Silent Hill: Townfall has a different kind of resonance if you grew up in the UK. Its Scottish island of St Amelia is already my favourite video game environment of the year for how it evokes the atmosphere and time of a place—specifically 1996—and captures the specific details of small town life.

From the video rental shop to the bunting sadly hanging from the buildings, it's the kind of run-down fishing town you never normally see in a video game. That's probably because it's not as glamorous as somewhere like Kamurocho in Tokyo (St Amelia regrettably lacks a Sega World) or New York, and not as dreamy as the Stephen King-inflected small town settings of games like Alan Wake or Silent Hill 2.

Using the Silent Hill franchise as this trojan horse to smuggle in a location that's clearly of interest to the Glasgow-based development team at Screen Burn was a marvellous idea: given the state of the games industry, it's unlikely that anyone will ever again be given the budget or time to craft an authentic British newsagent or storefront for a fish and chip shop.

Still, as eerily authentic as St Amelia's exterior details are, like the telephone boxes and road signs, it's the interiors that I find uniquely settling. Here's why: my grandparents basically lived in the houses in this game.

The kitchen tiling, the heaters, the wallpaper, the appliances—it's so forensically accurate to a certain type of house. The kind of places that were last renovated in the '70s or '80s and haven't been touched since, maybe because the residents were too old to want to redecorate or because they couldn't afford to do so.

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