I've been playing Silent Hill Townfall! It is good. I think I am enjoying it more than Silent Hill f, but I do intend to go back and give that another go (and a shot at one or more of the other endings) for the sake of fairness, comparison and suchlike.
Silent Hill Townfall is quite a different sort of game, though. For starters, it's presented from a first-person perspective rather than Silent Hill f's third-person viewpoint, and it places a strong emphasis on stealth rather than combat. There is combat — and it's modern-day, weighty, get-hit-once-and-half-your-health-bar-is-gone combat — but for the most part, sneaking around pretty much always seems to be an option, and in some cases is outright essential. I am fine with this.
I know some people don't like stealth much, but when it's executed well, it can be a great part of a game — and it's especially fitting with the horror genre. It makes absolute thematic sense to be creeping around monsters who very much do not have your best interests at heart rather than attacking them, and it especially fits with Silent Hill's traditional idea of a relatively "normal" person being the protagonist.
Silent Hill Townfall also provides you with some excellent tools to help with the stealth part. The main one is a little portable CRT television which you can "tune in" to monsters' frequencies, and this allows you to "see" them, even through walls. At other times, you have a pager whose LCD display shows the direction that monsters are in, but not details. Most of the monsters move in clear patterns, so the stealth sequences tend to boil down to puzzles of sorts: how best to get across the area while avoiding ending up in their line of sight.
There's excellent use of sound, too. When you're visible and vulnerable to a monster, the background audio builds in a gradual crescendo before eventually giving a "boom" when they're actively pursuing you. Likewise, you can tell when you've reached safety, because the background audio chills out a bit. Very clever and subtle.
I'm not entirely sure what's going on in the narrative as yet, but that's par for the course with the series. There is a lot of… medical stuff going on, though. Medical stuff in general gives me the squick, so it's ideal horror fodder for me; when combined with some of the other stuff Silent Hill Townfall is doing, I'm very happy at the experience it has provided thus far.
Highlights for me in the seven or eight hours I've apparently played since yesterday include some puzzles that involve creatively interpreting video footage to determine a combination number subtly hidden within; an inordinately stressful sequence in which you are tasked with performing various medical procedures on a patient while a complete cunt of a doctor yells at you over an intercom for being incompetent; and a puzzle based around locating blood bags, pairing them up with the appropriate medical charts, and then combining them to crack a code that unlocks a door.
I'm not crazy about the "instant death" monster who showed up during the blood bag sequence (only during the hunting for the blood bags, not during the puzzly part, thankfully) but, as previously noted, the sneaky-sneaky nature of most of the game means that you're already well-trained at avoiding monsters by the time you run into it anyway.
I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes. There's already been some intriguing weirdness to it all, but I have no idea where it's going to end up just yet. We shall see, I guess — that is, if Ace Combat 8 doesn't distract me from it too much…
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