Silent Hill: The Short Message Review

Reviewer’s Note: Due to extensive story critiques, revealing some SPOILERS is necessary. Read on at your own risk.

As both a cultural flashpoint for horror games and PlayStation for a time, the PS4-exclusive P.T. carried a unique pedigree as both its own strange experience and a primer to the then-announced Silent Hills, led by none other than Hideo Kojima. Nearly a decade after cancelling it and delisting P.T. soon thereafter, Konami revived the franchise with a string of new announcements – the first proper game being Silent Hill: The Short Message, a shadow-dropped free demo that can’t avoid the obvious parallels. It is ironically apropos how both the game proper and its neurotic protagonist, Anita, continuously wrestle with their closest peers.

Her troubling journey revolves around an abandoned apartment complex, known as “The Villa”, within the fictional town of Kettenstadt, Germany. Moving away from the eponymous Silent Hill doesn’t mean she escapes its disquieting atmosphere, though. Anita wanders through dilapidated, graffiti-caked hallways and rooms to find her friend Maya. She only has her clothes and smartphone – a blessing and a curse. The very thing used to illumine every dark and dingy area is also an attention black hole continually closing her off from the wider world.

There is genuine potential with that sort of framing device: the object practically glued to everyone also representing – perhaps even manifesting – social media’s uglier nature, slithering itself into the darkest recesses of Anita’s mind. The feeling of isolation compared to her peers is ever-present, but the same device can also show optimistic words from a friend. It’s also a great horror utility for the oh-so-unexpected occasions where the signal dies or creepy noises emanate from it, hinting at a malevolent force nearby.

Then again, who needs any introspective subtlety when ham-handed writing can do all the work? In no uncertain terms, Short Message is essentially the “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards!” comedic bit in game form. Tough topics like suicide and bullying aren’t so much explored as they are force-fed like a corny high-school PSA video down every player’s gullet. One minute some graffiti will inspire Anita to bleat on about adults being “a slave to the system”, the next a youth psychology report discusses “the fog of social media”. Even the same protracted suicide trigger warning is rolled out between every chapter – in case the flashing lights didn’t clue everyone in. It’s enough to make James Cameron, David Cage and Hideo Kojima blush!

It’s also not helped by writer/director Motoi Okamoto and company’s scene direction pushing Jeannie Tirado and every other voice actor to melodramatically embellish each and every sentence. The series has a penchant for…peculiar voice acting too, but having Anita constantly sound like she’s holding back tears alongside her pregnant pauses for basic observations is so repetitive and tiring. The only breathing room amidst this unremittingly angst-y sadgasm are short FMV cutscenes that manage ‘weird’ correctly: mismatched lip-syncing with Anne Yatco’s deliberately-stilted voice has a certain personality that’s found nowhere else.

Regardless of what Short Message’s themes may argue, one can’t help but compare to the more popular Silent Hill stories. Consider the various subject matter with which previous Japanese and American developers have tackled: fatherhood, sexual abuse, PTSD, imprisonment, and so on and so forth. Think of the setpieces, enemy design, and environmental details crafted to visualise such unsettling aspects of our corruptible nature – themes made manifest. Conversely, smattering mean-girl sticky notes (“Ugly!”, “You’re Insane!”, “Liar!”) across walls and complaints over weak social media engagement feels like franchise desecration. Granted, there’s more to the story than that, but it nevertheless strikes at the heart of where this fundamentally loses the plot.

It doesn’t find firmer footing when players wrest control either. As an atmospherically-focused first-person walking sim, the tropes won’t surprise anyone: instantly jumping between different settings to disorient, a few negligible puzzles, and so on. When not occasionally distracted by framerate drops or odd technical bugs, it’s easy to appreciate the visual and aural detail of Konami’s world. Having a legend like Akira Yamaoka experiment with a few new atmospheric tunes is certainly a treat – even if the music awkwardly trails off instead of looping like usual. There’s just nothing else done with it, so even the basic exploratory sensations feel flat and artificial.

The only other traditional gameplay outside of empty-headed puzzles are Outlast-esque chase scenes. It tries to crank up tension, and there’s something visually distinctive about the killer’s colourful design and low-framerate locomotion (à la Spider-Verse animated films), but it’s easy to see how segmented and short most are. At the same time, their growing complexity presages the finale’s obnoxious tricks. Melding collectathon and chase with a limited FOV, the monster’s cheap teleportation moves and inconsistent sound mixing might rank as its worst of many bad decisions.

Perhaps The Short Message’s greatest flaw is how ambivalent it feels about Silent Hill altogether. Such criticism is aimed less towards breaking pre-established world building and more the disregard towards previous entries’ thematic depth and character. Though not easy, exploring the more subtly corrosive aspects of bullying and teen suicide could work for this series, but that contention falls flat in the face of material that puts these topics in a blender and dumps them into a feeding trough. Konami still knows how to create detailed environments and a memorable enemy; whether they know how to make something new that honours the series’ legacy remains to be seen.