I loved Townfall but the cover image is awful
Like the title states, I thought Townfall was a fantastic entry to the franchise as a fan for the last 15+ years. I am finding a lot of opinions online a little reductive for all the Revival era games. I personally think the Post-Team Silent era was the roughest state the games in this franchise have suffered. As much as people don't like f & Townfall, personally I have a hard time seeing how Origins, Homecoming, or Downpour are better. From a storytelling perspective those games are far inferior to the Revival era IMO. Shattered Memories is a cut above those games writing wise for me, but I still think it has some issues. I am pretty open-minded to this series going in any direction it sees creatively fit. My only minor belief is that the games should contain some sense of supernatural reality and not have the events purely in the minds of the characters. The only game in the whole franchise that actually seemed to do that was Silent Hill: the Short Message.
Townfall and f both took creative risks, many more risks than the games previous did, and both games benefitted greatly from it. Townfall is probably my 4th or 5th favourite Silent Hill game now.
However, the cover image is just absolutely horrible. Silent Hill 2 Remake already had bad "Marvelized" cover design, but this game blows that out of the water in terms of poor design. Honestly, the cover of Townfall with Simon on his CRTV looks AI generated there is no better way to put it. It's one of the worst pieces of video game cover art I've ever seen, rivaling the ICO North American PS2 cover. We've gotten some bad cover art in this series, the North American cover of SH1 immediately comes to mind, but this just takes the cake for me. The sad part is that the Steelbook cover is significantly better, even just the placeholder art of the waves and the title is also significantly better. Oh well, at least Steam lets you change the cover art thankfully.