Konami’s return to Silent Hill hasn’t just been a huge success in terms of sales, but it’s also been a successful venture in creativity.
After the original quadrilogy of games in the late 90s and early 2000s, the Silent Hill franchise became watered down and repetitive. However, with the modern revival of the series, each game has tried something completely new.
As Konami pushes for Silent Hill to be an annual franchise between remakes and new entries, the company is also pushing for developers to explore new cultures. F, which released in 2025, explored a rural 1960s Japan, whereas Townfall, which released earlier this year, explored 1990s Scotland.
Alongside this, Konami has pushed to keep developers of one game in the series away from team creating another entry in the series. “We found out about a lot of those projects when everyone else did, when they announced them,” Townfall director Jon McKellan said in a recent panel at MCM London Comic Con. (Thanks, VGC.)
“Okamoto-san, who’s the series producer, was very keen to not let projects influence each other, and not compromise too much,” he continued. However, Konami did have an internal team checking everything to make teams weren’t inadvertently copying one another.
“The understanding, I think, was that he and his team would be reviewing everything rom all the games, and if they saw something we were doing was maybe a little bit too close to something else. Then they would step in and say, ‘you might want to course-correct here’”.
McKellan explained that the team at Screen Burn working on Silent Hill Townfall “were kept in the dark, but in a good way”. They explained that they got to see F just “a couple of months before it came out”, but in that scenario “there was no real risk of overlap” as the two games were completely different.
“[It] didn’t feel like we had to play to some bigger plan,” McKellan continued. “It wasn’t like a Marvel phase where it would be like ‘know your slot and stay within that’. We got to be free while we worked… we got to be very creatively free, just with the knowledge that Konami and the team would step in if they felt they had to.”
McKellan explained that there was a single piece of “visual design or something” that felt too close to another game’s enemy design, which the team at Konami urged them away from. Outside of that, though, the team was let off the cuff, albeit with the knowledge that “they’d let you know if you’re not on the right path”.
At the end of the day, Townfall, despite some players’ dislike of it, is a thoroughly unique entry in the Silent Hill franchise. It’s so different from prior games in the series while also keeping the same horror core that makes the series so enticing.
As the series continues with a new game every year, we’ll hopefully get to see even more cultures and even more inventive ideas for the horror series. Could we see a Silent Hill set in Vietnam? Or Paris? (I went to Lalinde once and I’d love to see a horror game there. At night time, it’s terrifying!)
