If you’re a fan of the Silent Hill franchise, and maybe even if you’re not, you remember when P.T. dropped. It was a free demo that dropped mysteriously onto the Playstation store; it was only after completing one of the most terrifying gaming experiences of all time that you would be rewarded with the information that it was a Playable Teaser for Silent Hills, an upcoming game in the Silent Hill franchise that would see Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro teaming up. Silent Hills ended up getting cancelled and the entire franchise collapsed for a decade and it remains, for me at least, one of the all time most painful game cancellations, a missed opportunity of truly epic proportions. Add the fact that it killed the entire franchise and you’ve got the entire Silent Hills debacle as a particularly terrible video game kerfuffle.
You might be wondering why I’m talking about a 12-year-old demo to a cancelled game when I’m supposed to reviewing a game that came out earlier this year. Well, because it’s pretty clear that the developers of The Short Message were also talking A LOT about P.T. while they were making The Short Message, if you know what I mean.
A couple of years ago now, Konami decided to go all in on the Silent Hill franchise again, a decision that was long overdue. We’re getting a high-profile remake of Silent Hill 2, the most acclaimed game in the original franchise; we’re getting Silent Hill f, a new game set in the main continuity of the series; we’re getting some smaller scale games as well. And The Short Message was to be the opening salvo here, the beginning of the new Silent Hill. I mean, Silent Hill: Ascension was supposed to be, but, God, I think we’ve all decided to just pretend that didn’t happen. So, I think they wanted a P.T.-style game to really capture the imagination in the way P.T. did. And they did a fairly good job aping the superficial qualities of P.T. The Short Message was released for free; it’s a short game, completable in less than three hours; it's in first person perspective; it’s built around constantly looping through the same environments over and over, though it’s an abandoned warehouse this time, not just a single hallway.
Now, to be generous, it was never going to achieve the levels of P.T. It just wasn’t. But it fails on its own terms as well as on P.T.’s terms. And the ways in which it fails are all concerning when it comes to Silent Hill. It’s not scary. Silent Hill doesn’t need, and perhaps actually shouldn’t include, a lot of jump scares, but The Short Message doesn’t have the creepy and unsettling atmosphere that I wanted it to have. Creeping around an abandoned warehouse should be scary; it just isn’t. The game also wants to address heavy themes and this is admirable; Silent Hill often has done that quite well. But here, when the game tries to address themes of cyberbullying and social media, it feels decidedly like Boomers trying to replicate how “kids today” use social media and it honestly feels pretty cringy.
In the final third of the game, we move away from some of the high-school drama and social media stuff and start to explore the traumatic home life of the main character and her relationship with her abusive mother and younger brother. This stuff worked a lot better and felt a lot more like Silent Hill; I found this section of the game to be the only one that actually had some compelling and disturbing moments. Unfortunately, it also features the game’s hardest (by far) sequence where you have to navigate a maze while fleeing a monster and also pick up several collectibles. I found it to be a pretty high difficulty spike from the other chase scenes.
I feel I should, in fairness, once again mention that this game was and still is free to anyone with a PS5. It feels a little strange to be as harsh as I’m being on a game that was provided completely free. Still, free or not, I expect a game to be good and Silent Hill: The Short Message isn’t. Ultimately, it fails in every way it needed to succeed in, both as a stand alone horror game and as a flagship for the return of the Silent Hill franchise. The Silent Hill 2 remake just dropped earlier this month and I haven’t picked it up yet. Given the developer, I’m not super optimistic, but the initial reviews have been mostly positive, so we’ll see; I’m still holding out some hope for the return of the franchise. Short Message notwithstanding, we’ll see what the future holds.