Konami has been making strategic moves to revitalize its main survival horror franchise. In 2022, during a presentation focused on the saga, several projects were announced, each in the hands of different developers, both Western and Eastern.
I like to highlight the fact that Silent Hill has struggled in recent times, largely because Konami decided to outsource the franchise to Western studios. Since Team Silent was disbanded, the franchise has undergone substantial changes in tone, in my view for the simple reason that Western horror is completely different from Eastern horror. Silent Hill: Homecoming, Silent Hill: Downpour and even Silent Hill: Origins are clear examples of this change and what made matters worse was the success of the first movie and also the second game, which most of the public consider to be the best in the franchise. This led many in the West to associate the image of the Pyramid Head as the main icon of the saga, as well as the attempt to emulate the feeling behind Silent Hill 2. Silent Hill Homecoming is the clearest attempt to achieve this.
The P.T. revolution
Then we had the short and maddening success of P.T. the little game/preview involving Hideo Kojima broke the internet in 2014, the experience was incredible and it seemed that the Konami would finally bring back the feeling of psychological terror that made the franchise stand out. Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito e Guillermo del Toro together in a Silent Hill seemed to be a dream, until everything fell apart, Kojima formed his own studio and the game was canceled and unpublished making P.T. an even more legendary experience, influencing an entire generation of indie games and triple A's.
The youtube channel Konami is still far from getting it right with the direction and choice of developers for its projects, I think nothing is clearer in seeing the difference in reception of the Silent Hill: Ascension with the Silent Hill: The Short Message. Oriental horror is intrinsically linked to the franchise and they should keep it that way.
A short game
My journey in Silent Hill: The Short Message began with a certain prejudice, seeing only the trailer released on the State of Play it seemed to me again that Konami would be trying to emulate the feeling of P.T. bringing an experiment for the community to unravel some secret, I started the game and already found myself with a soundtrack very characteristic of the golden age of the saga, so I gradually put aside this prejudice.
Silent Hill: The Short Message tells a story with a beginning, middle and end. Anita is a 17-year-old girl in a troubled period of her life, she's been bullied and carries a sense of guilt for something that the game gradually reveals, and the way this happens won me over every time. It's a game with strong themes, especially suicide, but with subtle and symbolic messages, which reminded me of some moments in Silent Hill 2 But the game took it in a different way, which pleased me even more.
Despite the name, the game is not set in the city of the same name, but in an apartment building in Germany where there have been many cases of teenage suicide. Something I found very interesting was the fact that some of the files found along the way mention recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and how this has affected many people's mental health. There is a connection with the old games, but again it's very subtle, which I liked a lot. Subtlety is what has to be part of this type of game because it's what makes the discussions happen.
As it's a short experience, I prefer not to go into details about the story so as not to spoil the experience, but I can say that in this sense it was a very positive point, it's bizarre to compare how this heavier theme is presented in this game and in such a poor way in other games. The Medium of Bloober Team.
The Mental Labyrinth
The game is divided into two parts, one more of exploration in which the details of the protagonist's life are revealed little by little with a few lines, cutscenes, documents and text messages on her cell phone, and the second part is a game of chase between a creature made of Sakuras (cherry blossoms) in a labyrinth that becomes more and more distorted, in this case the famous Otherworld, which shapes itself according to the protagonist's traumas. I thought that this part of the chase could have been better paced, as some details of the scenery go unnoticed due to the desperation to escape from the monster.
The game uses FMV cutscenes of all the secondary characters, something that caused me a certain strangeness due to the fact that the language spoken by the actors and actresses isn't English so the lypsync wasn't correct, I even tried to find a way to change the language of the game but I couldn't find anything in the menus.
Graphics aren't everything
Graphically, the game doesn't impress. Unlike P.T., which to this day is impressive for its lighting and photorealistic modeling, Silent Hill: The Short Message at times even has some scenes of poorly implemented facial expressions, but I believe that this doesn't detract from the experience, in this case it's something that the game as a whole outweighs the technical flaws. It's a free game and according to the game's director Motoi Okamoto this is just the first project in the revival of the franchise.
A hope
Silent Hill: The Short Message is a very interesting experience, featuring classic names from the franchise such as Masahiro Ito and shows that at least someone there in Konami is concerned with making the right decisions for the franchise. It's a competent game, much better than many that try to emulate P.T. in recent times. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for Silent Hill 2 Remake which seems to me to go in the opposite direction of everything I've said, at least we have another very promising project announced, which is the Silent Hill f.
Silent Hill: The Short Message is available for free for Playstation 5
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