Silent Hill: Townfall devs destroyed real TVs with magnets to make the CRTV feel authentic

Silent Hill: Townfall launches September 24th on PC and PS5, and ahead of Gamescom, Screen Burn director Jon McKellan and series producer Motoi Okamoto have been opening up about the game's design — from its Scottish setting and retro tech to what it's like following Silent Hill f and the Silent Hill 2 Remake.

The centrepiece of Townfall's gameplay is the CRTV, a portable CRT device that replaces the series' iconic radio. It warns players of enemies, provides directional clues, and doubles as a puzzle-solving tool. To make the static and fuzziness feel genuinely analogue rather than digitally faked, Screen Burn ran actual gameplay footage and cutscenes through old pocket televisions, damaged the cables, and held magnets to the screens to distort the image — then captured that footage back into the game. "This pivotal tool doesn't just look authentic; it really is authentic," McKellan said. The team was deliberate about the retro tech angle: McKellan explained that analog devices now feel "unstable, unreliable, or hard to trust completely," and the design goal was to force players to depend on a device they instinctively distrust. Players control Simon Ordell, an American washed ashore in the fictional Scottish port town of St. Amelia in 1996, who carries a physical map and relies on a nurse named Zoe Ellis communicating through the CRTV. The first-person perspective — a first for the mainline series — draws a clear line back to Screen Burn's previous work: the studio, formerly known as NoCode, made Observation and has a direct lineage with Alien Isolation, which McKellan directed DLC for.

Screen Burn is acutely aware of the pressure. "For us as a team, I think the best way to describe it is utterly terrifying to be the next one in the series," McKellan told Eurogamer, adding that Silent Hill 1 and 2 were his favourite games as a teenager. Both he and Okamoto are leaning into the franchise's familiar psychological horror DNA while deliberately subverting expectations — McKellan's words were "massively subverting." Okamoto framed the broader revival philosophy simply: keep the strong psychological horror narrative intact, and the gameplay style can change freely. That approach has already produced three very different experiences in Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, and now Townfall. The 1996 setting, built around the early integration of the internet into everyday life, gives Screen Burn a fresh cultural anxiety to mine — one that feels distinctly of its era without leaning on the supernatural iconography the series is known for.

Press who played preview builds — IGN got three hours, Eurogamer got five — came away impressed, with both noting the first-person intimacy pulls players closer to the story and the dread in ways a third-person camera wouldn't. Full previews are expected around Gamescom, and the game releases September 24th. Given the reception to Silent Hill f earlier this year, the bar is high — but early hands-on impressions suggest Screen Burn is clearing it.