Silent Hill: The Short Message [Review]
Silent Hill: The Short Message is a free, short game in the long dormant franchise. How does it stack up?
Image credit: Konami / Hexadrive
Konami released Silent Hill: The Short Message immediately after surprise announcing the game during Sony’s State of Play event on January 31. This is the first Silent Hill game to be released in nearly a decade; Konami billed it as an experiment, a way to dip their toes back into developing a horror game (with the help of co-dev Hexadrive) after so much time away from the genre. It’s hard to not see this as a spiritual successor to the no longer available P.T. demo, in that it ushered in a first person perspective for Silent Hill’s atmospheric horror.
Protagonist Anita is invited by a friend, graffiti artist Maya, to meet her in an abandoned apartment complex that’s become known as a suicide spot for teen girls. While waiting for Maya, Anita blacks out and wakes up somewhere inside the dilapidated building. All Anita has is her cell phone, which is both a flashlight and a story device used to receive texts and calls from the third friend in the triangle, Amelie. Anita wanders through the hallways of hell cast as the bankrupted, decaying housing project, searching for Maya and a way out, all while wrestling with her own depression, repressed memories, and low self esteem.
Image credit: Konami / Hexadrive
The setting is visually rich and interesting, particularly as it transforms over the course of the game. Most of your time, however, will be spent simply walking through it and looking around. The gameplay is barely a step above a walking simulator and I would expect more out of a good Silent Hill game. There’s only a single puzzle in the whole experience; including more would have made it more engaging. I did appreciate how most of the horror is internal and then externalized in visually creative ways, in true Silent Hill fashion.
The other, most active gameplay element is a series of chase sequences, where Anita must escape from a monster whose design echoes the game’s pervasive cherry blossom motif. In these sections, the player is put in a maze and must find the exit while evading the monster. If at any point Anita is caught, she wakes up at the doorway to the maze and has to start over. At the beginning, facing the monster and getting caught are genuinely frightening. By the fourth or fifth time I had to do one of these chases, fatigue had already set in. Nearly all the chases except the final one are mechanically exactly the same way, they happen too often for such a short game, and having to start over is very, very irritating. I wish the game had some variety in how it uses the monster.
Image credit: Konami / Hexadrive
The Short Message’s writing is a little bit too on the nose with the game’s themes. The driving force of the narrative is about pitfalls that modern youth face: bullying, and more specifically cyber bullying and the problems that social media create. Unfortunately, the game relies a little too much on voiceover and internal monologue; The Short Message does a great job with some of its visual storytelling so it’s a pity it’s so overwritten. This especially becomes especially grating whenever voice acting kicks in; the localization coupled with line delivery bring down nearly every strong moment in the game. Some lines come off as very “anime” in a bad way, undercutting the emotional depth of the game’s story with line readings bordering on cartoonish. The Short Message could have done more here with less.
Image credit: Konami / Hexadrive
Some cutscenes are live action video. I feel like the game could’ve done without these, particularly because they feel very cheap compared to the rest of the game’s visuals. Sets are bare, and the quality in general reminds me of 1990s FMV games. I can’t speak to the Japanese actors’ raw performances, but the dub brings these down. The bottom line is that I’ll have to replay or watch The Short Message in Japanese to see if any of these performances improve in that version.
I’m eager to see where the other upcoming Silent Hill games go. I hope they can fix some of the negatives I experienced with The Short Message.
Silent Hill: The Message is available now as a free download for Playstation 5.
