Most in-game gadgets are faked with a shader and a bit of noise. The CRTV in Silent Hill: Townfall took a harder, weirder road: developer Screen Burn actually damaged old televisions to make it feel authentically analogue.
The CRTV is Townfall’s spin on the series’ beloved radio, the device that has warned players of unseen enemies since the very first Silent Hill. This time the tool does more heavy lifting — it offers directional clues and doubles as a puzzle-solving instrument, making it central to how you navigate the game.
Speaking at a recent preview event, writer and director Jon McKellan explained why the static and fuzz on the CRTV’s little screen look so convincing. The short version: it’s convincing because it’s real.
“We would take gameplay footage and cutscenes and actually run them through old hardware, old TVs, pocket televisions, to create something that was truly authentic,” McKellan said. “We would damage the cables, hold magnets to them, and then get that footage back into the game.”
The payoff, he argues, is a device that goes beyond cosmetic mimicry. “That way, this pivotal tool doesn’t just look authentic; it really is authentic.”
It’s a small design philosophy with big consequences. As McKellan put it, handing protagonist Simon a modern GPS instead of a battered, torn old map “would have an extremely different feel to the story.” The friction of analogue tech is part of the horror.
Silent Hill: Townfall launches on 24th September on PC and PS5. Early hands-on impressions from the opening five hours have been positive, with a strong sense that there’s far more lurking beneath the surface than the preview reveals.
The game is one piece of a much larger Silent Hill revival. Konami relit the franchise in 2022 with a simultaneous barrage of announcements — Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, Silent Hill: Townfall, Silent Hill Ascension and the movie Return to Silent Hill — followed by the shadowdropped Silent Hill Short Message.
Series producer Motoi Okamoto says the trick to keeping all these wildly different projects coherent is to “cherish” a “strong psychological horror narrative.” “As long as that remains intact, we feel that we can be more liberal and experimental with what kind of gameplay we take,” he said. Silent Hill 2, Silent Hill f and Townfall each play very differently, and that’s by design — the narrative core stays fixed while the mechanics roam free.
For the CRTV, at least, that experimentation meant reaching for a bag of magnets and a stack of dying televisions.
