The developers behind Silent Hill: Townfall wanted the game's pocket-sized CRT television to feel authentically analogue, so they took the route of genuine destruction: breaking real TVs, damaging cables, and holding magnets to old hardware to capture the static and fuzz before feeding that footage back into the game.

The studio, until recently known as No Code, rebranded to Screen Burn in July 2025 — a name that nods to the ghost of an image burned into an ageing CRT screen (GamesIndustry.biz). The rebrand pointed squarely at Townfall, and now the reason is visible. The game's signature gadget is the CRTV, a handheld CRT television that functions as both a story device and a core gameplay mechanic (80.lv).

Long-time Silent Hill players will recognise the lineage. The series has always used a crackling radio to warn players when enemies are near. The CRTV expands on that idea: it alerts you to threats, offers directional clues, and doubles as a puzzle-solving tool. Because analogue technology is fundamentally unreliable — signals drift, screens flicker, reception comes and goes — it lends itself naturally to puzzles, the developers said (Polygon).

Writer and director Jon McKellan explained the process at a recent preview event. The team ran gameplay footage and cutscenes through old television sets and pocket televisions, physically interfering with the signal to produce the distortion. Cables were damaged. Magnets were held against screens. The mangled output was then brought back into the game as the CRTV's live feed (Eurogamer).

McKellan's verdict on the result was blunt: the CRTV "doesn't just look authentic; it really is authentic."

The commitment to tactile, dated technology extends to the game's broader design. McKellan noted that giving the protagonist, Simon, a GPS instead of a dog-eared, torn old map would change the feel of Townfall's story entirely. The analogue aesthetic is not decoration; it shapes how the narrative reads.

Silent Hill: Townfall is scheduled for release on 24th September on PC and PS5 (Eurogamer). It is one strand of a wider franchise revival. In 2022, Konami announced Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, Silent Hill: Townfall, Silent Hill Ascension, and the film Return to Silent Hill in a single briefing, with Silent Hill: Short Message shadow-dropped thereafter.

Series producer Motoi Okamoto has said the key to the franchise's revival is to "cherish" a "strong psychological horror narrative." As long as that core stays intact, he believes the franchise can be more liberal and experimental with gameplay — and a pocket TV built from broken hardware is about as experimental as it gets.

For players, that means a horror gadget that crackles with the real thing: genuine static, pulled from genuinely ruined screens, pressed into a game that ships in less than two months.