Silent Hill: Townfall is one of four new ones silent Hill Games Konami announced during his flooded showcase earlier this week, and perhaps the most mysterious. Details were scarce outside of a brief teaser trailer featuring a cryptic voiceover and harrowing music, but fans believe they may have unlocked a clue hidden in the video’s audio file. And their minds are wild with the possibilities.
A spin-off from No Code, the studio behind the excellent monitoring and Untold Storiespublished by indie art house label Annapurna Interactive, city case is obviously influenced by the original silent Hill but also possibly a departure from the third-person action footprint of the popular horror series. In the trailera man talks to someone and describes mysterious but horrific events that haunt him wherever he goes as fear builds on the screen of a portable CRT.
Fans might have been content to digest it and move on from there, but creative director Jon McKellan hinted that there’s more to the trailer than meets the eye. Enter Reddit user MilkManEX (via IGN) who ripped the audio from the file, converted it to an MP3 file and found a hidden message inside the resulting spectrogram:
“Whatever heart this city had has now ceased,” reads the full encoded sentence.
Creepy! And also very vague. “But what stopped?” wrote one fan on the subreddit. They point out that elsewhere in the trailer, there’s the subtlest sound of a woman’s voice possibly saying something like, “Wow, is that really Alessa?”
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They further hypothesize that the man speaking in the trailer could be K. Gordon, Alessa’s teacher. “The key is very similar to the classroom key, but not close enough that I could say it’s secure,” they continue. “In any case, I have a feeling that they are speaking to Alessa herself.”
Alessa is the focus of the first silent Hill and a central recurring character throughout the series so it would certainly fit with the rest of the trailer. Elsewhere, Morse code has been translated to “SOS,” another ominous but common clue. Hmm, someone else is getting strong silent Hill vibes from all this?
While fan theories are still in their infancy, the mere existence of the clues has gamers excited for the intense augmented reality (ARG) game they’re hoping for city case‘s publication. “I’m literally so hyped for Townfall because the format looks very VHS type ARG (suspicion correct thanks OP) that would be something you would find on the dark side of yt AND I LOVE IT, works so well really can’t wait with the theme of Silent Hill,” wrote one player.
This is all consistent with No Code’s previous work. monitoring was a sci-fi adventure thriller about the controls of a spaceship AI trying to unravel the mystery behind its missing crew. Untold Storiesmeanwhile, was an episodic horror series set in the style of 1980s black mirror. Both focused on screen-mediated action and puzzles, and the spooky CRT in the new trailer hints at a potentially similar approach city case. It is clear to fans that the actual game has already begun.
