Silent Hill: Townfall Beginner Tips: Difficulty Settings and Early Mistakes to Avoid
Silent Hill: Townfall just launched. Here is how to set combat and puzzle difficulty, use the CRTV, save reliably at phone booths, and avoid early mistakes that waste resources.
Simon Ordell walks the fog-bound streets of St. Amelia in Silent Hill: Townfall's key art. Image: Konami.
Silent Hill: Townfall is out now on PS5, Steam and Epic Games Store, and it is the first mainline Silent Hill built entirely in first person. You play Simon Ordell, a man who wakes up on the fog-bound Scottish island of St. Amelia in 1996 with no memory of how he got there and every reason to leave. The game front-loads a handful of systems that decide how rough your first few hours feel, and none of them are explained clearly in the tutorial. Here is what to set and what to know before the fog closes in.
Set combat and puzzle difficulty separately
Townfall splits difficulty into two independent sliders, and the options menu does not make that obvious at a glance. Combat difficulty runs Story, Normal or Nightmare and controls how much damage enemies deal and how easily you can shake them. Puzzle difficulty runs Normal or Hinted, and it only changes how much help the game gives you: on Hinted, the specific lines in documents and notes that matter for the puzzle you are stuck on highlight in red. Neither puzzle setting changes an actual solution, code or combination, so there is no reason to avoid Hinted out of pride. Both sliders can be changed at any point from the pause menu without reloading, so if Nightmare combat turns a section into a slog, drop it to Normal and keep going.
Learn the CRTV before you need it
The portable CRTV is Townfall's replacement for the series' static radio, and it does more work than the radio ever did. Hold it up and it hums when something hostile is nearby, with the pitch and a directional cue pointing you toward the threat, even through walls and fog. Tuning it in also pulls in narrative broadcasts and, in specific rooms, hints toward the puzzle you're standing in front of. On PS5 the DualSense's gyro is mapped to the tuning dial, so physically tilting the controller fine-tunes the signal instead of holding a stick in one direction; it is fiddly for the first few uses and then becomes second nature. Get comfortable tuning it in a quiet room before you're doing it while something is walking toward you.
Save at phone booths, every time
Manual saving happens exclusively at red phone booths scattered through St. Amelia, where you dial 100 to record your progress. The game will not let you cross into the Otherworld until you've used one at least once, which doubles as a soft tutorial nudge, but it also means you can go long stretches without a checkpoint if you ignore them. Duck into every booth you pass, even if you just saved five minutes ago. There is no autosave safety net covering a bad encounter.
Avoid fights you don't have to win
Townfall is built around evasion more than confrontation. Ammunition and melee durability are both scarce enough in the early hours that fighting every threat you see will leave you empty-handed for the encounter that actually requires it. Director Jon McKellan has described the design intent bluntly: go in swinging and you're going to have a bad time. Use doors, lockers and line-of-sight breaks to lose enemies instead of trading hits with them, and save your firearm for moments the game clearly frames as a fight, not every shape that moves in the fog.
Early mistakes worth skipping
- Don't dump your first flashlight batteries exploring side rooms with nothing in them; St. Amelia's early areas reward backtracking once you have new tools, not first-pass completionism.
- Don't ignore the adaptive trigger and haptic cues on PS5; the resistance change on your weapon's trigger is often the game telling you a shot won't land clean before the animation does.
- Don't skip the Deluxe Edition's bonus content if you already own it expecting it to matter for difficulty; the interactive artbook and soundtrack are cosmetic extras and the early access window has already passed for anyone starting today.
- Don't assume Story mode trivializes the game; it only softens combat, and the puzzle and pacing design stays identical on every setting.
Townfall runs roughly 10 to 14 hours on a first playthrough depending on how much you explore, with five distinct endings and two more accessible only through New Game Plus. None of that is gated behind difficulty choices, so pick the combat and puzzle settings that let you actually finish a session rather than the ones you think you're supposed to pick. Full details on editions, PS5 features and the game's Scottish setting are on the official Konami launch announcement and the PlayStation Store product page. PlayStation's own breakdown of the DualSense features referenced above is worth reading in full on the PlayStation Blog, and background on the studio and the wider Silent Hill timeline is on Wikipedia.