Interview
October 15, 2026
SILENT HILL: Townfall delivers haunting psychological horror at its very best with UE5
Every once in a while, a new game is so startlingly different, it spawns its own genre. When Silent Hill hit stores back in 1999, it pioneered a unique brand of psychological horror unlike anything players had seen before. That original game’s legacy can be felt in everything from Alan Wake 2 to Crow Country—and now, the OG is returning with the next instalment in the franchise, SILENT HILL: Townfall.
This latest offering follows an American named Simon Ordell who mysteriously washes ashore in the fog-shrouded Scottish harbor town of St. Amelia in 1996. Delivering a chilling, slow-burn psychological dread that blends the series' classic themes of guilt with a distinctly melancholic, 1990s British sensibility, SILENT HILL: Townfall is being hailed as marking the return of genuine survival horror.
Screen Burn Interactive chose Unreal Engine for the project because powerful systems including Lumen and Nanite would enable the small team to craft complex, beautifully rendered scenes, while tools like MetaHuman provided a fast workflow for creating and iterating on realistic digital humans. The team also looked beyond the engine, tapping into powerful tools across the Epic ecosystem, including RealityScan, to capture details from real Scottish villages.
We caught up with Screen Burn Interactive’s Writer and Director Jon McKellan, Lead Animator Andrea Gandola, and Lead Programmer James Hancox to find out more.
This latest offering follows an American named Simon Ordell who mysteriously washes ashore in the fog-shrouded Scottish harbor town of St. Amelia in 1996. Delivering a chilling, slow-burn psychological dread that blends the series' classic themes of guilt with a distinctly melancholic, 1990s British sensibility, SILENT HILL: Townfall is being hailed as marking the return of genuine survival horror.
Screen Burn Interactive chose Unreal Engine for the project because powerful systems including Lumen and Nanite would enable the small team to craft complex, beautifully rendered scenes, while tools like MetaHuman provided a fast workflow for creating and iterating on realistic digital humans. The team also looked beyond the engine, tapping into powerful tools across the Epic ecosystem, including RealityScan, to capture details from real Scottish villages.
We caught up with Screen Burn Interactive’s Writer and Director Jon McKellan, Lead Animator Andrea Gandola, and Lead Programmer James Hancox to find out more.
Thanks for joining us! SILENT HILL: Townfall looks terrifying in the best way. Could you please provide a brief overview of the game and what awaits players in St. Amelia?
Jon McKellan, Writer and Director: SILENT HILL: Townfall is a narrative-driven horror game where the protagonist Simon Ordell finds himself in a town he’s unfamiliar with, but is somehow asked to ‘come back to’ in order to ‘make things right’.
It’s set in the town of St. Amelia—an island town off the coast of Scotland—and it’s a full-length game with a unique mix of stealth, evasion, combat, and puzzle solving, all presented in first-person perspective; a first for the series.
Silent Hill has one of the most devoted fanbases in horror. What were your core goals in creating a full-length, self-contained entry, and how did the team go about defining what makes a Silent Hill game a Silent Hill game?
McKellan: Silent Hill means a lot of different things to different people. As with any franchise that’s not only been around for so long, but has also been so experimental, we find that everyone has their own touch points depending on when and how they fell in love with it.
For me personally, it was the first game back in 1999 on PS1 that got me hooked, and the series continued to inspire my own work in the years to come. For other folks, they joined it this decade and discovered these originals as ‘retro cult classics’! We saw this not only in the development team, but in the fan base too.
When we started the project, we asked what Silent Hill meant to our team members individually, and as expected, we got a lot of different answers. So what we focused on was the common ground; the consistent themes, thoughts, and feelings that transcended the individual games or experiences. There was a lot to unpack, and it was a lot more than just “it has fog!”
The stories were subjective and always up for debate. The atmosphere was dense and tension-driven, rather than full of jump scares. There was a deep psychological element to the horror, where even the creatures you encountered were entwined with the stories and their protagonists.
You've described traveling the Scottish coast, photographing real fishing towns, piers, and the Haar, the sea fog that rolls in off the North Sea. How did that research shape St. Amelia and the game's overall atmosphere?
McKellan: It was integral to the process. We firmly believe that to make a new location in a game feel believable, you have to really ‘live’ there in your head as much as possible. Visiting these towns, and drawing from our own experiences and memories too, really played a massive role in defining not only the look and feel of the town, but narrative elements and locations for the gameplay to take place in.
We would not only photograph the various towns and villages, but we’d scan them too. A mix of RealityCapture [now rebranded as RealityScan] and LiDAR scanning would allow us to not only bring really interesting surfaces, objects, and quirks of the landscape into the game, but also to really accurately retain the metrics and general size of everything.
We could scan entire streets and bring them directly into Unreal Engine to give us a starting point for material reference, scale, depth—and even reveal some surprising elements we would never have thought to imagine on our own, such as simply how much subsidence and ‘warping’ there is on every wall. Nothing is a right angle in these towns, and nothing is on a grid.
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Where is Screen Burn Interactive based and how big is the team working on SILENT HILL: Townfall?
McKellan: We’re based in Glasgow, Scotland mainly, with a few staff down in London and Brighton remotely. We're 27 people at the time of writing, a small team making big things!
SILENT HILL: Townfall is Screen Burn’s first project built in Unreal Engine. Why was Unreal Engine 5 chosen for this project? Which UE5 features stood out to you most during development (and why), and how smoothly was the team able to make the transition?
McKellan: We made the transition to Unreal Engine 4 when we began the project. When we were evaluating the project's needs, the two biggest factors at the time were realism in the rendering, and Blueprints. A team of our size can’t bottleneck behind code to get any and every feature implemented, so Blueprints provided a way to let every department build, or at least prototype, the game on their own. We all wear a lot of hats at Screen Burn, so that flexibility and the opportunity to rapidly prototype without relying on other departments' time were a game-changer for us. When UE5 rolled around, productivity exploded in so many amazing ways too.
How have Unreal Engine 5’s lighting, materials, and environment tools helped you achieve the game’s cold, fog-shrouded visual art style?
McKellan: Working with both Nanite and Lumen allowed us as a small team to create very complex and beautifully rendered scenes. To be honest, non-uniform environments bathed in fog and overcast lighting are probably one of the hardest combinations of things to pull off!
It took a lot of experimentation to be able to accurately depict the lighting of fog diffused sunlight while retaining depth and balancing that with window-lit, natural light indoors.
Combining that with dense volumetric fog, and the freedom Nanite gave us to make complicated building materials, we could really layer on the warped, cracked details that the town needed to sell its history and place in time. Frankly, if it weren’t for Nanite and Lumen, this game would be wildly different and probably much smaller!
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You're also making use of the Lumen dynamic global illumination and reflection system as well as ray tracing. What has it been like diving into these systems and how have they changed the look of SILENT HILL: Townfall?
McKellan: Lumen was a game changer for us. I’m the lighting artist on the game and very early on, I built a system to allow us to do swift and dramatic changes to the world lighting—for example, from fog to Otherworld lighting profiles—and have that affect almost every light in the game, all in real time.
While our system is (deliberately) not physically accurate in ways, the systems Lumen provides are flexible enough to allow us to build the scene lighting exactly as we need it, and make both micro and macro changes rapidly, whether that is for authoring lighting for a scene, or in-game as part of our Otherworld lighting shifts. It made rapid iteration possible, with no bake times to worry about: wildly different from our experience on previous titles.
How did you make use of Nanite's virtualized geometry to build out St. Amelia and its richly detailed environments?
McKellan: Nanite not only allowed us to layer in a level of detail and history in every frame that we could only have dreamed of before, it also changed how our artists worked fundamentally. We no longer had to spend a lot of time on level of details (LODs) or high-poly / low-poly bakes, and instead built everything with a mid-to-high polygon count from the start—and got assets into the game quickly, while remaining optimized and performant.
Nanite also allowed us to bring raw scan data from our research trips directly into the world, and walk around and play the game with them in the scene, before deciding what to build, adapt, or remove.
The characters are central to the game's sense of dread. Could you walk us through how MetaHuman fits into your character and cinematic pipeline, and how it worked alongside your other DCC tools?
Andrea Gandola (Lead Animator): MetaHuman provided us with standardized high-grade rigs and assets that were directly integrated into our Maya and Unreal Engine development environment, allowing for a very detailed range of facial expressions and micro-movements crucial for delivering subtle yet dramatic performances through our characters. The direction of performance in Townfall is very much understated and nuanced, and MetaHuman was key to conveying the story in this way, where even a subtle eye-glance can hint at a much bigger emotional moment.
For Townfall, we decided to move over to the MetaHuman pipeline in its early development stage, which meant utilizing the technology as it was iterated on. MetaHuman's complex asset and rig generator has been a great bridge between DCCs and the engine. One of the main reasons for the adoption was to avoid having to develop and maintain a large and often complex FACS-based rigging pipeline, which enabled us to eliminate months of setup and R&D per character. We used MetaHuman Creator to get us as close as possible to the original likeness of the actors and meshes we had previously scanned in RealityCapture and processed in ZBrush.
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What were the biggest benefits MetaHuman brought to the project, and how many people were involved in bringing the characters and cutscenes to life day to day?
Gandola: MetaHuman heads have been essential for a team our size for fast iteration, reduced processing time, and depth and detail of the expression. Because of the standardized setup, sharing meshes, skeletons, rig logic, and building tools meant that most of the improvements could be shared across all characters.
On the animation side, we had a total of three people working on cutscenes at any given time, two of whom split their time with gameplay tasks: one full-time cinematic animator and two technical animators, one DCC-oriented dealing with rigs and meshes, and one gameplay/systems-oriented taking care of connecting the real-time world to the sequences. The majority of facial animation polishing or edits was done by a single animator for the whole project, which is a testament to not only their skills, but the quality of the tools they were using!
In other areas, Jon handled the editing of the scenes in Sequencer, as well as camera animation and lighting, while our team at Arrival handled audio production and voice editing.
Could you estimate how much longer it would have taken for the team to create the game's characters and cutscenes without the help of MetaHuman?
Gandola: When we adopted the MetaHuman pipeline, we already had a classic FACS-based pipeline which required expensive licenses and a long setup time with lots of manual mark-up, which would sometimes still need heavy adjustments. With MetaHuman already being part of the engine, we gained quick iteration times and smart auto-solving which takes the animator's time out of tedious technical process in favor of creative and polishing time.
Ultimately, if it weren’t for MetaHuman, the story of Townfall would likely have been presented very differently, with far fewer scenes possible for a team our size.
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Could you please describe the role Sequencer and Unreal Engine's in-engine animation tools played in bringing the cutscenes to life? How much of that work happened directly in-engine?
Gandola: All of our in-game cinematics use Sequencer, along with some other in-world items that needed to be animated in sync with audio, triggered by bespoke or dynamic moments, while keeping it neatly separated from all other game and mission logic. Sequencer's Event Track allowed us to control and sync world events such as lighting changes reliably.
We used in-engine animation tools for fast iteration throughout the entire development of the game, ranging from blocking to last-minute touch-ups or polishing—although we prioritized using Maya where the animators had the most experience with the existing tools, while keeping in touch with the engine-side tool updates which we are sure we'll lean on more going forward.
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The CRTV is a clever replacement for the series' radio. You've talked about building its look by playing real footage back out through physical CRTs and pocket televisions. Which Unreal Engine tools helped you bring that analog feel into the game?
McKellan: Building the CRTV content was a very hands-on and craft-driven experience, and as with all things being built outside of the computer like this, it could be very liberating and exciting to work on!
The process involved running final footage of a cutscene or gameplay into the real CRTVs and broadcast monitors we’ve collected over the years, distorting those signals on playback with various techniques, and then filming the result. The contents were then played back as Bink video files and rendered into the materials of the CRTV.
We could play the video texture back in a complex material that would handle additional static, cross-fade multiple video clips running in parallel, and even mask out the static from the upscalers so that the glitchy and erratic video is not smoothed out and ‘made pretty’ by upscalers and frame blending: it takes a lot of time and effort to make footage look this bad!
Creating the original sequences to pipe into the signal flow was a mix of live gameplay, custom sequences, and cutscenes, and used heavily tweaked camera shake assets to build a realistic handheld feel for those shots. The external process with the real TVs would simply add texture, and allow me to ‘perform’ the noise, static, and signal degradation in time with the scene contents. I could have static intensify on certain lines of dialogue by ‘playing’ the cable inputs like an instrument. The most fun you can have while breaking TVs!
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Much of the game's tension comes from stealth and from threats the player can't yet see. How did you approach enemy behavior and encounter design, and what role did Unreal Engine play in tuning those moments?
McKellan: Our design team has built complex yet elegant Behavior Trees for our enemy behaviors. In order to have players feel scared during these more stealthy moments in the game, the creatures, despite being fairly gross and weird, had to behave ‘believably’. While that sounds ridiculous as they are clearly abstract creatures and not animals, we could take those strange designs and bake reality into them by having them use their senses and investigative skills regardless. They would use a mix of senses, Behavior Trees, Nav Mesh and audio-only Nav Meshes, to build individual performances that feel customized to the player’s location, direction, and actions in a way that wasn’t possible 10 years ago.
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How important has it been for you to have access to UE’s source code throughout development?
James Hancox, Lead Programmer: Access to the Unreal Engine source code has been very valuable to us during development. It lets us better understand how systems are implemented, so that we can build our game in a way that works smoothly with Unreal Engine. It also allows us to make engine modifications where needed—both backporting changes and improvements from later versions of Unreal Engine, and extending the engine’s systems to handle specific situations we need for our game.
For instance, our game relies heavily on cinematic presentation, and makes extensive use of depth of field effects—including in our cinematics, when the player raises the CRTV, and even on the main menu. Because we have source code access, we’ve been able to integrate improvements to depth of field from UE 5.7 and 5.8 into our game, even though we launched on UE 5.6.
How have Unreal Engine’s profiling tools assisted your team with debugging and performance optimization? SILENT HILL: Townfall is shipping with ray tracing and two graphics modes on PlayStation 5. How did you approach hitting those targets?
Hancox: We used a large number of Unreal Engine’s tools to help optimize SILENT HILL: Townfall. When we identified a scene or area that was underperforming, the first tool we would typically use is Unreal Insights. This gave us a detailed breakdown of timings on both GPU and CPU, showing what was taking up time in the frame, and where we should focus our efforts.
Depending on where the bottleneck was, we might then use different tools in the editor to focus our efforts. For instance, if shadow mapping was proving particularly expensive, we might use the Light Mixer to check the lighting setup in a specific scene (looking for overly large lights), and the Virtual Shadow Map (VSM) cached page view to find sources of VSM invalidation such as World Position Offset.
When the out-of-the-box tools did not quite fit our needs, we would sometimes add extensions or customizations. We added custom filters to help search for specific types of problematic textures and meshes, building on top of Unreal Engine’s frontend filter search system; annotated our game source code with markers for Unreal Insights so that we could track down where CPU time was going; and used the Gauntlet system to build simple automated performance testing for the game. As a small team, having these systems to build on top of was extremely valuable. We don’t have the resources to build and maintain this kind of tooling ourselves, but we can extend them to solve our specific problems.
Hitting our targets on PlayStation 5 took a lot of work. From a high-level perspective, our approach was to use Dynamic Resolution Scaling in order to maintain the target frame rates and allow internal resolution to vary. It was then a matter of consistently profiling and iteratively optimizing, trying to squeeze additional performance out of each part of the frame.
For raytracing specifically, the optimizations in UE 5.6 allowed us to move from software raytracing to hardware raytracing on consoles, but we then needed to emphasise optimizing our raytracing acceleration structures—both the Top Level Acceleration Structure (TLAS) and the Bottom Level Acceleration Structure (BLAS).
The Render Resource Viewer makes it easy to find assets with unusually large BLAS. Once these problematic assets were identified, we could work with the art teams to find ways to optimize them. Optimizing the TLAS was more difficult for us. St. Amelia is a realistically dense environment, with lots of twisted roads and buildings not aligned to the XY grid, which meant that we had some very large overlaps in the TLAS in certain areas. These problem areas could be identified through the Instance Overlap debug view in the editor, but given the level layouts were already locked down, we were slightly limited in what we could do. We were able to see some improvements through subdividing some very large meshes such as roads into smaller sections, but it remained a difficult problem to solve.
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Did the team take advantage of the UE documentation, Epic Developer Community, Epic Pro Support, or other parts of the ecosystem like Fab throughout development?
Hancox: Epic Pro Support was very helpful throughout the project. It enabled us to see how other developers were handling problems, discuss confidential platform issues, and directly contact the developers of new Unreal Engine features we were using.
For instance, we started experimenting with the new first-person rendering feature in UE 5.5, and were able to give feedback to the developers about issues we found and specific bugs we ran into. This meant that by the time we came to release on 5.6, these issues had been ironed out and we were able to ship with this feature.
Do you have any advice for indie/small teams evaluating Unreal Engine today?
McKellan: As with any project, you not only need to pick the right engine, but also the right toolset within that engine. UE has a wide range of applications beyond just photorealistic rendering, and the toolsets available inside the software (such as the modelling tools or procedural content generation) can dramatically change how you work.
It’s fair to say we could not have built SILENT HILL: Townfall, especially to the quality and scale that we have, without UE5 and the tools it brought to the table. To build a AAA-feeling game with just 27 people is hard, but Unreal Engine took so much of the stress out of it and allowed us to make the game we really wanted to, while offering us development routes and fresh ideas that we never would have considered before.