Annapurna Interactive has finally confirmed that Silent Hill: Townfall continues to be in development.
The publisher shared this statement on their official Twitter account:
“We deeply apologize for any concerns about SILENT HILL: Townfall. SILENT HILL: Townfall will continue to be co-developed by KONAMI, Annapurna Interactive, and No Code.”
Konami announced Silent Hill: Townfall as part of their big Silent Hill: Transmission event in October 2022, nearly two years ago. The game’s main developer, No Code, is a specialist in adventure games. No Code’s 2017 release Stories Untold was an episodic adventure game series demonstrating their faculty in telling different kinds of stories. In contrast, Observation was a puzzle adventure game that showed that they could tell a single story in the course of a full game as well.
The studio was co-fouinded by Jon McKellan, who had previously worked in Creative Assembly and was part of the team behind Alien: Isolation. So No Code may have proven their ability to make good adventure games independently. But they also have people who were already experienced in making adventure games with a big name license. So Annapurna and Konami put together a potentially winning combination for this project.
The big issue for Silent Hill: Townfall came up last month, when Annapurna Interactive’s entire team resigned. As reported by Game Developer, what we saw then capped off months of infighting between Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary and producer Hector Sanchez. The situation got serious enough that it drew in Annapurna’s founder Megan Ellison directly.
Game Developer also corroborates that Annapurna has simply chosen to staff back up, and has been reassuring partners that their projects are safe. At the time, we reported that some developers were already reassuring fans that their games were still in the works. But it now looks like even they had not been contacted by Annapurna yet and were only speaking for themselves.
Nathan Gary is rumored to be planning to start a new game publishing company himself, so it seems the events of last month are irreversible. We hope Annapurna’s partners can all confirm that their games are still safely in production.
