Review Roundup: Silent Hill Townfall Wins Critics Over, Loses Some Players
The series' first-person revival holds an 81 on Metacritic for its Scottish-set horror, but a wide critic-player gap has opened over its combat and stealth.
A note before we begin: HotGameNews staff have not played Silent Hill: Townfall. This is a roundup of published reviews and aggregate scores, not our own hands-on review. The game launched September 24, 2026 on PS5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.
The scores. Townfall holds a Metascore of 81 from a wide pool of critic reviews, with OpenCritic slightly ahead at 82 and 92 percent of critics recommending it. The picture looks very different on the player side: the Metacritic user score has fallen to 7.2, and Steam’s own review split sits in the 68-71 percent positive range — a noticeably wider critic-to-player gap than most of this year’s big horror releases.
What critics love. The Scottish setting and first-person perspective — new ground for the series — draw consistent praise, alongside the atmosphere, story, and sound design. Several reviewers single out the mood and world-building as the strongest reasons to play, calling it a successful, if strange, reinvention of the series’ horror.
The complaints. The friction is concentrated in moment-to-moment play rather than mood or story. Critics and players alike flag the stealth and combat as frustrating or repetitive, and some puzzles draw complaints for being overly difficult with pacing that drags in places. That mechanical friction, more than anything about the setting or story, appears to be driving the player-side scores down.
How to read it. This is a case where the aggregate critic score undersells how divided the reception actually is. An 81 Metascore paired with a 7.2 user score and sub-75-percent Steam positivity is a real split, not noise — worth knowing if you’re buying based on the headline number alone. The praise for atmosphere and setting is consistent across both camps; the disagreement is almost entirely about how the game plays moment to moment.
The bottom line. Townfall’s new first-person, Scottish-set take on Silent Hill lands well with critics for its atmosphere and story, but go in expecting friction in the stealth and combat that’s turned off a meaningful slice of the player base.
Scores reflect Metacritic, OpenCritic, and Steam at time of writing and may shift as more reviews are added.