Couldn't Even Redownload It
In 2015 Konami made a beloved Silent Hill demo vanish for good. A new one lands today, one day before the original game it's riding on turns 25.
Today, if you bought the Deluxe Edition of Silent Hill: Townfall, you're already 48 hours into it — early access opened this afternoon. The full release is Wednesday, September 24. Silent Hill 2, the 2001 game the whole modern revival of this franchise is built on, turns 25 the day after that.
Eleven years ago Konami did the opposite of "welcome back." In August 2014, Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro put out P.T. — a free PS4 teaser that didn't admit it was for a new Silent Hill game, Silent Hills, until you'd already finished it. It became one of the most talked-about horror releases of the decade without technically being a real game. Then in early 2015 the whole thing collapsed along with Kojima and Konami's relationship. Silent Hills was cancelled. Konami pulled P.T. from the PlayStation Store on April 29 — you could still redownload it for about a week, and then, from that May on, you couldn't, not ever again, unless you'd been careful enough to never delete it off your own console. Del Toro has spent basically every anniversary since publicly reminding Konami he hasn't forgotten.
Now Konami can't stop making Silent Hill games. Bloober Team's remake of Silent Hill 2 shipped a million copies in three days back in 2024 and has since passed 2.5 million. Silent Hill f shipped over 2 million copies this year. And at Gamescom this August, series producer Motoi Okamoto said the plan going forward is "to, hopefully, have an annual release of new games," with — his words — "many projects that are still under the works and very unannounced." Townfall, from a studio called Screen Burn that used to be called No Code, is just the next one out the door, landing the day before the anniversary of the game that made all of this worth doing again.
Somewhere there's a PS4, untouched since 2015, with P.T. still sitting on it. The only official copies of that game left on Earth are the ones nobody ever deleted.