Konami won’t let you forget that Silent Hill: the short message is basically a Silent Hill game, but something is missing. In this one you follow a teenage girl named Anita, who wakes up in an abandoned apartment building; After Anita receives strange text messages from her friend Maya, she goes looking for her. Along the way, she is confronted with her trauma and guilt, as she is drawn into a horror straight from her tortured psyche. Does that sound familiar? If you played Silent Hill 2 or many other games made after it, you can bet this is the case.
The short message, which was never officially announced even though fans knew it was in development, suddenly appeared on the PlayStation Store after the first trailer was shown during Sony’s State of Play in January. Even stranger: it was free to play. Konami collaborated with Hexadrive on the game, which takes just a few hours to complete and works both as a standalone experience and as a precursor to the upcoming Silent Hills.
(Ed. remark: This review contains spoilers for Silent Hill: the short message. It also includes discussions about bullying, mental illness and suicide.)
The new title plays like many previous Silent Hill games. Like it PT, The short message uses a loop to tell a story about being stuck in your worst nightmare. Anita is taken to an abandoned apartment building with no idea how she got there and has to walk around to find her way out. Until she encounters both metaphorical and physical demons, she is trapped. She has no weapons or objects that can help her, except her phone, which she uses as a flashlight and as a way to talk to her friends Maya and Amelie.
There are multiple loops in the game and they are great at increasing the tension. In one, Anita walks through her old apartment, and each time she restarts the loop, she becomes smaller. Once I realized that I was becoming childlike, as I relived Anita’s childhood trauma and learned more about her mother, something sank in my stomach. I saw myself becoming weaker and more helpless, which matched Anita’s experience.
The most prominent place you’ll see these loops is in the game’s only action scenes, where you have to run from a monster that clearly looks like Maya. Considering Pyramid Head creator Masahiro Ito worked on The short message, it’s no surprise that it’s such an intense creature. It looks gruesome but strangely beautiful, rendered in pastel colors that pop in the dark. She also moves at a different frame rate, making her movements look jerky and unnerving. I’m not sure what its name is yet (Cherry Blossom School Girl perhaps?), but it will certainly be one of the most memorable monsters from the franchise.
Image: Konami
Running away from the monster is a bit reminiscent of trying to escape the Void Silent Hill: downpour, although fortunately a lot less annoying. You must navigate looping mazes while using your phone to listen for static (a common Silent Hill mechanic) to avoid the monster, which immediately sends you back to the start. Like the building, these mazes become increasingly dilapidated and terrifying over time, with the latter leading you through a Silent Hill-esque otherworld covered in metal grilles and surrounded by fire.
Another hallmark of modern Silent Hill seems to be the concept of a city that reflects the protagonist’s worst fears and traumas, and expanding these horrors across the world. The short message is set in Germany, specifically in the fictional city of Kettenstadt. The town is described as a “border stronghold” that once had big revitalization dreams until the COVID-19 pandemic caused investors to pull their financing. Many of the buildings are therefore abandoned, including the Villa apartment complex, where the game takes place.
It’s impressive how fleshed out Kettenstadt feels, and like the best of Silent Hill, it’s a character in itself. This is only a two-hour game, so there’s only so much detail here, and you don’t see anything outside the Villa, but there’s still enough to drive home how Silent Hill-esque Kettenstadt is – partly because of the tragic backstory and the current state of neglect. Even if the world around you looks worse with every loop, you never feel like you’ve left the Villa. Anita’s state of mind can make the environments look grimmer and more miserable, but the line between the real state of Kettenstadt and the Silent Hill version is always blurred. Capitalizing on the pandemic also adds needed depth, especially now that we are in 2024 and still seeing its effects on a large scale. (Is this the first major COVID game?)
Image: Konami via Polygoon
The Villa is haunted in other ways. Anita’s mental state has some effect, but the history of Kettenstadt plays a major role. In addition to the general disrepair, it has become a place where a young girl commits suicide almost every year after jumping from the roof. Konami immediately makes this clear via in-game messages The short message will tackle some heavy themes including bullying, self-harm and suicide. This is something the game will never let you forget as it is conveyed through multiple content warnings with links to resources and mention of the American Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Suicide plays a major role in the story of Anita and the city.
I think for the most part the subject of suicide is treated respectfully here. However, when Anita tries to commit suicide herself, it feels borderline tacky. Each time she jumps off the roof, the game pauses to display the content warning again. She does this twice. The first time is extremely shocking; It’s not often you see suicide depicted so blatantly in video games, and when the hotline card shows up, you might think for a moment that this is how the game ends. When it happens the second time, it feels forced, like the game is apologizing for putting you through that moment again.
I understand why the developers erred on the side of caution when it came to warning players about the subject matter, but trying to keep the player engaged doesn’t change the fact that the story still relies on shock value. It’s worrying that the game’s creators apparently don’t trust the public to understand a content warning without showing it multiple times – or perhaps there’s uncertainty about showing this footage to players. I fear that future Silent Hill games will approach these themes in the same way.
Image: Konami via Polygoon
Anita is a terminally depressed teenager, and given all the revelations about her character and relationships, her suicidal tendencies certainly fit her overall story. I appreciate that Konami didn’t shy away from this. On the other hand, the game hits you over the head with it, both in terms of hotline messages and how often it comes up.
It doesn’t help that Anita’s character for most of the game is her being depressed and trying to cover it up while texting her friend Amelie, her only connection to the outside world. But when she’s alone and rummaging through the abandoned apartment building, her dialogue is mostly about putting herself down. “I’ve always been trapped,” she says at one point. She wonders if she deserves to live and if people even notice her. Anita is a teenager, and teenagers can be annoying, so I didn’t mind that her dialogue was sometimes very dramatic. But while depression can be all-consuming, The short message does not give Anita much more definition than her mental illness.
A lot of The short message feels heavy-handed in its themes, from suicide to the impact of social media to the cruelty of bullying. There are notes all over the walls with insults scrawled on them, and they all feel a bit on the nose. I know bullying isn’t smart sometimes, but the notes and the voices saying “Freak!” or “Slut!” quickly became repetitive. It’s another place where the audience isn’t trusted to understand the story without it being spelled out.
Image: Konami via Polygoon
The short message is also extremely unsubtle when it comes to the Silent Hill connections. In the first room you will find a defaced Little Hope town sign Silent Hill: Homecomingand of course the loop rooms The short message are similar to the core system in PT A particularly groan-inducing moment involves a note talking about the “Silent Hill phenomenon,” a brain fog so intense that victims see real fog. And yes, it is named after the city. If you weren’t sure what kind of game this was, now you’re educated.
It’s not just references — The short message just doing a beat-for-beat Silent Hill performance, but on a smaller scale. It’s not just about Konami publishing games to fit a series, and more about what it feels like to see something replicated, sometimes poorly. The short message has its moments, like Cherry Blossom School Girl, and some of the loops are great. Plus, it’s a stunning game to look at, with some unique visuals that make me optimistic about the future of the series. This is very much a Silent Hill innovation, even if it’s a particularly good one, and Konami wants you to know that. It makes you wonder if all upcoming titles will follow a similar path.
Silent Hill: the short message is now available for free on PlayStation 5.