“Scary enemy”

“Thing I can’t open yet”

“Merchant who actually has money”

Custom pins are good, but custom pins where I can actually write “weird locked door, come back later” are better.

At its core, Dune: Awakening is open-world survival game set on Arrakis. You gather resources, build a base, survive the desert and gradually work your way from running around on foot to flying your own ornithopter. The original version wrapped all of that inside a shared online world, and some of the strings attached to that setup were enough to make people think twice before diving in.

But now, with Update 1.5, you can play the whole game alone, reach the endgame without ever fighting another player, tailor the survival grind to your liking and finally finish Book One (the game’s first major story arc).

If Dune: Awakening looked good last year but came with one too many reasons to say "no", well... most of those reasons are gone now.

Dune: Awakening’s Single-Player Includes the Whole Game

You can now play the full story and endgame alone, with the systems built around other players reworked for solo play.

At launch, Dune: Awakening was a shared-world survival game. Even if you spent most of your time alone, you were still part of a persistent online world where other players traded resources, competed over territory and helped drive systems around you.

The new single-player mode keeps the full game intact without requiring other players to be there. You can explore Arrakis, play through the entire story and continue into the Deep Desert entirely on your own. 

Developer Funcom has also reworked the systems that only made sense in multiplayer. Faction competition can now happen in the background, for example, while the game’s expansive endgame zone no longer wipes and reshuffles itself every week to make room for a busy online population.

You can basically turn Dune: Awakening into a huge Dune survival RPG now.

Multiplayer is still very much alive and well for anyone who wants the shared-world experience, but single-player no longer feels like an afterthought. Funcom has put real effort into making the whole game work properly on your own, rather than just letting you avoid other players inside a world still built around them.

PvP Doesn’t Get to Take Over the Endgame Anymore

You can now play right through Dune: Awakening’s endgame without fighting another player.

The original game could spend dozens of hours feeling like a mostly PvE survival game before changing the deal in the Deep Desert, where combat with other players became a much bigger part of late-game progression.

Funcom eventually discovered that most people simply weren’t interested in playing Dune: Awakening that way. Its own data says around 80 to 90 percent of players stick entirely to PvE, meaning they would rather fight the game world than fight each other.

The multiplayer version now gives those players a proper route through the endgame. Hagga Basin, the huge region where most of the game begins, stays entirely PvE on official worlds, while the Deep Desert offers separate PvE and PvP versions. Players who choose PvP get much higher resource yields for taking the extra risk, while everyone else can keep progressing without being pushed into it.

PvP is still there for people who want it. It just isn’t mandatory for endgame progression anymore.

Making PvP optional would not help much if the PvE endgame had nowhere to go, so Funcom has spent the last year expanding that side too. Repeatable activities, more character progression and harder versions of late-game dungeons give PvE players more reasons to stick around once the main survival progression starts opening up.

Arrakis Is as Brutal as You Want It to Be

Dune: Awakening finally lets you decide how much survival-game pain you actually want.

Living on Arrakis still means worrying about heat, thirst, resources and everything else that comes with trying to build a home on one of fiction’s least relaxing planets. Single-player simply gives you far more control over how demanding those systems become.

Resources can be quicker to gather, crafting can be cheaper, enemies can be easier to fight and death can be less punishing. Heat and dehydration can be toned down too, while anyone who really wants Arrakis to leave them alone for five minutes can even switch off sandstorms and sandworms.

The survival game hasn’t gone anywhere. You just get a much bigger say in how annoying it’s allowed to be.

And of course, those same settings can make Arrakis even tougher. You can make every drop of water matter, or ease off the grind and focus more on exploring, building and the story. 

Book One Finally Has an Ending

Someone starting Dune: Awakening now can actually finish its first major story arc.

Book One is the five-act storyline Dune: Awakening has been building since launch. The PC version arrived with only part of it available, and Funcom gradually added the remaining chapters through later updates.

Update 1.5 finally adds the fifth and final act, so new players can now follow Book One all the way to its conclusion instead of catching up with the developers halfway through.

Dune: Awakening itself is far from finished, with more stories and updates already planned. But now, new players have a complete first adventure waiting for them from the start.

Dune: Awakening: The Quick Answers

• What is Dune: Awakening? An open-world survival game set on Arrakis, with building, crafting, exploration and combat. You can play alone or in its larger shared multiplayer world.

• Is Update 1.5 out now? Yes. It launched on PC on 17 September and is also available during the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S Deluxe and Ultimate Edition head start. The full console launch is 22 September.

• Platforms: PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

• Game Pass: Dune: Awakening joins Game Pass on 22 September.

• Can I play the whole game solo? Yes. Single-player includes the story, Deep Desert and endgame.

• Is PvP required? No. Multiplayer offers separate PvE and PvP versions of the Deep Desert.

• Is Book One the whole story? No. It completes the game’s first major story arc, with more content planned.

• Does it have crossplay? Xbox and the Microsoft Store PC version support cross-play and cross-progression through Xbox Play Anywhere. Broader cross-platform play is planned after launch.

Dune: Awakening still has rough edges, and full crossplay isn’t here yet. But if last year’s version sounded like a game you wanted to like more than one you actually wanted to play, this is the version worth reconsidering.

The soundtrack. I mean the soundtrack. 🙄

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/7599a881942544/announcing-grand-theft-auto-vi-the-album-coming-november-19

Turns out letting Leon just stay Leon and telling another story in this RE universe was the right move…

Need to see it immediately.

Dragonwilds is a really good co-op survival RPG first and foremost. Its RuneScape lineage is what gives it the skills, weird ideas and personality that help it stand out in a crowded genre.

Dragonwilds Is Basically RuneScape Meets Valheim

If survival games are already your thing, you’ll know what you’re doing in Dragonwilds almost immediately.

Ashenfall, the hidden continent where Dragonwilds takes place, is a big fantasy world you can explore alone or with up to three friends. You gather resources, build a base, craft better equipment, take on quests and bosses, and gradually push into places that would have flattened you a few hours earlier.

It’s a familiar loop if you’ve played Valheim, Enshrouded or any of the other big survival games. What changes the feel is everything Dragonwilds drops into that loop: RuneScape-style skills, weird magic, familiar creatures and 25 years of fantasy ideas to pull from.

You don’t need to care about RuneScape to understand why Dragonwilds works as a survival game.

Ashenfall is a new continent in Gielinor, the same world where RuneScape takes place, so longtime players will recognise some of the creatures, gear and magic. But Dragonwilds starts everyone somewhere new. If you’ve never set foot in RuneScape before, you’re discovering Ashenfall for the first time just like everyone else.

RuneScape’s Infamous Grind Is Actually Perfect for a Survival Game

Woodcutting, Mining and Construction turn everyday survival chores into actual progression.

Most survival games eventually ask you to chop a ridiculous amount of wood. Dragonwilds does too, of course, but all that work also feeds into a proper Woodcutting skill. The same goes for Mining, Construction and the rest of the game’s skills: the repetitive stuff you were going to do anyway is also making your character better at doing it.

That’s the part of old-school RuneScape that translates so well in this game. Chopping trees isn’t just how you get wood. The more you do it, the better you get at Woodcutting, and the more useful stuff you unlock along the way.

Eventually, Dragonwilds starts rewarding all that busywork by letting you get a little ridiculous with it. Keep levelling Woodcutting and you can summon a spectral axe to tear through groups of trees at once. Mining gets its own magic for blasting apart ore deposits. Even fishing can involve pulling fish out of the water with a tornado.

And yes, Bones to Peaches is here too. It’s an old RuneScape spell that turns bones into healing food, because apparently fruit is what skeletons were missing all along.

RuneScape’s skill system makes the survival grind feel like it’s actually going somewhere.

The callbacks are fun if you remember them, but nostalgia isn’t required. Dragonwilds keeps finding strange ways to make the chores survival games ask you to repeat hundreds of times faster and more satisfying.

Ashenfall Has More Personality Than Most Survival Worlds

RuneScape gives Dragonwilds a fantasy world that already knows what it is.

A new survival game normally has to build its identity at the same time it’s teaching you how to make an axe, cook dinner and stop dying outside. Dragonwilds gets a pretty big head start because Jagex has spent 25 years filling RuneScape with strange creatures, recognisable gear, oddball magic and a particular kind of slightly dorky fantasy.

Dragonwilds can pull from all of that without requiring you to know where any of it came from. Longtime RuneScape players might recognise a monster, weapon or spell straight away, while everyone else just gets a world that already feels like it has some history behind it.

Ashenfall feels more distinctive because Dragonwilds has 25 years of RuneScape weirdness to pull from.

You don’t need to recognise every reference. They just help Ashenfall feel like an actual place rather than another fantasy survival map populated by wolves, bandits and suspiciously convenient ruins.

1.0 Is the Best Time to Start Dragonwilds

If you were waiting for Dragonwilds to feel finished enough to start, your patience paid off.

Dragonwilds spent roughly 18 months in Early Access, and quite a lot happened while you were waiting. New regions, quests, enemies and abilities arrived while combat and progression continued to change around the people already playing.

But 1.0 isn’t just another pile of new stuff. Scorned Wilderness finally gives the Kuldra Saga, Dragonwilds’ first major storyline, an ending.

That means somebody starting now gets a complete first adventure rather than reaching the current end of the game and finding a big “come back later” sign waiting for them.

After 18 months of Early Access, Dragonwilds 1.0 finally feels like a complete first adventure.

Dragonwilds itself isn’t finished, and that’s intentional. More regions, skills, quests, bosses and stories are planned beyond 1.0. The difference is that you’re now starting at the beginning of a finished saga instead of halfway through one.

Crossplay Makes Dragonwilds Much Easier to Play With Friends

A four-player survival game is a much easier sell when nobody has to own the same platform.

Dragonwilds was already built around solo play or groups of up to four, but 1.0 blows the doors open. PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2 players can now all play together.

In a game where someone builds, someone gathers, someone disappears halfway across the continent and someone starts a fight nobody was ready for, being able to pull that group together across four platforms is a pretty big deal.

Your PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch 2 friends can all share the same Dragonwilds world.

More than 1.5 million people bought Dragonwilds during its Steam Early Access run. 1.0 doesn’t just give those players a finished first saga. It brings an entirely new console audience into the same co-op pool.

Dragonwilds 1.0: The Quick Answers

• What is it? A co-op survival RPG set in the same world as RuneScape.

• Do I need to know RuneScape? Nope. Ashenfall is a new continent created for Dragonwilds, and its story is designed to stand on its own.

• Release date: 15 September 2026.

• Platforms: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch 2.

• Co-op: Play solo or with up to three friends, with crossplay across every platform.

• Where does it take place? Ashenfall, a previously unexplored continent in Gielinor, RuneScape’s world.

• What does 1.0 actually add? Scorned Wilderness finishes the Kuldra Saga, so Dragonwilds now has a complete first main storyline from beginning to end. 1.0 also marks the console launch.

• Is Dragonwilds finished? Its first saga is. The game isn’t. More regions, skills, quests, bosses and stories are planned.

If you saw RuneScape in the title and mentally filed Dragonwilds away as “not for me”, that might actually be the best reason to give it a try. 

I’m sold! You did it!

I do not need "trailer six" featuring three more bosses, a location I didn’t know existed and something that definitely looks like it happens 30 hours in!

Now I see it and think oh nice, I might actually finish this haha

Zanzibar, de_dust2, Nuketown?

Something brought you here. That’s sort of how Silent Hill works.

Maybe it was Silent Hill 2 Remake. Maybe Silent Hill f. Or maybe Townfall has you wondering how much catching up you need to do before heading into the fog.

Thankfully, getting into Silent Hill is a lot simpler than surviving it. Most of these games tell their own stories, and you absolutely do not need to play every single one.

Start With Silent Hill 2 Remake

For most people playing Silent Hill for the first time, I’d start right here.

And if you like it, pick your route:

• Want the full Silent Hill experience? Silent Hill 2 Remake → Silent Hill → Silent Hill 3 → Silent Hill 4, then get pickier from there.

• Mostly interested in modern Silent Hill? Silent Hill 2 Remake → Silent Hill f → Silent Hill: Townfall.

• Only here because Townfall looks good? You can start with Townfall. Its story stands on its own.

The original Silent Hill 2 is one of the defining games in the series, and the remake gives you its standalone story with modern controls, reworked combat and an over-the-shoulder camera. It’s probably the easiest way to understand why people love Silent Hill without making a PS1 game from 1999 your introduction to the series.

Purists may tell you to start with the originals, and they have a point. But if you’re simply trying to find out whether Silent Hill is for you, this is the best of both worlds.

Want the Full Silent Hill Experience? Go Back to 1999 Next

One annoying warning before we go backwards: classic Silent Hill preservation is kind of a mess. This is the order I’d recommend experiencing the games in, not a promise that every stop will be easy to actually play.

Silent Hill (1999)

Yes, it looks old.

But if Silent Hill 2 Remake has you wondering why people have been obsessed with this series for decades, this is where I’d go next.

You play Harry Mason, searching Silent Hill for his missing daughter Cheryl. More importantly for our purposes, this is where the story that eventually continues in Silent Hill 3 begins.

Unfortunately, recommending Silent Hill is much easier than telling you where to buy it. The original has never received the straightforward modern re-release you’d expect from one of horror gaming’s most important games.

Konami has announced a remake, but if you want the original experience, access remains considerably more awkward than it should be.

And yes, we’re intentionally skipping the original Silent Hill 2. At this point, you ideally would’ve just played the remake. Asking you to immediately go through James Sunderland’s story again for historical accuracy would be a bit much.

We’ll come back to it.

Silent Hill 3 (2003)

This is why we sent you back to 1999.

Unlike Silent Hill 2, the third game directly continues the original Silent Hill. Saying much more starts getting dangerously close to spoilers, so we’ll leave it at that.

If you remember one sequencing rule from this entire article, make it: Silent Hill 1 before Silent Hill 3.

The frustrating part is actually playing it. The original PC version isn’t sold digitally on a modern storefront like GOG, and the original console release is a PS2 game. The easiest official route on current hardware is Xbox, where the backwards-compatible Silent Hill HD Collection includes Silent Hill 3, although that remaster has never exactly been beloved by fans.

So yes, the game I’m telling you not to skip is also one Konami has made extremely difficult to play properly. Welcome to classic Silent Hill preservation.

Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)

Finish the classic run here.

The Room gets considerably stranger, trapping Henry Townshend inside his apartment before sending him through increasingly unpleasant holes in its walls.

It also gives us a fun little preview of something Townfall would eventually take much further. You explore Henry’s apartment in first person, while the nightmare worlds beyond it switch back to the series’ usual third-person perspective. Townfall is the first full-length Silent Hill to stay in first person throughout.

The Room isn’t a direct continuation of the games above, but it was still developed by Team Silent and feels like the natural final stop for that original era.

And, miracle of miracles, this old Silent Hill game is actually easy to buy on PC.

See? It can be done.

After Silent Hill 4, You Can Get Much Pickier

You’ve now finished the original Team Silent run. From here, there isn’t really another sequence you need to follow to understand what comes next.

Origins, Homecoming, Shattered Memories and Downpour all have interesting reasons to play them, but none of them unlocks some crucial piece of story you’ll need for the modern games.

So rather than treating all four as mandatory stops, this is where I’d start following whichever ideas sound most interesting to you.

Silent Hill: Origins (2007)

It’s a prequel, but not a prerequisite

Origins is a prequel to the first game, following trucker Travis Grady before Harry Mason ever reaches Silent Hill.

But it was made years later and works much better as an extra look backwards than as your introduction to the series. It sticks fairly closely to the classic formula, although letting Travis move between the normal world and Otherworld through mirrors gives it one neat trick of its own.

There’s no later Silent Hill that requires you to know Travis’s story, so play Origins if you want another dose of the older formula, not because the chronology says you have to.

Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008)

This is the combat-heavy detour.

Homecoming follows Alex Shepherd as he returns home looking for his missing younger brother, with a noticeably heavier emphasis on combat than the earlier games.

That shift is a big part of why it remains so divisive, although even plenty of people who dislike Homecoming give its monsters and bosses some credit.

It’s another standalone story rather than a missing link in the series, so there’s no continuity penalty for skipping it. If a more action-heavy take on Silent Hill sounds interesting, though, this is where you’ll find it.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009)

If you play one game from this optional middle stretch, I’d make it Shattered Memories.

Shattered Memories reimagines the original Silent Hill, with Harry Mason once again searching for Cheryl, but almost everything else is different.

Instead of fighting monsters, you explore, solve puzzles and run for your life during nightmare chase sequences. The game also watches the choices you make, both in therapy sessions and while exploring, then changes things like dialogue, character appearances and even the monsters you encounter.

Treat Shattered Memories as an alternate take on Silent Hill 1, not a replacement for it.

The problem, once again, is access. It only officially released on Wii, PS2 and PSP, with no straightforward modern re-release, so playing it generally means having compatible older hardware and tracking down a copy.

Silent Hill preservation, or lack thereof, strikes again.

Silent Hill: Downpour (2012)

Another standalone detour, this time built around exploring much more of Silent Hill itself.

Downpour follows prisoner Murphy Pendleton into a more open version of the town, where you spend much more time wandering its streets, ducking into buildings, solving puzzles, taking on optional side quests and dealing with monsters along the way.

That freedom to explore is probably its best reason to give it a chance. Like Homecoming, it tells its own story, and nothing later depends on Murphy’s journey.

But if you’re still hungry for Silent Hill by this point, play it and see which side of the argument you land on.

Just Want Modern Silent Hill? Play These Next

If the previous section had you pricing used PS2s and reconsidering your life choices, good news:

You can go straight from Silent Hill 2 Remake into the modern games without missing some giant connecting storyline.

Silent Hill f (2025)

If you’re sticking to modern Silent Hill, this is where I’d go next.

Silent Hill f moves the series to 1960s Japan, with Higurashi and Umineko writer Ryukishi07 behind its story and grotesque floral imagery replacing much of the rust and decay you probably now associate with the series.

And make no mistake, this is still a pretty enormous departure from the Silent Hill that came before it. Moving the series to Japan after decades of mostly American settings is already a big swing, and f also leans considerably harder into melee combat than Silent Hill 2 Remake.

You technically can start here because the story stands on its own. I just wouldn’t make it your first-ever Silent Hill if you have the choice. A lot of what makes f interesting is seeing how deliberately it stretches the series after you already have some idea of what Silent Hill normally looks and feels like.

That’s why it works so well after Silent Hill 2 Remake: first you get a modern take on classic Silent Hill, then you get to see how far the series can bend without completely losing itself.

No wider story catch-up required.

Silent Hill: Townfall (2026)

You do not need to play another Silent Hill game before Townfall.

And if Townfall is the reason you ended up here, that’s probably the answer you wanted most.

Townfall is built around a full-length, self-contained story set on the fog-covered Scottish island of St. Amelia in 1996.

It’s also the first full-length Silent Hill presented entirely in first person. Even the familiar radio has been reinvented as a handheld CRTV that you tune into strange signals for clues, story fragments and help spotting threats through the fog.

So yes, Townfall can genuinely be your first Silent Hill game. Just know that you’d be starting with one of the series’ more deliberate reinventions rather than a particularly representative example of how Silent Hill has traditionally played.

That’s why I’d still recommend Silent Hill 2 Remake first if you’re choosing freely. You’ll understand the language Townfall is changing before you watch it change it.

But if Townfall is what got you interested in the series in the first place, there’s no story reason to wait.

What About the Original Silent Hill 2, P.T. and the Rest?

There are a few games and experiments we’ve deliberately left outside the recommended paths above.

Silent Hill 2 (2001)

Save the original for later rather than replaying James Sunderland’s story immediately.

It is absolutely worth playing. Plenty of fans still prefer it to the remake, and the two versions are different enough that anyone who properly falls for Silent Hill should eventually experience both.

But this route started you with the remake, so making you play essentially the same story again before continuing would be strange advice.

Come back once you’re deep enough into Silent Hill to actually want the comparison.

Silent Hill: The Short Message (2024)

It’s free, standalone and absolutely optional.

The Short Message is a short modern Silent Hill experiment released free on PS5.

I wouldn’t put it ahead of f in a curated play order, and I definitely wouldn’t judge the entire series by it. But if you can play it, there’s very little reason not to see what you think.

P.T.

Essential Silent Hill history, but practically impossible to include in a real play order.

P.T. was the playable teaser for the cancelled Silent Hills, and its influence on horror games is enormous.

Its availability is also in a league of its own. Konami removed it from the PlayStation Store years ago, and it can’t officially be downloaded again even by accounts that previously claimed it.

In practical terms, officially playing P.T. means finding a PS4 that still has the original installation sitting on its drive.

So yes, absolutely learn about it. Watch it if you need to. But I’m not going to pretend “find a decade-old PS4 that never deleted a delisted demo” is a reasonable step in a beginner play order.

Silent Hill: Book of Memories

This was a full Silent Hill release. It was also a multiplayer dungeon-crawling RPG.

The PS Vita spin-off trades survival horror for isometric action, RPG progression and co-op multiplayer. It’s an interesting curiosity if you want to see just how far Konami was willing to stretch the name, but there’s no reason to include it in a newcomer’s play order.

And Silent Hill has wandered down even stranger side roads: the Japan-only Play Novel on Game Boy Advance, light-gun game The Arcade, the Orphan mobile trilogy and The Escape, and the interactive streaming experiment Silent Hill: Ascension.

They’re all part of Silent Hill history, but none changes the order I’d actually recommend. If you reach the point where tracking down a Japanese GBA visual novel or a Silent Hill arcade cabinet sounds essential, you probably don’t need a beginner’s list anymore.

If You Just Want the Order

After all of that, here’s the simplest version:

• Best place to start: Silent Hill 2 Remake

• Want the classic/full-series route: Silent Hill 2 Remake → Silent Hill → Silent Hill 3 → Silent Hill 4, then explore Origins, Homecoming, Shattered Memories and Downpour based on what interests you. Save the original Silent Hill 2 for later.

• Want modern Silent Hill: Silent Hill 2 Remake → Silent Hill f → Silent Hill: Townfall

• Only interested in Townfall: Start with Townfall. Its story stands on its own.

There isn’t one giant story you need to work through before you’re allowed into the newer games.

If you want the history, it’s absolutely worth starting with Silent Hill 2, and honestly, that’s about as good an introduction to a nearly 30-year-old series as you could ask for. 

But if you just want to follow whatever brought you into the fog in the first place, that works too.