Silent Hill: The Short Messagehas 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 Messagefeels more like a zeitgeisty Netflix show than something classicallySilent 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 Messagecould be an unfortunate omen for the future of the franchise.
First conceived in 1996,Silent Hillwas 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 fourSilent Hillgamesare some of the most important and well-constructed horror games ever created.
Team Silent was disbanded in 2005, and development of future games was passed to Western developers. Games since Team Silent’s disbanding have frequently been met with mixed to negative reviews.
The Original Silent Hill Games Were Trendsetters
When Team Silent created the originalSilent Hillin 1999, they had no precedents to follow. WhileResident Evilwas undoubtedly an inspirationon the game’s mechanics,Silent Hillwas an attempt at a game that was as psychologically disturbing as it was visceral. Taking inspiration from literature, film, and fine art, the original fourSilent Hillgames 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 fourSilent Hillgames has plagued the franchise ever since Team Silent was disbanded. While each of the Team Silent games approached theSilent Hillconcept with a fresh set of ideas and inspirations, subsequentSilent Hillgames have all simply tried to recapture the magic of those original titles—leavinggames likeSilent Hill: DownpourandSilent Hill: Homecomingfeeling more like hollow simulacra than original creative visions in their own right. WhileSilent Hill: The Short Messageshows 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 recentSilent Hilltitle.
P.T. Was a Ray of Hope for Silent Hill
Released in 2014, Hideo Kojima’s radical reinterpretation ofSilent Hillcaused 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 previousSilent Hillgames, but by Kojima’s own literary and cinematic fixations, the game ended up feeling more trulySilent Hillthan any mainlineSilent Hillgame 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 thatSilent Hill: The Short Messageis not a trendsetter. Like other recentSilent Hillgames, it’s stuck in the trap of trying to replicate previous successes rather than forging a new path forward. While the original fourSilent Hillgames may no longer influence the design or worldbuilding of futureSilent Hillgames, it’s only because the original games’ early-2000s horror trappings have been swapped out forP.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 theSilent Hill 2 remakebeing given to Bloober Team—developer ofthe ‘hallway horror’ seriesLayers of Fear—it looks like Konami is fully committed to takingSilent Hilldown this pretty but repetitive path.
Silent Hill: The Short Message
WHERE TO PLAY
An all-new, modern Silent Hill experience, powered by the latest in game technology.Following messages from her friend, street artist Maya, Anita arrives at an old, crumbling apartment block. Drawn inside, she soon encounters bizarre, otherworldly spaces and inexplicable happenings as she explores, all while being pursued by a twisted monster.If she wants to make it out alive, Anita must somehow escape the abnormal perils of the apartments and find her way out again. But where is Maya? And just what is this strange world that she finds herself lost in?
