Silent Hill: Townfall is a harrowing ride from start to finish, but to me, the scariest moment comes near the end. It’s not scary because you face down some terrifying monster; it’s scary because you’re the monster, and you might not realize it on your first playthrough.
Major spoilers ahead. You have been warned.
Townfall’s penultimate chapter, “Richard,” puts you in control of the titular character, a mysterious figure who subtly guides the game’s protagonist, Simon, as he explores the Scottish town of St. Amelia. As a sort of flashback, the chapter takes place inside Chapman Energy Corp’s (the company at the center of the game’s story) headquarters, and you have to make your way to the CEO’s office on the top floor.
Things get grim as soon as you enter the building, with you soon discovering the halls are littered with the mangled corpses of “other” Richards who tried and failed to complete the mission you’re on now. However, the tone shifts almost immediately when you swipe a shotgun from one of the Richards and load it with the myriad of shells you find lying around.
From here, the CEG HQ starts to feel like a section from a completely different game. Monsters known as Widows soon appear, but instead of charging at you like the others you’ve encountered so far, they embrace stealth, crouching behind lockers or waiting around corners to ambush you. They can be dangerous if they get the drop on you, but a solid shotgun blast invariably takes them down.
Before long, the Widows stop being a threat and start being a nuisance. Once you learn how they work, you go on the offensive, using the building’s layout to corner them where they hide and fill them with buckshot before they can attack. Still, the moment doesn’t feel triumphant, and the reason is simple and horrifying: the monsters aren’t the threat here; you are.
Throughout Townfall, you slowly piece together that C.E.G., at the behest of its CEO, ignored safety protocols while installing new equipment on an oil rig off the coast of St. Amelia. Said equipment soon failed, triggering a catastrophic fire that claimed the lives of over a hundred people. In the aftermath, C.E.G.’s CEO did everything he could to cover his tracks, pretending nothing could have prevented the tragedy.
And just who is this greedy, cowardly CEO? You find out when Richards enters the CEO’s office and picks up his own ID card.
Once you realize Richard is C.E.G.’s CEO, small details you might have noticed throughout his chapter start clicking into place. The Widows Richard guns down are the literal widows of the workers who died because of his negligence. The fact that he only sees his own corpse piling up reflects the idea that, in his own entitled mind, Richard is the sole victim of the St. Amelia disaster, a “man of industry” being unjustly persecuted by an ungrateful town.
Richard, like so many people in corporate power today, chose profit over the people his company claimed to serve. And when the consequences of his choices become too big to hide, he chooses destruction over reflection, tearing through his workplace with a gun, mowing down the loved ones of the employees he let die in a desperate attempt to regain control.
Comparing Richard’s gameplay section to Simon and Rose’s only makes the flags redder. Simon and Rose’s gameplay sections subtly reinforce the characters’ remorse for their roles in the St. Amelia tragedy, encouraging you to avoid violence through resource scarcity and empathy-inducing monster design. Richard’s gameplay, in contrast, actively encourages you to mow down your foes, even awarding you an Achievement for killing thirty of them.
Through this haunting gameplay segment, Townfall seamlessly puts the player in the headspace of a man who caused immeasurable suffering and feels absolutely no guilt over it. And in my opinion, that makes it one of the scariest moments I’ve ever played in a video game.
