Silent Hill: Townfall is the first horror game to make me feel bad for using a shotgun

Silent Hill: Townfall is a suffocating experience, especially if you're like me and love tormenting yourself with stealth, limiting the use of any kind of weapon. I spent almost all of my first playthrough forgoing any pipe or plank, or even pistol in favour of my trusty CRTV and top-notch strategy. But my pacifist run stopped dead in its tracks when I got my hands on the shotgun.

Every horror game fan will know the liberating power of getting your hands on a shotgun in a game where you've done nothing but cower and run from danger—finally, you get to be the danger. Turns out the horrors are trapped inside this game with you, not the other way around.

I may have embodied this a bit too much when I got my hands on the shotgun in Richard's section of Townfall. …