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SILENT HILL: Townfall is presented in first person with no traditional heads-up display, in a wide cinematic frame, on a palette built around red and black. The look was researched on location in Scotland rather than assembled from concept art alone.

The Frame

The game runs in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio by default, which puts letterboxing at the top and bottom of the screen and gives it a cinematic shape. It is not fixed: previewers reported an option to switch to a conventional 16:9 full-screen presentation instead.

Palette

Red and black dominate. Asked about the choice, Jon McKellan gave a two-part answer: partly that they are a striking pair of colours, and partly that "as you progress through the game, players will discover that these two colors hold a deeply symbolic and vital significance for our protagonist, Simon." The ordinary town is fog and grey; the Otherworld is bathed in oppressive red light, and ray tracing is used on both.

Interface

There is no conventional on-screen HUD. Information reaches the player through objects held in the world instead: the CRTV is raised into view, the map is a pamphlet Simon is doodling on, and the peek renders as a lean rather than as an overlay. Simon's inner monologue is unspoken and written on screen in his own handwriting, with lines as short as "there's no answer."

The studio's earlier work was built on interactive retro interfaces and VHS-style aesthetics, and McKellan has called analog technology his visual calling card, which is where a lot of this comes from.

Why First Person

Graeme McKellan has explained the decision as a horror one rather than a technical one. A first-person view has a more limited field of view, so things happen off-screen that the player is not aware of, "and as we know in horror, what happens off-screen is sometimes more scary than what happens right in front of you." The peek mechanic exists to give some of that control back.

The CRTV is the other half of the answer. McKellan has said the device could not work from any other perspective, and that the first-person view was an indispensable foundation for building mechanics around it. One knock-on effect: interiors are reportedly built at a 1:1 scale, a choice made possible by there being no third-person camera to accommodate. Encounter design under the same constraint is on Combat and Stealth.

Engine

Townfall runs on Unreal Engine 5. A Screen Burn developer states it on camera in Konami's own studio documentary, describing how "Unreal allows us with Nanite to just sort of layer on loads of meshes and textures on top of each other." Nanite is the practical reason a street can carry, in the same developer's words, "layers upon layers upon layers of life and history," mimicking several hundred years of a town accumulating.

Location Research

Screen Burn visited and photographed real coastal towns in Scotland to recreate their look and feel. The harbour town of St Monans, on the east coast, was the first place the team built for the game and is the direct reference for the St. Amelia pier. St Monans is a real place used as a reference; it is not a location Simon visits.

The trips were about more than reference photography. "It's the smell and the wind and the sound of the place, all of that together is what you're trying to recreate," McKellan has said. "You're not just trying to recreate the visuals, you're trying to recreate the vibe, and there's no better way of doing it than spending time there." The team walked several piers to compare their shapes, and one artist noted that in the finished game the benches sit exactly where they do in the real town.

Making the Signals Look Real

The analog footage that plays on the CRTV was produced physically rather than filtered. The team recorded in-engine footage, played it out through real analog hardware, and re-imported the result, which is what gives the scrubbing and tuning their texture. The studio has separately described using and abusing old televisions to get the effect right.

One practical note from the press build: some interiors are dark enough that a previewer suggested raising gamma. That is one person's impression of a pre-release build rather than a published recommendation.