How the Silent Hill Townfall team made a charming seaside town utterly terrifying

This damp island village is cozy yet nightmarish

Atmosphere is an integral element of any good horror game, and Silent Hill: Townfall nails it. Developed by Glasgow-based studio Screen Burn and published by Konami, the latest installment in the venerated series takes place in a fictional island town in Scotland called St. Amelia during the mid-1990s. If you’ve ever set foot in a small town in the U.K., you’ll marvel at the meticulous attention to detail in Townfall’s environmental design, from the way the moisture hangs in the air to the rubbery texture of the paint on the nobbly stucco buildings. At a preview event in Los Angeles earlier this month, writer-director Jon McKellan and series producer Motoi Okamoto gave Polygon a glimpse behind the process of making St. Amelia a reality.

According to McKellan, St. Amelia is based on a couple specific towns in Scotland. The first is St. Monan’s, which inspired the look of the port seen in the very early moments of the game. The second is Shetland, an isolated island community located in the North Sea, about 150 miles off the coast. The Screen Burn team conducted extensive research to get the look of their city just right, and much of that was done via a coastal road known as the North Coast 500.

“It's a combination of lots of details, like the type of surfaces that you use on buildings for the type of weather they have. The fact that when you live by the sea, everything rusts a little bit faster. All these little things paint a unique culture, wherever you go in the world. And the island of St. Amelia was built from those things,” he explained. “It must have been hundreds of times that we'd stop off, get out, start taking photographs, start LiDAR scanning areas, and have the locals wonder what the hell we're doing because we're taking a hundred pictures of an ashtray. We were really trying to nail exactly what makes these towns personal, so that St. Amelia could have a personality that's unique.”

That attention to detail carried over to Townfall’s homes and interior spaces, and even caught some members of the team by surprise. “I remember the first time we put together one of these test beds for the game, some of our partners over in the U.S. were like, ‘This house looks very small, you know, houses aren't that small.’ And I'm like, ‘They are. This is how small they get,’” McKellan said with a laugh.

Opting for a first-person perspective instead of the third-person view featured in previous Silent Hill games allowed the Screen Burn team to fully embrace the idiosyncrasies of older buildings, like tight spaces, low-slung cabinetry, hissing radiators, and all sorts of mystery noises.

“With first-person, we don't need to make anything bigger to fit the camera over their shoulder. We can be right there in the center of the action. So we would measure the depths of drawers. We would make sure the kitchen counters are the right height,” McKellan said. “With a lot of these Scottish homes, like, they just sound like that. There's always just weird noises and pipes creaking, and you're constantly looking around. Like, is this normal?”

Early on in Townfall, you’ll need to restore power to a house in order to access the computer. But it’s not as simple as replacing a fuse. Instead, you’ll need to search the nearby pharmacy for prepaid cards used to top-up the electricity meter located in a ground-floor crawl space. This outmoded process very much feels like a video game puzzle, even though it’s literally an ordinary chore people did on a regular basis not so long ago. It’s a uniquely UK-specific element that grounds the story and makes St. Amelia feel more like a real place.

“Our key thing is making that feel grounded and believable. That should feel nostalgic for us, but interesting for people who didn't grow up with that stuff, it's like something really new for them,” McKellan said of the power meter sequence. “It's something that's, for us, very nostalgic. We grew up with that stuff and then other people are going, ‘You really had that? Like, that's a thing?’ So you get a lot of interest out there as well, so you know, without it feeling too much like a gimmick.”

Silent Hill: Townfall will be released on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC on Sept. 24.