Only a few years ago, the Silent Hill name was considered a relic of the horror genre. Its best efforts were its earliest from 20 or more years ago, and it had since lost its way. Lately, though, it's found its footing again, first with Bloober Team's remarkable remake of Silent Hill 2 in 2024, then with 2025's brilliantly rule-breaking Silent Hill f. Now, with Screen Burn's Silent Hill: Townfall, the comeback feels complete. Townfall is the third memorable entry in as many years, reviving a legendary series for a new era.

Like Silent Hill f, Townfall defies tradition and takes the series outside the United States, this time to Scotland. There, an American man named Simon Ordell washes up on the shore of a blue-collar island town, St. Amelia. Right away, Townfall captures the all-important tone of a Silent Hill game. It's more than the fog that's become synonymous with the series: It's the unsettling stillness, the sense of sadness lurking in every shop and down every alleyway that lingers like a harbinger of the dread that will certainly follow. Though it adheres to some of the series' touchstones, it's a fully standalone entry. It works just as well if this is your first Silent Hill game.

As you explore the town, it becomes clear early on that St. Amelia has suffered a tragedy so severe that the community was shuttered almost overnight. Heartfelt memorials in the town square dedicate pictures and words to loved ones taken too soon, and the displays are only matched in number and emotion by the many protest signs demanding accountability. The finer details, of course, aren't yours to understand for a long while. Like the fog and its accompanying melancholy, Silent Hill also serves as the stage for startling truths that only emerge late in a character's journey. 

But if you think you know where it's going, I bet you don't. Screen Burn's founder and Townfall's writer Jon McKellan once ran a fansite dedicated to this series, and that sort of lifelong devotion is clear by the end of Townfall. He and his team understand what Silent Hill has been, but also--and more importantly--what it can be. The rules of this universe are played a bit fast and loose, and it's better for it. Is Silent Hill a physical place, or an idea? Is everyone found there sent to suffer? While some themes re-emerge like somber notes on a mandolin, some of Townfall's best parts are how it toys with expectations, twisting them into new shapes and sometimes rejecting them.

Townfall feels a lot like Silent Hill 2 early on. The original music, as great as it is in its own right, deliberately recalls the series' heyday, and you'll spend some early hours navigating through the roundabout corridors of a hospital and an apartment complex. But this is more than a "fan game" liberally reusing what's worked before. Screen Burn makes it its own.

That's most obvious in how it's played. Townfall is presented in first-person, as few games in the series have been before it, and introduces a new gameplay element that relies on a handheld piece of analog tech--the sort of physical contraption this team made its name on with games like Stories Untold and Observation. Whereas many games in the series use a radio to passively alert you to nearby threats, Townfall's CRTV is closer to Alien Isolation's mot

Remedy Entertainment's signature style has often made gameplay feel secondary to story. Games like Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control had fun gameplay hooks, but the depth mostly lived in their narrative puzzle-boxes, where the answer to each strange mystery created three more questions. Control Resonant breaks from tradition magnificently, revealing a whole new side to Remedy. Armed with deep, engaging combat mechanics in a stunning version of Manhattan that is unforgettable, Control Resonant is a confident delivery of Remedy's best gameplay experience ever that never sacrifices the team's unique brand of weirdness. 

Control Resonant takes place seven years after the first game, with the mystical Oldest House still under siege from the Hiss invasion. Now, outside the Oldest House's once-secret doors, a second Altered World Event is threatening Manhattan. With Federal Bureau of Control director Jesse Faden gone AWOL for reasons unknown and much of the bureau dead or displaced, her brother Dylan is released from his holding cell as Plan B. 

If that paragraph of proper nouns leaves your head swimming, I understand. And although Control Resonant doesn't shy away from throwing a lot at you in its story, it does give newcomers a helpful recap of the first game to get them up to speed. The important thing to know is that New York City is under attack from a paranatural threat, and Dylan Faden, once the puppet of the Hiss and blamed for much of the carnage to date, is reluctantly given a chance at redemption.

Whereas Control was a third-person shooter, Control Resonant is a melee-focused action game that winds up feeling like a dark superhero-adjacent adventure akin to Infamous or Prototype. However, Resonant has so much Remedy flair that these comparisons are best understood as suboptimal shorthand for something ultimately deeper and more enjoyable.

Dylan's weapon of choice is the Aberrant, a piece of shape-shifting metal that becomes the basis for intricate combat builds. The Aberrant has several forms ranging from a pair of quick-strike clubs with a chance for critical hits and a larger scythe that does slower but more sweeping damage, to a tweener form that is neither especially fast nor slow but does bonus damage from behind enemies. 

The game encourages you to switch up your build often with respec tokens and a huge tree of upgrades--it's hard to see any of the many options as obviously advantageous, allowing you to experiment without feeling like you're being funneled down a specific path. I loved experimenting with the many different abilities and combinations. Over the course of the 30-40 hour story, you'll fortify the Aberrant and Dylan alike with this treasure trove of combat enhancements, equipping up to six special abilities at a time and combining different sets of them nearly whenever you want to. Each of them gives Dylan a distinctly different feel, but what they have in common is how good they look and feel to use. 

There are shields, telekinetics, friendly summons, and more to pick from the deeper you go. My experience with Resonant may feel very different from yours, and that's partly why it works so well.

Control Resonant's power climb over those hours is supremely satisfying because it invites--and then rewards--thoughtful decisions by the player. For instance, rather than c

Boarding a seemingly dead derelict cargo spaceship, a salvager and her partner expect a routine haul of broken tech and lost data. Instead, they discover the silent corridors are actively patrolled by monstrous robotic sentinels and lethal hidden dangers. Drastically outmatched and entirely unprepared for the horrors inside, the duo must rely on each other to survive an impossible situation. Tune in to this thrilling second episode of shorts to witness a salvage run gone wildly wrong.

#scifi #anime #deadspace #scifiadventure #scifihorror #alien #space #spaceship #sci

A scavenger of derelict spaceships boards a cargo ship thinking it would be an easy run. But what she finds is far from what is expected! Watch the first episode of shorts for the adventure she goes through is nothing she's been prepared for before!

#scifi #anime #deadspace #scifiadventure #scifihorror #sci #aliens #alien #entertainment #space #spaceship

Few movies can truly say they hit the ground running, but Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is among them. And that’s a good thing, because after so many Resident Evil movies, every new one needs a running start to have a chance of making it.

We can’t talk about a Resident Evil movie without doing a little bit of table-setting first, though. Resident Evil debuted on PlayStation in 1996 and coined the name for an emerging game genre: Survival Horror. Since then, Paul W.S. Anderson has directed six live-action Resident Evil movies starring his photogenic and acrobatic wife Milla Jovovich. 2021 brought us the Robbie Amell-led Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. That’s not counting the half-dozen CGI Resident Evil movies that more or less act as canonical extensions of the game series. Generally speaking, the Resident Evil movies have been on a downward trend since early into Anderson’s tenure. Now, in 2026, the unkillable movie franchise rises again, this time with Zach Cregger, director of Barbarian and Weapons, acting as the head of the monster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNd1gb19A-c

Resident Evil follows medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he drops off a package and argues with his girlfriend over the phone. Instead of going home to talk to her about it, though, Bryan jumps at the chance to take a high-priority delivery to Raccoon City. It needs to get there intact, and without any detours. A perfect way to not talk about any personal problems Bryan might have. Bryan starts questioning his decision when he hits a woman in a nightgown while driving in the dark down a slick road in heavy snow.

That moment marks the point in which Bryan is in over his head and finds himself in a race to survive.

Bryan is not a hero. He is perhaps the least heroic character to lead a Resident Evil movie. And that’s a huge factor in why this disgusting, hilarious, and often frightening movie works. Bryan doesn’t have special forces training, and like so many of us, he’s only ever wielded a gun using a video game controller. 

As he curses and fumbles his way through this horrifying night, he’s easy to sympathize with. He’s a sort of self-insert character for the audience, but not in the usual way we think of. What if you sat down to play Resident Evil for the first time but woke up in that world? The vast majority of us would be stuck in a stumbling run, trying to load the last rounds we have with shaking hands. That’s Bryan–always breathless and on the edge of a panic attack.

But Bryan never stops, and the movie doesn’t, either. Resident Evil runs at a breakneck pace through the film's entire 95-minute runtime. There are no quiet moments to breathe and reflect: It’s a horrible night where one disaster pushes Bryan into the next one. Each time he’s found something resembling safety, he’s yanked right back into the endless nightmare. It’s a marathon movie in the vein of movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and Run Lola Run.

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