By Silent Hill Townfall is the latest entry in Konami’s horror series, developed by Screen Burn and co-published with Annapurna Interactive. You play as Simon Ordell, returning to the island town of St. Amelia to “put things right”, in a mix of tense evasion, confrontations and puzzles. I’ve been testing it on the Steam Deck to see how it runs and which settings give it the best shot, and right now it’s a rough ride.
Best settings
To give the game as much headroom as possible, I set almost everything to Low, with FSR handling upscaling. The one exception is textures, which I left on Medium. That’s about as far as you can push the settings down while keeping the game looking decent on the Deck’s screen.
For context, Konami’s minimum PC requirements list an RTX 2060 Super or RX 6600 for Low settings at 1080p and 30 FPS, so this is a demanding game for handheld hardware.
Performance on the Steam Deck
Even with those settings, Townfall struggles to hit 30 FPS. The bigger problem is stability. There are regular hiccups where the frame rate drops below 20 FPS, and at its worst I saw it fall to around 13 to 14 FPS.
Indoor areas are less demanding, so the frame rate is higher there and it touches 30 FPS every now and then. Even indoors, though, it still dips below 30 and you still get those sudden performance spikes. Those drops pull you right out of the atmosphere, which is a real problem for a horror game that relies on immersion.
Does frame generation help?
I also tried Mako frame generation and adaptive frame generation. Both give a smoother experience than running the game without them, but they can’t hide the dips. The frame pacing still isn’t consistent, so it’s still not a good time on the Deck.
Looks great, runs poorly
It’s a shame, because the game looks really good on the Steam Deck even on low settings, and the story seems engaging so far. The visuals and the performance just don’t match up yet.
Final thoughts
As it stands, I can’t recommend Silent Hill Townfall on the Steam Deck. It needs optimisation, and I think that with more updates it could become playable on the Deck and maybe even earn a Playable rating. For now, I’d hold off. If you’re already playing it on your Deck, let me know how your experience has been.