Silent Hill: The Short Message (2024)

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.

The Other Black Girl (2021) - Zakiya Dalila Harris

Once you stop fighting – once you let this wave wash over you – you’ll see. It’ll wash over you so quickly, you won’t even feel it. You won’t feel the pain.

One of the blurbs on this debut novel features a comparison of the type that I typically find distinctly unhelpful and annoying: the classic “This new thing is old popular thing meets other old popular thing.” A = X + Y, one of the hoariest cliches in advertising and criticism. In this case, The Other Black Girl is “The Devil Wears Prada meets Get Out.” And, for once, I think, the old formula is actually pretty apt. The book wants to be a behind-the-scenes, often rather satirical exploration of a cutthroat industry that then becomes more of a high-concept thriller/horror with a lot of ideas related to racial prejudice and identity. From what I gather from a lot of the buzz online, a lot of people find this genre mixing element of the book to be where the book drops the ball; I read it for a book club and a lot of people in the club had similar feelings. From where I stand, I think it succeeds to near perfection and it’s one of the best, sharpest debuts I’ve read in a long time. Harris is definitely on my radar now as an author to keep an eye on.

The easiest way to boil down the basic set-up is that Nella Wagner, a black editorial assistant at a prestigious publishing firm, often feels like a token, the one black person allowed into this company, a bastion of whiteness, as most publishing firms are. When Hazel McCall is hired as another editorial assistant, Nella is at first thrilled that she’ll have a fellow African-American in this space. But it’s certainly no spoiler to say that there’s something a little off about Hazel and Nella finds herself spiraling into paranoia, uncertainty and anxiety, three things she’s already been plagued with her entire life. Nella is a fantastic main character and Harris is able to really put you inside her head and her emotional and mental experience of the world around her. Before the book eventually shifts tones into being more of a straight-forward thriller, Harris has already created a world where every interaction is a potential minefield of emotional tension and microaggressions. There’s a scene where Nella attempts to approach her boss and one of the firm’s authors with some racially based concerns she has about his new manuscript and Harris just ratchets the tension tighter and tighter. The feelings of dread run deeper than conspiracies and outright physical harm; it’s the constant existential dread of being out of place and in a world not built for you and Harris really pulls it off well.  

And that’s ultimately why the book succeeds as well as it does. I did find the most effective stuff to be mainly in the first half when Harris is making the mundane everyday realities fraught with terror and panic. But the book absolutely sticks the landing in a way I feel like I rarely see. The final confrontation between the two central black girls is a beautifully written scene and it’s unsettling and frightening because of how quiet it is. Rather than going big at the end, Harris pulls us back down to the most personal level and the “climax” turns out to be a conversation. But it’s not a deflation or an anti-climax, but the very thing that, in my opinion at least, does push the book over into a subcategory of horror. It’s just a beautifully dark ending that really has a lot of emotional weight behind it. End of the day, it’s a book I absolutely love and I think it basically nails everything it goes for. 4 stars.

tl;dr – Devil Wears Prada meets Get Out blurb is actually pretty apt; well-characterized, sharp, satirical, filled with the anxiety and dread of the mundane, this one is a killer debut. 4 stars.  

More Book Reviews!