Silent Hill: Townfall studio Screen Burn used broken TVs and magnets to make its in-game gadget, the CRTV, feel analogue as well as look it.
Silent Hill’s radio has long been a series staple, alerting players to enemies before they can see them. Townfall’s CRTV does a similar job, although its usefulness has been expanded to provide directional clues and to double as a tool for solving puzzles.
Talking at a recent preview event, writer and director Jon McKellan explained how the CRTV was developed, revealing that the reason the static and fuzziness of the small device’s screen feel so authentic is because it is.
“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 result, he said, is a device that isn’t just dressed up to look analogue: “That way, this pivotal tool doesn’t just look authentic; it really is authentic.”
As McKellan explained it, giving Simon a GPS instead of a dog-eared and torn old map “would have an extremely different feel to the story”.
Silent Hill: Townfall is out 24th September on PC and PS5. I recently played the opening five hours and really enjoyed what I saw, but felt – strongly – that there’s a lot more to Townfall than meets the eye.
As for what’s next for the series? Silent Hill was resuscitated with a bang in 2022 when Konami announced Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, Silent Hill: Townfall, Silent Hill Ascension, and movie Return to Silent Hill all at once, with Silent Hill Short Message shadowdropped thereafter, too. Series producer Motoi Okamoto said that the key to the franchise’s revival was 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,” Okamoto said at the time. “So I think that’s very evident in how Silent Hill 2, last year’s Silent Hill F and, of course, Silent Hill: Townfall, are all very different gameplay experiences. We feel that as long as we keep the narrative core intact, there’s very much room to keep the gameplay style changing.”
