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St. Amelia
August 20, 2026 at 02:32 AM
Initial version covering the island's setting, landmarks, layout and navigation
St. Amelia is the fictional island town where SILENT HILL: Townfall takes place. It sits in Scotland and the game is set in 1996. Store copy describes a town "lying quiet beneath a heavy fog, seemingly abandoned but not at rest," where fog-soaked streets, abandoned communities and forgotten corners tell their story through atmosphere and history.
St. Amelia is invented for this game. It is not a real place, and it is not the town of Silent Hill. Screen Burn built it out of real Scottish coastal towns the team knows, but the island itself is fiction.
The fog has a name. Jon McKellan has described chasing a Haar, the sea fog that rolls in on the east coast of Scotland, and photographing it rather than imagining it: "I could go to a town that looks like St. Amelia and find a fog that looks like SILENT HILL and come back and show the team, here's what the game needs to look like." On one of those trips the fog closed in until the team could no longer tell which direction the coast was in, and McKellan has said that moment is where the game's opening came from.
Scotland was picked partly for that. "Scotland is naturally a very foggy region, making it a perfect fit for Silent Hill," McKellan said. For a long time the team considered a generic Northern European setting before locking it down.
These are the places named in official material or seen in the sections shown to press. Nothing else about the island's geography has been published.
Place | What is known |
|---|---|
The pier | A working harbour front. The team walked several real piers to study their shapes and uses before building St. Amelia's. |
Shorefront | A named region of houses and apartments, used as the setting for part of the gameplay trailer. See Shorefront. |
The town square | Simon reaches it after hearing shouting and seeing flashes that suggest a protest or riot, and finds it empty of people. |
The alleyways | Narrow lanes that, in McKellan's words, "snake through the entire town." Fun to walk in the real towns they came from, much less so with a creature behind you. |
The family clinic | Where Zoe worked. Her office holds a set of three scales. |
The pharmacy | Holds a prescription Zoe called in at the wrong dosage, and a passcode puzzle fed through the CRTV. |
The hospital | A separate medical centre, distinct from the family clinic, and the setting for the second section shown to press. |
Zoe's house | An explorable location, marked as its own chapter in the official gameplay trailer. |
Phone booths | Dotted around the island. They are where the game saves, and they are marked on the map. |
Previewers who played the July build described the town as freely walkable early on: you can wander the streets and take in the sights, but new areas open by triggering story progress rather than by unlocking on their own. Backtracking is built into that. Some items can be used the moment they are found, and others only make sense on a return visit once Simon knows more.
Navigation runs through two objects. The CRTV tunes signals that name the next place Simon needs to reach, leaving the player to work out where that is. The map does the rest: it is drawn on a pamphlet Simon doodles on, it marks his position along with telephone boxes and locked doors, it uses a numbering system with no legend, and it gathers concepts, names and codes as the game goes on. In practice it works as a journal as much as a map.
Saving happens at the phone booths. Autosaves appear as red squares. Running is not available from the start; the ability is handed over partway through the prologue.
Set dressing does a lot of the storytelling. Previewers noted protest signage and notices posted around town, and homes for sale lining the streets. The town appears to have suffered some kind of medical outbreak, which is what ties Zoe's story to it.
Okamoto has framed the game's social angle as "the dynamic between the individual and society at large and corporations," and said the series had not explored that before. One account of the backstory adds a specific: a labour union that fought a corporate institution, with the conflict boiling over and giving way to something worse. That detail is single-sourced and unconfirmed.
McKellan has named isolation as the thing he was writing about: "There's like an existential dread that comes with that. Silent Hill has always had a sense of not being able to leave the town, and face why you're there. That isolation isn't just for the protagonist, but also for the town." Lead game designer Graeme McKellan put the practical version of it more bluntly: there is no running away, so you have to solve the problem.
The look of the place came out of real photography trips rather than concept art alone. That work is covered on Art Direction and Presentation.
