Silent Hill: Townfall's "Creepy Game Boy" Turns 90s Nostalgia Into a Weapon

Silent Hill: Townfall is built around a chunky handheld television called the CRTV, and according to Screen Burn co-founder and writer Jon McKellan, the team's internal nickname for it was the "Creepy Game Boy."

In an interview with GameSpot, McKellan said the device grew out of a simple question: what could the studio do with the series' classic radio? Early sketches were literally just a radio that let players tune into frequencies, rather than passively hearing static when enemies were near. It felt basic. Once the team latched onto the idea of a small TV, the screen opened up uses for puzzle clues, story beats and enemy tracking, and there was "no turning back."

The design drew on pocket TVs from the 1980s and 90s. Early Sony Watchman models were too tall and narrow for a first-person, landscape view, so Screen Burn took shapes, colours and details from several models and built its own. The goal was something that felt weighty and old-fashioned while still giving players a screen big enough to use.

The enemy-tracking mechanic went through plenty of revisions. The team tried giving each enemy type its own frequency, putting several on one frequency, and showing only video of the creature instead of its position. Fast iteration helped, McKellan said, and the last major addition was a quick tune function. After locking onto an enemy, players can flick through targets with the D-pad, which makes tracking multiple threats in tricky, vertical spaces far easier.

Combat and exploration were always part of the plan. McKellan recalled early talks with co-founder Graeme about letting players walk around and deal with threats while solving puzzles, aiming for something more visceral than Screen Burn's earlier games.

The 1990s setting arrived at the same time as the CRTV. McKellan pointed to a period when technology was taking off but wasn't yet useful enough to rescue anyone from trouble. There was email and internet, but no phone GPS and no digital signal tuning, so everything had to feel analogue. Guns being rare in the setting helped too. He also noted the device isn't specifically Scottish, just a fit for the era, the sort of thing someone in a working-class island town might have wanted from an Argos catalogue.

The most striking detail is how the in-game footage was made. McKellan owns a collection of half-broken pocket TVs and broadcast monitors. He feeds the game's signal into them, distorts it with static, magnets and deliberately loose cables, and "plays" the interference like an instrument in time with dialogue and key moments. A camera shielded with sheets and filters films the result, so the static is real rather than a software effect. Different screens, such as a 480p broadcast monitor versus a small LCD, give different pixel grids that suit different scenes.

As for why the 90s suit horror, McKellan said digital broadcasts tend to simply stop when they break up, which is dull to look at, while analogue signals degrade in cinematic ways. Texture, static and a tangible shape ground the player, so even a dreamlike nightmare feels believable when the object in your hand is familiar. The team calls the approach "weaponising nostalgia": take something you remember fondly and make it say horrible things.

Silent Hill: Townfall is out now on PC and PS5.