Silent Hill: The Short Message

Silent Hill: The Short Message fails to win over fans

Silent Hill: The Short Message deviated significantly from the series' roots, opting to set the story in an economically depressed German town rather than the nebulous Silent Hill. The plot follows a teenage girl receiving text messages from her deceased friend, an internet-famous graffiti artist. This approach makes the game more like a modern Netflix series than a traditional Silent Hill. With reduced attention to detail in the world, lore and atmosphere, focusing on long, repetitive corridors with scripted scare moments, Silent Hill: The Short Message could be a worrying harbinger for the future of the franchise.

Since its conception in 1996, Silent Hill has been a passion project of Team Silent, a group of extremely talented creatives at Konami in the late 90s. Drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources, from the novels of Colin Wilson, Stephen King and Michael Crichton to the films of Dario Argento, David Cronenberg, Adrian Lyne and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Team Silent created four games that explored the intersection between harsh reality and manifestation. Filled with fog, truly disturbing imagery and literary and philosophical themes, the first four Silent Hill games are some of the most important and well-constructed horror games ever created.

After the dissolution of Team Silent in 2005, the development of future games was transferred to Western developers, often resulting in mixed to negative reviews.

The Original Silent Hill Games Were Pioneers

When Team Silent created the original Silent Hill in 1999, they had no precedent to follow. While Resident Evil was an inspiration for the game's mechanics, Silent Hill was an attempt to create a game that was as psychologically disturbing as it was visceral. Setting a standard in the industry that many other horror games still struggle to reach, both in the AAA and indie spheres.

Trying to live up to the first four Silent Hill games has been a challenge for the franchise since the dissolution of Team Silent. While each of the Team Silent games approached the Silent Hill concept with a fresh set of ideas and inspirations, subsequent Silent Hill games have simply tried to recapture the magic of those original titles, leaving games like Silent Hill: Downpour and Silent Hill: Homecoming looking more like empty simulacra than original creative visions in their own right. While Silent Hill: The Short Message shows that the franchise has finally escaped the gravity of the original Team Silent games, it also shows that the series has only just fallen into the orbit of a more recent Silent Hill title.

P.T. Was a Ray of Hope for Silent Hill

Released in 2014, Hideo Kojima's radical reinterpretation of Silent Hill caused a furor in the gaming community. P.T. - or 'Playable Teaser' - was a short but dense horror game released on PS4 as a proof of concept of what Kojima hoped to do with the franchise. Abandoning the baggage and imagery of previous games, Kojima created a complex world that presented its narrative exclusively through environmental storytelling. Inspired not by previous Silent Hill games, but by Kojima's own literary and cinematic fixations, the game ended up feeling more truly Silent Hill than any main Silent Hill game in years. The game's dreamlike atmosphere and recurring corridors have become common tropes in horror games today, but were radically original in 2014.

Silent Hill: The Short Message Repeats the Past

It's clear now that Silent Hill: The Short Message is no pioneer. Like other recent Silent Hill games, it is stuck in the trap of trying to replicate previous successes rather than forging a new path. While the original four Silent Hill games may no longer influence the design or world-building of future Silent Hill games, it's only because the horror trappings of the early 2000s have been swapped for P.T.'s 'corridor horror'.

Exploration and backtracking through environments dense with ambient terror have been replaced by the task of making the player find things in a high-fidelity environment to trigger the next scare. However, given that the remake of Silent Hill 2 is being handed over to Bloober Team - developers of the 'corridor horror' series Layers of Fear - it seems that Konami is fully committed to taking Silent Hill down this beautiful but repetitive path.

Silent Hill: The Short Message is a free horror game for PS5 by Konami. The story follows Anita as she explores an apartment building after receiving text messages from her dead friend.

Launched on January 31, 2024

ESRB M For Over 17s Due to Blood, Strong Language, Violence

Estimated time to complete: 2 hours