Silent Hill: The Short Message
Year: 2024
Developer: Hexadrive & Konami
Publisher: Konami
Platform: PS5
PEGI: 16
Published: 12/02/24
Developer: Hexadrive & Konami
Publisher: Konami
Platform: PS5
PEGI: 16
Published: 12/02/24
When Konami released Silent Hill: Ascension in November last year it was supposed to be the start of a triumphant return for the franchise following an eleven-year hiatus since the last official Silent Hill title, 2012’s Silent Hill: Book of Memories. The release went about as well as expected with the game being a shameless cash grab that even now, four months into its planned six-month content rollout, has still yet to become worthwhile. But the biggest announcement from 2022’s Silent Hill Transmission video was Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2. So, following a gameplay trailer, Konami had a trick up their sleeve in the hopes to appease Silent Hill fans who were spurned by Ascension’s disastrous launch. That being Silent Hill: The Short Message, a free downloadable game available immediately from the PlayStation Store. Evoking P.T. vibes, fans were eager to play the game and to say it’s gotten a mixed reception would be an understatement. So, what do I think?
The German town of Kettenstadt has been hit particularly hard by economic depression following the 2008 financial crisis, and never really recovering before being hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. An abandoned apartment building has become a hotspot for teenagers expressing their discontent through graffiti, and more recently a string of suicides of teenage girls.
A young woman, Anita, is contacted by her friend and internet celebrity, Maya, to meet her at the apartment building, but when she arrives all, she finds is Maya’s artwork and a monster covered that pursues her through the building. To escape this hell Anita must unpack her childhood trauma and confront her own insecurities from online bullying.
Silent Hill: The Short Message is a double-edged sword that is certainly the most promising Silent Hill content we’ve received in over a decade, but in many ways feels like it simply doesn’t understand what made Silent Hill’s horror so effective in the first place.
It’s going to be tough to talk about why The Short Message is so polarising without addressing the games story in significant depth, so expect spoilers from here on out.
The main themes of the game are suicide and bullying, with any semblance of subtlety thrown right out the window. You learn relatively early on that Maya killed herself several months before the start of the game, but in a Silent Hill 2 style ‘twist’ Anita doesn’t remember this until her other friend Amelie, who she is communicating with via text messages, reminds her. From here the game begins to unpack Anita’s psyche as she begins to blame herself for Maya’s suicide because of hurtful messages she anonymously sent Maya due to her online popularity and feeling as though she never notices Anita. So, this aspect of the story kind of takes the concept of Silent Hill 2’s tormented killer angle, where the protagonist has been responsible for the death of the character they’ve been contacted by and is seemingly being tormented by their own guilt. The problem is The Short Message doesn’t do it as well as Silent Hill 2 for two reasons, firstly we’ve seen it before in Silent Hill 2 so you can see it coming a mile away, and secondly, it’s just lacking any nuance.
There is also this layer of child abuse trauma that starts to bleed through at times where it delves into Anita’s past. This stuff I thought was done relatively well, but it doesn’t really mesh with the bullying and suicide stuff very well. It was these moments that felt the most evocative of P.T., which is another hurdle the game has to try and deal with that doesn’t do it any favours.
One interesting aspect of the story was that when Anita succeeds in killing herself, or is killed by the monster that pursues her, time reverses and she finds herself alive again aware of the fact that she was dead. I like this idea that Anita’s stuck in some kind of purgatory where death is only a temporary escape from the nightmare. But the ending felt so awful by basically saying that the answer to suicidal thoughts is to just not kill yourself, and then suddenly everything will get better. It’s like instantaneous too, Anita decides that she won’t throw herself off the top of the building for a third time and suddenly all the Silent Hill iconography disappears, and she goes to the mall to go shopping with Amelie because she’s now instantaneously over all the trauma from her childhood and she’s just decided that just apologising to Maya at the point where she killed herself makes it ok that Maya killed herself because of what Anita and others did. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so tone deaf and disrespectful to people who do genuinely suffer from suicidal thoughts.
The final thing about the story that bugged me, and it was a really niggly thing that just wound me up the more I thought about it. That was that the game is set in Germany, but the characters in cutscenes are performed by Japanese actors, and all the voice work is done by Americans. Where is this even set Konami?
The German town of Kettenstadt has been hit particularly hard by economic depression following the 2008 financial crisis, and never really recovering before being hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. An abandoned apartment building has become a hotspot for teenagers expressing their discontent through graffiti, and more recently a string of suicides of teenage girls.
A young woman, Anita, is contacted by her friend and internet celebrity, Maya, to meet her at the apartment building, but when she arrives all, she finds is Maya’s artwork and a monster covered that pursues her through the building. To escape this hell Anita must unpack her childhood trauma and confront her own insecurities from online bullying.
Silent Hill: The Short Message is a double-edged sword that is certainly the most promising Silent Hill content we’ve received in over a decade, but in many ways feels like it simply doesn’t understand what made Silent Hill’s horror so effective in the first place.
It’s going to be tough to talk about why The Short Message is so polarising without addressing the games story in significant depth, so expect spoilers from here on out.
The main themes of the game are suicide and bullying, with any semblance of subtlety thrown right out the window. You learn relatively early on that Maya killed herself several months before the start of the game, but in a Silent Hill 2 style ‘twist’ Anita doesn’t remember this until her other friend Amelie, who she is communicating with via text messages, reminds her. From here the game begins to unpack Anita’s psyche as she begins to blame herself for Maya’s suicide because of hurtful messages she anonymously sent Maya due to her online popularity and feeling as though she never notices Anita. So, this aspect of the story kind of takes the concept of Silent Hill 2’s tormented killer angle, where the protagonist has been responsible for the death of the character they’ve been contacted by and is seemingly being tormented by their own guilt. The problem is The Short Message doesn’t do it as well as Silent Hill 2 for two reasons, firstly we’ve seen it before in Silent Hill 2 so you can see it coming a mile away, and secondly, it’s just lacking any nuance.
There is also this layer of child abuse trauma that starts to bleed through at times where it delves into Anita’s past. This stuff I thought was done relatively well, but it doesn’t really mesh with the bullying and suicide stuff very well. It was these moments that felt the most evocative of P.T., which is another hurdle the game has to try and deal with that doesn’t do it any favours.
One interesting aspect of the story was that when Anita succeeds in killing herself, or is killed by the monster that pursues her, time reverses and she finds herself alive again aware of the fact that she was dead. I like this idea that Anita’s stuck in some kind of purgatory where death is only a temporary escape from the nightmare. But the ending felt so awful by basically saying that the answer to suicidal thoughts is to just not kill yourself, and then suddenly everything will get better. It’s like instantaneous too, Anita decides that she won’t throw herself off the top of the building for a third time and suddenly all the Silent Hill iconography disappears, and she goes to the mall to go shopping with Amelie because she’s now instantaneously over all the trauma from her childhood and she’s just decided that just apologising to Maya at the point where she killed herself makes it ok that Maya killed herself because of what Anita and others did. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so tone deaf and disrespectful to people who do genuinely suffer from suicidal thoughts.
The final thing about the story that bugged me, and it was a really niggly thing that just wound me up the more I thought about it. That was that the game is set in Germany, but the characters in cutscenes are performed by Japanese actors, and all the voice work is done by Americans. Where is this even set Konami?
The gameplay is for the most part enjoyable though. The P.T. comparisons are painfully obvious, and I think Konami knew this and was trying to capitalise on that by releasing Short Message in exactly the same way. The difference is that P.T. wasn’t marketed as a Silent Hill game, it was only once the game was completed that you were shown the connections to the franchise. Short Message meanwhile has it in the title and was shown directly after the gameplay trailer for Silent Hill 2’s remake. Despite this, beyond walking around a looping environment Short Message has no other similarities to P.T., and so whilst comparisons can and should be drawn, it is a very different kind of experience.
The basic gameplay just sees you exploring this apartment building, floor by floor and room by room reading notes to gain insight into what happened to the town, the strange phenomena that residents have been experiencing (conveniently called ‘The Silent Hill Effect’ in one of the notes you find), and finding these gives context to a lot of what you learn through Anita’s story about what happened to Maya and what Anita’s mother did to her and her younger brother. But you are semi-frequently thrust into chase sequences where you must escape a monster covered in cherry blossom petals. It’s hilarious more than scary because this thing shuffles so slowly and is so bright pink that it just doesn’t evoke fear. It certainly makes you jump when it suddenly appears, but you’ll have no trouble escaping it unless you run into a dead end…which will happen a lot.
Whoever was the level designer for Short Message really needs to not be allowed to design levels again, because these corridors are labyrinthian in design. I know that’s meant to be the point, its supposed to be confusing and hard to navigate, but that only leads to frustration. It’s generally not too bad until you get to the final chase sequence where you need to collect five photos in a looping series of environments. But even as someone who has great directional awareness and can map places out in my mind very easily, it’s damn near impossible here because everything looks the same and you’ve got the added pressure of the monster just appearing out of nowhere all the time. It’s like Slenderman but indoors, I hated it, and it was a really crap way to end the game.
The Short Message does have a strong visual presentation though. Whilst the cherry blossom monster may not be a particularly good design, everything else looks great. The dilapidated apartment is very creepy to walk around, and when it turns into the nightmarish otherworld the Silent Hill iconography is very much there but in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s just copying previous titles. There’s a lot of detail in the environments and the lighting in particular works really well with the only natural light coming from the grey foggy outside through the windows. It’s certainly nice to look at, even if it’s not so nice to navigate at times.
Akira Yamaoka also returns to provide the score as he has done for all previous Silent Hill titles barring Ascension, and as usual he makes the experience as chilling as he possibly can. No matter how much the quality of Silent Hill games varies at least Yamaoka’s music can always be relied on to be top tier.
I can think of worse things than Silent Hill: The Short Message, and I think a lot of what redeems the game is that it’s free. This might be a good way for newcomers to the franchise to dip their toes in (especially seeing as you can’t actually play any old Silent Hill titles on PS5), and fans like me are sure to gobble it up anyway because let’s face it, new Silent Hill content. But The Short Message stumbles at every hurdle and even when it does get something right it’s immediately followed by something stupid. I wouldn’t exactly recommend it to anyone, but it’s a damn sight better than Book of Memories and Ascension were.
The basic gameplay just sees you exploring this apartment building, floor by floor and room by room reading notes to gain insight into what happened to the town, the strange phenomena that residents have been experiencing (conveniently called ‘The Silent Hill Effect’ in one of the notes you find), and finding these gives context to a lot of what you learn through Anita’s story about what happened to Maya and what Anita’s mother did to her and her younger brother. But you are semi-frequently thrust into chase sequences where you must escape a monster covered in cherry blossom petals. It’s hilarious more than scary because this thing shuffles so slowly and is so bright pink that it just doesn’t evoke fear. It certainly makes you jump when it suddenly appears, but you’ll have no trouble escaping it unless you run into a dead end…which will happen a lot.
Whoever was the level designer for Short Message really needs to not be allowed to design levels again, because these corridors are labyrinthian in design. I know that’s meant to be the point, its supposed to be confusing and hard to navigate, but that only leads to frustration. It’s generally not too bad until you get to the final chase sequence where you need to collect five photos in a looping series of environments. But even as someone who has great directional awareness and can map places out in my mind very easily, it’s damn near impossible here because everything looks the same and you’ve got the added pressure of the monster just appearing out of nowhere all the time. It’s like Slenderman but indoors, I hated it, and it was a really crap way to end the game.
The Short Message does have a strong visual presentation though. Whilst the cherry blossom monster may not be a particularly good design, everything else looks great. The dilapidated apartment is very creepy to walk around, and when it turns into the nightmarish otherworld the Silent Hill iconography is very much there but in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s just copying previous titles. There’s a lot of detail in the environments and the lighting in particular works really well with the only natural light coming from the grey foggy outside through the windows. It’s certainly nice to look at, even if it’s not so nice to navigate at times.
Akira Yamaoka also returns to provide the score as he has done for all previous Silent Hill titles barring Ascension, and as usual he makes the experience as chilling as he possibly can. No matter how much the quality of Silent Hill games varies at least Yamaoka’s music can always be relied on to be top tier.
I can think of worse things than Silent Hill: The Short Message, and I think a lot of what redeems the game is that it’s free. This might be a good way for newcomers to the franchise to dip their toes in (especially seeing as you can’t actually play any old Silent Hill titles on PS5), and fans like me are sure to gobble it up anyway because let’s face it, new Silent Hill content. But The Short Message stumbles at every hurdle and even when it does get something right it’s immediately followed by something stupid. I wouldn’t exactly recommend it to anyone, but it’s a damn sight better than Book of Memories and Ascension were.