This Silent Hill: The Short Message review contains minor spoilers.
Will Silent Hill ever move out of P.T.‘s shadow?
The Short Message, the first new Silent Hill game in ten years, has me worried that the series is bound to be forever trapped by the spectre of Hideo Kojima’s masterpiece. It tries desperately to imitate P.T. and fails quite spectacularly because of it.
P.T., despite only being a demo for the cancelled Silent Hills project, reinvented the horror genre and spawned an array of copycat titles that aimed to emulate what made the original so special. None of them met that high bar and now, a decade later, Konami has had another pop at it under the official Silent Hill banner.
Silent Hill: The Short Message, like P.T., was announced and released on the same day, and is also free-to-play. Its aim, presumably, is to build excitement for the numerous upcoming Silent Hill titles. Unfortunately, it has me concerned instead of excited.
Don’t get me wrong – The Short Message isn’t out-and-out bad. For the duration of its approximately two hour runtime, I felt a little bit spooked, a little bit touched, and a little bit intrigued by what I was playing. But that’s a little bit of a problem. In the end, nothing stood out and it was far from the must-play experience that P.T. delivered back in 2014.
Silent Hill: The Short Message review
The Short Message follows teenager, Anita, as she finds herself trapped inside of the Villa, an abandoned apartment complex infamous for teen suicides, where she searches for her friend, Maya.
The Villa is basically an endless maze of dilapidated, graffiti covered rooms and corridors that are, at first, undeniably creepy but ultimately become repetitive and tiresome. This is because, like Norman Reedus’ character in P.T., Anita is trapped in a seemingly endless loop.
The problem here is that, unlike P.T., which required the player to solve tough puzzles to get out of an otherwise endless loop, Silent Hill: The Short Message is a disappointingly linear experience with very little independent thought required. There’s no combat and only a couple of puzzles. Outside of that, there are a few chase sequences that see Anita stalked by a cherry blossom monster and amount to nothing more than an exercise in trial-and-error.
Problems also lie with the game’s setting, which has a serious identity crisis. It is (apparently) set in Germany, yet it follows three Japanese girls with American accents. If the game was about three Japanese-American expats who had recently relocated to Germany, that would make sense – but it isn’t. Instead, it’s just an incredibly jarring production oversight.
Of course, this also means that Silent Hill: The Short Message is not set in the eponymous town. So, for anyone hoping to revisit the iconic location from the original games, as I was, don’t get your hopes up. Outside of a briefly mentioned witch’s curse, there’s no real explanation about why the Fog World and the Otherworld are accessible from the Villa.
The Short Message also has a significant problem when it comes to thematic subtlety. While it attempts to address the important and serious themes of suicide, depression, abuse, bullying and social media, the game is laughably heavy-handed in its efforts. There’s a whole cutscene dedicated to Anita complaining about her lack of followers and likes on social media and how this contributes to her depression. “I need to upload stuff like this, to get as many likes as Maya,” says Anita as she gorms at her social media feed like some kind of Gen-Z zombie.
Unfortunately, by the time we get to the meat of Anita’s quite disturbing backstory, it’s too late. Most will have already written her off as whiny. But then, even these late game revelations are conveyed through clumsy expository flashbacks with sub-par voice acting.
Speaking of dodgy acting, the live-action cutscenes that are interspersed through the game also fail to hit the mark thanks to questionable acting, a low-budget look, and immersion-breaking dubbing.
Silent Hill: The Short Message review – Verdict
If you’re a fan of the Silent Hill series, The Short Message is definitely worth checking out. It’s free and does enough right to justify your attention for its short duration which makes the entire thing playable on an extended lunch break.
However, if you’re hoping for a revolutionary entry in one of gaming’s most iconic horror series, you will be disappointed. Linear gameplay, clumsily handled themes and a confused setting make for a game that feels like a frustrating missed opportunity, even when you discount the absence of Silent Hill itself. What’s more, the game suffers from inconsistent visual quality and spotty performance throughout.
Perhaps The Short Message‘s most egregious flaw, though, is it being a poor imitation of P.T. in almost every way, even all these years later.
Overall Rating: 5/10
Version played: PS5
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