Konami and Annapurna Interactive have dropped nineteen unbroken minutes of Silent Hill: Townfall, and it is the first time the game has been allowed to explain itself rather than gesture at a mood. With the launch just over a month out, developer Screen Burn Interactive finally shows what the thing plays like: a first-person survival horror game built around a handheld television set.
The footage opens on Simon Ordell being told, by a voice that does not explain itself, that he needs to return to St. Amelia. From there he is loose in an abandoned Scottish coastal town in 1996, working through empty streets under the kind of fog the series has been trading on since 1999 - except here the fog has an obvious mechanical purpose rather than a technical one.
The CRTV is the whole game
Simon carries a portable analogue TV, and it is the closest thing Townfall has to a signature system. Tuning it does several jobs at once. It picks up signals that point toward objectives - in the trailer, locating Zoe Ellis's apartment. It reveals threats through walls, which turns the town's dead ends into readable stealth space. And it feeds puzzles, because what the screen shows is not always what the room contains.
Screen Burn has been unusually specific about how that screen was made: the distortion is captured from real vintage televisions rather than approximated with a shader. That is a small production detail and it explains a lot about why the device reads as an object rather than an overlay. It also explains the studio's name, which it adopted in July 2025 after seven years as No Code - the team behind Stories Untold and Observation - in reference to an image burned permanently into a CRT.
Puzzles that are locks, not riddles
The two puzzles shown are refreshingly literal. A fuse box needs a prepaid power card. An organ donor box has a combination lock. Neither asks Simon to interpret a poem about the seven virtues; both ask him to go find a thing and bring it back. That is the older, colder Silent Hill puzzle grammar - the one where the obstacle is bureaucratic and the horror is that you have time to think about what you are doing.
Combat exists, and it is not the point
When stealth fails, Simon swings whatever is at hand - a wooden plank, in the footage - and later produces a revolver that has considerably more weight to it than its simplicity suggests. Encounters are staged so that the first monster you meet is one you are expected to avoid. Tension first, ammunition later. The preview also cuts between two register of environment: a damp, plausibly furnished apartment block on the Shorefront, and an Otherworld pass that rusts the same geometry into something wrong.
That structure - a real place and its corroded double - is the most orthodox thing about Townfall, and probably deliberately so. Everything else here is a departure. First-person. A 30-person team. Five endings. A Scottish town instead of an American one, and a 1996 setting that puts the handheld TV squarely in period.
Release details
Silent Hill: Townfall launches September 24, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and PC, with Deluxe Edition pre-orders getting in 48 hours early on September 22. Konami Digital Entertainment and Annapurna Interactive are co-publishing; producer Motoi Okamoto brought the studio to Konami on Annapurna's recommendation after playing its earlier games, and the team was reportedly given the development time to finish the idea rather than ship the pitch.
There is one more beat before launch: another trailer is set for Gamescom Opening Night Live on August 25. Nineteen minutes is a lot of game to show a month out, which usually means a publisher is confident - or that it has decided the only way to sell an odd horror game is to let people watch it for a while.
