(Image credit: Screen Burn)

Silent Hill: Townfall 's St. Amelia is a singularly unnerving location, especially if, like me, you are blessed with the good fortune to be a Scot. It's a fictional place, but one that a lot of us are intimately familiar with, even as it's twisted by fog and trauma. It's a nightmare, and like most nightmares it's powerfully relatable.

When I spoke with director Jon McKellan at Gamescom, we talked a lot about Scottishness and authenticity , which St. Amelia has in spades. And with the game now out in the wilds, we've reconvened—this time joined by art director Paul Abbott—to dig deeper into the town's origins, and the process that brought it to life.

Arrival

(Image credit: Konami)

Screen Burn knew it wanted to create St. Amelia, and it had a clear vision for the town right at the start. "We knew where we wanted to draw reference from—lots of Scottish coastal towns, island towns, stuff like that," McKellan tells me.…