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

Lançado em 2014, a radical reinterpretação de Silent Hill por Hideo Kojima causou um furor na comunidade de jogos. P.T. — ou ‘Playable Teaser’ — foi um jogo de terror curto, mas denso, lançado no PS4 como uma prova de conceito do que Kojima esperava fazer com a franquia. Abandonando a bagagem e a imagética dos jogos anteriores, Kojima criou um mundo complexo que apresentava sua narrativa exclusivamente através da narrativa ambiental. Inspirado não pelos jogos anteriores de Silent Hill, mas pelas próprias fixações literárias e cinematográficas de Kojima, o jogo acabou se sentindo mais verdadeiramente Silent Hill do que qualquer jogo principal de Silent Hill em anos. A atmosfera onírica do jogo e os corredores recorrentes tornaram-se tropos comuns nos jogos de terror hoje, mas eram radicalmente originais em 2014.

Silent Hill: The Short Message Repeats the Past

É evidente agora que Silent Hill: The Short Message não é um pioneiro. Como outros jogos recentes de Silent Hill, está preso na armadilha de tentar replicar sucessos anteriores em vez de forjar um novo caminho. Embora os quatro jogos originais de Silent Hill possam não influenciar mais o design ou a construção do mundo dos futuros jogos de Silent Hill, é apenas porque as armadilhas de terror do início dos anos 2000 foram trocadas pelo ‘horror de corredor’ de P.T.

A exploração e o retorno através de ambientes densos com terror ambiente foram substituídos pela tarefa de fazer o jogador encontrar coisas em um ambiente de alta fidelidade para acionar o próximo susto. No entanto, dado que o remake de Silent Hill 2 está sendo entregue à Bloober Team — desenvolvedora da série de ‘horror de corredor’ Layers of Fear — parece que a Konami está totalmente comprometida em levar Silent Hill por esse caminho bonito, mas repetitivo.

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