: Townfall?

• Buy it if you want slow, avoid-the-monster horror and a richly detailed setting. This is where critics are closest to unanimous.
• Wait if you play on PC and are sensitive to stutter. Konami has promised a performance patch for the Steam version but has not dated it.
• Skip it if forced stealth sections put you off. VGC's complaints about The Weight describe the game's most divisive stretch.
• Want more action? IGN describes 2025's Silent Hill f as the more action-oriented entry; Townfall is the return to sustained tension.

For comparison, Silent Hill f and the Silent Hill 2 remake both hold 86 on Metacritic, with 80% and 95% positive on Steam respectively (figures from our launch report). If first-person horror is the draw, Resident Evil Village is the obvious big-budget alternative, and it also runs in VR on PS5: see our guide to its PS VR2 mode. Everything else we have published on the game is on the Silent Hill: Townfall hub.