Silent Hill: Townfall’s developers at Glasgow-based Screen Burn have sought to make its fictional Scottish island setting, St. Amelia, both believable and unsettling through close observation of real coastal communities. The approach matters because the game uses familiar domestic spaces, weathered buildings and everyday noises to create horror from an environment that initially appears charming and recognisable.

Writer-director Jon McKellan said St. Amelia drew particularly on St Monans and Shetland, with the team researching locations along the North Coast 500 through photography and LiDAR scans. The mid-1990s game is played in first person, allowing developers to preserve cramped house sizes, low cupboards, radiator hiss and creaking pipes without enlarging spaces for a third-person camera; they even measured drawer depths and kitchen-counter heights.