Silent Hill: Townfall's CRTV Explained: How to Tune Signals and Spot Monsters
Simon Ordell's pocket CRTV tunes frequencies, reveals hidden monsters and unlocks puzzle clues. Here is exactly how to use it, including the eight-radio RGB alignment trick.
Simon Ordell tunes the CRTV in the fog-choked streets of St. Amelia. Image: Konami.
Simon Ordell doesn't carry a gun that solves every problem in Silent Hill: Townfall. He carries a battered pocket television called the CRTV, and it does more work than any weapon in his bag. It finds monsters through fog and walls, it hums when a locked door is nearby, and it plays back scraps of broadcast that explain why St. Amelia looks the way it does. Get comfortable with it early and the rest of the game gets noticeably less punishing.
Developer Screen Burn Interactive built the CRTV to replace the radio static from older Silent Hill games, a series with a long history detailed on Wikipedia, and it leans hard into the bit: the picture rolls, the tuning band hisses, and you genuinely lose peripheral vision while Simon tilts it up to check a signal. For a closer look at how those visuals come together on PS5, Screen Burn broke down the DualSense and ray-tracing feature set before launch, which is worth a read if you're chasing the best-looking version of the game. Sony covered the same build in its own PlayStation Blog post, and the game itself is available now on the PlayStation Store.
How to raise and tune the CRTV
Hold L1 to bring the CRTV up. Simon's camera dips to look at the screen, so only do this when you're reasonably sure nothing is bearing down on you. Once it's up, scroll the fine-tune slider across the frequency band until static resolves into a picture. Signal strength rises as you get closer to whatever is broadcasting and fades as you walk away, so treat the hiss like a metal detector rather than a menu you're picking from. On PS5 you can also tilt the controller itself to fine-tune, which is faster once it clicks but not required.
The CRTV serves three separate jobs, and it's worth knowing which one you're using at any given moment:
- Threat detection: tuned to the right channel, it shows a fuzzy, sonar-like silhouette of any monster in range, through walls and fog.
- Lock and puzzle hints: a nearby locked object gives off a faint hum whose pitch shifts as you turn the dial; matching the peak clicks the lock open.
- Story broadcasts: some channels only resolve into a watchable transmission after you stabilize and calibrate the picture by hand.
Using it to find monsters through fog and walls
The Otherworld sections introduce an enemy type the game never lets you kill outright, so the CRTV is your only real defense there. Tune to its tracking frequency and the screen renders a rough outline of the creature even through solid walls, which is enough to tell you whether a hallway is worth the risk before you commit to it. Move slowly while you're scanning, since holding the CRTV up narrows what you can see with your own eyes, and a patrolling enemy can close the gap while you're staring at static. Enemy tracking channels don't count toward the game's signal collectible total, so there's no reason to be shy about checking them constantly.
Solving locks with the audio hum
Plenty of doors, cabinets and safes in St. Amelia don't have a visible code anywhere nearby. Instead, raise the CRTV near the lock and listen: the hum climbs and falls as you sweep the dial, and it peaks right at the frequency the lock wants. It's a listening puzzle more than a visual one, so turning the game's audio up a notch before a locked-door section pays off. This is also where the tip below matters most.
Aligning RGB signals on the field radios
St. Amelia hides eight physical radios that need a more involved calibration than the handheld puzzles do. The process has a fixed order, and skipping a step is the single biggest reason people get stuck on these:
- Use the fine-tune slider to find the incoming pattern and get a rough signal instead of pure static.
- Hold the right stick to stabilize the CRTV's tilt angle until the picture stops drifting.
- Use the D-pad to drag the red, green and blue channels back on top of each other, one at a time.
- Hold R2 to lock in the calibration once all three channels line up.
Why all 18 signals are worth chasing
Between the field radios and the standalone video transmissions Simon finds while exploring, Townfall tracks 18 CRTV signals total, and radio calibrations count toward that number alongside the video ones. None of them gate the main story, so you can finish the game without touching a single extra broadcast. What they add instead is context: narrative logs that explain who used to live in a given building, and clues that make later puzzles click faster because you've already seen the pattern. If you're planning a second run, or you just don't want to backtrack through the Otherworld a second time, tuning in as you go is far less friction than hunting them down retroactively.
If you're just arriving in St. Amelia, our Part 1 Arrival walkthrough covers the opening clinic sequence step by step, and our beginner tips page runs through the difficulty options worth adjusting before you get this far. Between the two, and a bit of patience with the dial, the CRTV stops being confusing and starts being the most useful thing in Simon's inventory.