Silent Hill: Townfall's St. Amelia is a singularly unnerving location, especially if, like me, you are blessed with the good fortune to be a Scot. It's a fictional place, but one that a lot of us are intimately familiar with, even as it's twisted by fog and trauma. It's a nightmare, and like most nightmares it's powerfully relatable.

When I spoke with director Jon McKellan at Gamescom, we talked a lot about Scottishness and authenticity, which St. Amelia has in spades. And with the game now out in the wilds, we've reconvened—this time joined by art director Paul Abbott—to dig deeper into the town's origins, and the process that brought it to life.

Screen Burn knew it wanted to create St. Amelia, and it had a clear vision for the town right at the start. "We knew where we wanted to draw reference from—lots of Scottish coastal towns, island towns, stuff like that," McKellan tells me. "Once you've played through the story, I think the things that have happened to St. Amelia, it's very much because of who they are and where they are. So it was always a fundamental part of the story that it was the type of town it was."

"We realised that leaning into things was going to make things much more authentic."

But what wasn't locked down was St. Amelia's location. " It didn't take long for Screen Burn to settle on making it more specific, however.

Source link