Silent Hill: The Short Message Could Be an Unfortunate Omen

Silent Hill: The Short Message has not been warmly received. Shifting focus away from the eponymous town in favor of an economically depressed town in Germany, and following a teenage girl as she receives text messages from her dead friend—an internet-famous graffiti artist—Silent Hill: The Short Message feels more like a zeitgeisty Netflix show than something classically Silent Hill. With little attention paid to the world’s details, lore, or atmosphere, instead focusing on long recurring corridors with scripted scare moments, Silent Hill: The Short Message could be an unfortunate omen for the future of the franchise.

First conceived in 1996, Silent Hill was the passion project of Team Silent, a small team of wildly talented creatives working at Konami in the late 90s. Seeking to create a new kind of horror game, and 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 hard-reality and manifestation. Drenched in fog, filled with truly disturbing imagery, and suffused throughout with literary and philosophical themes, the original four Silent Hill games are some of the most important and well-constructed horror games ever created.

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Silent Hill’s Renaissance May Need a Major Backup Plan if Things Go South

Silent Hill is ramping up for a major return to the spotlight, but Konami might want to hedge their bets in case things don’t go as planned.

The Original Silent Hill Games Were Trendsetters

When Team Silent created the original Silent Hill in 1999, they had no precedents to follow. While Resident Evil was undoubtedly an inspiration on the game’s mechanics, Silent Hill was an attempt at a game that was as psychologically disturbing as it was visceral. Taking inspiration from literature, film, and fine art, the original four Silent Hill games set a standard in the industry that many other horror games are still struggling to live up to—both in the AAA and indie spheres.

Trying to live up to the first four Silent Hill games has plagued the franchise ever since Team Silent was disbanded. 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 all simply tried to recapture the magic of those original titles—leaving games like Silent Hill: Downpour and Silent Hill: Homecoming feeling more like hollow simulacra than original creative visions in their own right. While Silent Hill: The Short Message shows that the franchise has finally escaped the gravitational pull of Team Silent’s original games, it also shows that the series has only 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 firestorm in the gaming community. P.T.—or ‘Playable Teaser’—was a short but dense horror game released on the PS4 as a proof-of-concept for what Kojima hoped to do with the franchise. Sloughing off the baggage and imagery of previous games, Kojima created a complex world that presented its narrative through environmental storytelling alone. 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 mainline Silent Hill game had in years. The game’s dreamlike atmosphere and recurring hallways have become common horror game tropes today, but were radically original in 2014.

Silent Hill: The Short Message Repeats the Past

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

The exploration and backtracking through environments thick with ambient terror has been replaced with tasking the player to find things in a high-fidelity environment to trigger the next scare. Nevertheless, given that the Silent Hill 2 remake being given to Bloober Team—developer of the ‘hallway horror’ series Layers of Fear—it looks like Konami is fully committed to taking Silent Hill down this pretty but repetitive path.

Silent Hill: The Short Message

Konami’s Silent Hill: The Short Message is a free-to-play PS5 horror game. The story follows Anita as she explores an apartment building after receiving texts from her deceased friend.

Released

January 31, 2024

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood, Strong Language, Violence

How Long To Beat

2 Hours