Silent Hill: The Short Message is the first playable Silent Hill release since 2012’s Silent Hill: Downpour.
This wait has been agonizing for fans of the franchise, but did this release live up to the wait? The short answer in my opinion is no, however, it does have some merits that are valuable to point out.
Plot
The game follows a new character called Anita as she navigates a building called ‘The Vila’. Whilst wandering around she receives cryptic messages from her friend Maya who recently took her own life. All the while she is being perused by a monster covered in Cherry Blossoms.
The setup is great, it feels like a classic Silent Hill plot. It has a confusing story, bizarre characters, scary monsters, and an incredible ambient soundtrack. You can tell that the people making it wanted to re-create the magic of Silent Hill 2, specifically with the focus on Anita’s dark past and mental health. However, the handling of the subject matter leaves something to be desired. The themes and issues in the game are rarely given time to be explored and justified. We learn about Anita’s childhood near the end and this moment is incredibly dark and hard to watch. This would be fine if it was executed correctly. However, in the next section, it is completely swept under the rug as the game rushes to its end.
Gameplay
The game has a rough run time of an hour and a half, making it a short trek through the other world. Due to this short run time, the game is never able to fully flesh out any of its ideas. Much of the sensitive subject matter that this game deals with falls short and comes off as almost offensive.
The gameplay (if you can call it that), has you running around the same rooms for three chapters, interacting with notes and books that add context to where the game is set as the general plot. These moments account for about 70 per cent of what you will be doing in The Short Message, the other 30 per cent consists of chases with the aforementioned Cherry Blossom monsters.
These chases can get fairly tedious as they boil down to just getting from point A to B. The most tedious part is the layout of the rooms, which all look the same and are separated by dividers meaning that going down one side could lead to instant death, and going down the other will end up leading you to another room that is almost identical to the one you just left.
Voice acting
The voice acting also leaves something to be desired, this could be down to the script being lost in translation as it originally was done in Japanese. This leads to much of the dialogue that should be impactful, sadly coming off as laughable.
Visuals
One of the more interesting things that the game includes is multiple live-action cutscenes which are interspersed between chapters / key story moments. These give a face to Maya, the girl that has led Anita to ‘The Vila’. Unfortunately, these moments were as confusing as they were unnecessary. They show us what Maya was like before the game begins but it comes off as almost insulting to the player as the game has already given us this information previously, through the various text messages and books.
The game itself looks very good for the most part, the interiors are full of little details with graffiti being a key visual and holding a lot of story significance. The environments can go from incredibly unsettling to oddly calming within moments and in the first chapter, there is a real fear of going from one room to another as you never know what is behind each door. All this tension is undone when you find out that the monster only appears when the world shifts. Sadly, the world shifts lead to both environments being ruined and poorly recycled.
The monster itself is another positive of The Short Message. It follows the old Silent Hill idea of having the monsters symbolize aspects of the central character. In this case, the Cherry Blossom monster looks very similar to Maya, playing on the idea that Anita has conjured this monster version of her friend to torment her for what she has done.
The design is also very striking with the blossoms coming from the head and running down the neck. The disjointed and broken movements of the monster make it terrifying to run into.
Final thoughts
Overall, Silent Hill: The Short Message doesn’t deliver in the areas that it should. A story that doesn’t make sense, important character beats that are dropped, and an irritating gameplay loop that quite literally leaves you running in loops.
As someone who loves Silent Hill and wants it to return to where it once sat amongst other horror games such as Resident Evil, this isn’t the way they are going to be able to do that.
I don’t recommend this to anyone new to the franchise but, if you have played previous games and are interested at all in this one, it’s free and it’s short, so you won’t be wasting anything but your time.
𝘍𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘵: 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.𝘉𝘭𝘰𝘨
Fourth year Film and Journalism student
Deputy editor
Contact - deputyeditor@brignews.com
