Of all the things I expected from Silent Hill's big comeback, Scottish coastal fog wasn't on the list. But here we are. The Daily Record has a great piece tracing how a village in Fife inspired Silent Hill: Townfall, one of the most anticipated games of the year, and it's worth a read even if horror isn't usually your lane.

Townfall comes from No Code, the Glasgow studio behind Stories Untold and Observation, published under the revived Konami banner alongside the rest of the Silent Hill projects announced back in 2022. No Code's whole identity is mundane dread, VHS static, ordinary rooms that stop feeling ordinary. Pairing that sensibility with Silent Hill always made sense on paper. Now we know some of that texture comes straight from the studio's own backyard.

The Daily Record walks through how the Fife location shaped the game's mood, and if you've spent any time on that stretch of Scottish coast, you'll understand immediately. There's a specific quality to a North Sea town in winter, the kind of gray that makes noon feel like dusk. Silent Hill has always been about atmosphere over gore, going back to the 1999 original where the fog existed partly to manage the PlayStation's draw distance and partly became the series' entire personality. Accidental genius. No Code inheriting that legacy and grounding it in an actual Scottish fishing village feels like the natural handoff this series has needed.

It also explains why so many people have taken to calling Townfall "the most Scottish game ever," a label the Record leans into. I've played my share of games that claim British roots and then sound like a Hollywood idea of Britain, so I'm inclined to give this one the benefit of the doubt. When a studio makes games about the places it actually lives, you can feel it. Squaresoft knew Tokyo; FromSoft knows the architecture of decay; No Code knows a cold Scottish harbor.

Townfall still doesn't have a hard release date beyond its 2026 window, which at this point is par for the course with the Silent Hill revival. But between this, the remake momentum, and everything else in Konami's pipeline, the series is in its healthiest place in two decades. That's a sentence I genuinely didn't expect to type after The Room.

If you want the full history of the village connection, including the specific spots that made it into the game, go read the Record's piece. The best horror settings are rarely invented. Somebody found them first, and No Code went looking in the right place.