In brief: Konami recently announced a harvest of new Silent Hill content including a teaser for a spinoff called Silent Hill: Townfall. The minute-and-change trailer features a voice-over from a mysterious character as the camera slowly zooms in on an 80-style pocket television. The gadget’s screen provides plenty of quick-burst frames that can be analyzed on their own but fans decided to dig deeper and did not come up empty-handed.
A Reddit user extracted the audio from the trailer and converted it to an MP3. A spectrogram of the audio showed text that read, “WHATEVER HEART THIS TOWN HAD HAS NOW STOPPED.”
A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies in a signal, and this isn’t the first time the technique has been used to hide content in game-related audio. A spectrogram of a song from the 2016 Doom soundtrack revealed a pentagram followed by the numbers 666 repeated multiple times.
A frame-by-frame analysis of the images on the pocket TV revealed some interesting findings as well including what appears to be snippets of a map, Morse code for S.O.S., a message about flesh being weak and what could be scenes from the game. There may even be a body floating in the water at the very end of the clip. Morse code found in images shared on Twitter revealed the text, “I DON’T KNOW HOW TO LEAVE.”
Konami shared teasers for four games last week including a remake of Silent Hill 2 from Bloober Team and the aforementioned Silent Hill: Townfall, which is being developed by No Code Studios and publisher Annapurna Interactive. Silent Hill f, meanwhile, is an entirely new story set in 1960s Japan. It is being written by Ryūkishi07, a well-known visual novelist that specializes in murder mysteries, supernatural and psychological horror.
Last but not least is Silent Hill: Ascension. It is billed as an interactive streaming series where the community shapes the canon of Silent Hill. It’ll be available 24/7 in 2023,” we are told. It looks to be the most ambitious of the bunch, and also the project that is most likely to fall short.
