This may not be a full fat Silent Hill sequel, but the surprise release of The Short Message is welcome, all the same.
Silent Hill: The Short Message is only half right. It takes around two hours to finish, true, but it’s set in Kettenstadt, a fictional German town in an economic slump. What gives? When I play Silent Hill I want to be assured of three things. One, fog, the thicker the better. Two, things that writhe and judder out of it, to ruin your afternoon. And three, Silent Hill: a rural town of neat and quiet streets, partially sucked into a howling netherworld of pain. I mean, really. Is that asking for much?
We play as Anita, a girl in her late teens, who wakes in an abandoned apartment complex. The camera is in first-person, and Anita uses her phone as a feeble torch; now and then, messages beep through from her friends, one of whom is supposed to have died. The hallways are squalid and cluttered with junk. Escape seems a sensible idea, only there is no obvious way out. “I’m trapped,” Anita says, and then – pause – “I’ve always been trapped.” It was at this point I started to worry. As a rule, it’s best not to have your characters diagnose their own development ahead of time. Anita, we learn, has suffered bullying at school and online, and before long we pick up a textbook with an excerpt entitled, “Inside the Fog of Social Media.”
This is the biggest problem with The Short Message. It raises some clever ideas – the haze of the internet, both everywhere and nowhere, slipping fuzzily over our days while we grope through the distortion – but it blasts them with explanation and they burn off into the glaringly plain. You wonder where this urge to illuminate came from, given that the series at its best showed us the worst and left us to work it out. Do the developers at HexaDrive really worry that we won’t have the foggiest? It is no surprise that the strongest things here come from composer and sound designer Akira Yamaoka, who supplies us with clangs, hums, and hard-metal droning – the industrial-strength glue that has held this series together even at its most fractured points; and Masahiro Ito, who is credited for “creature design” and “Otherworld design.” Trust two former members of Team Silent to say nothing at all, and let their work unsettle us.
Anita is hounded, at certain points, by a wraith. It spasms toward you with stuttering speed, as if a cracked frame rate signalled a cracked frame of mind. This thing wants you dead, but you can’t help noticing the sad beauty of its design: bendy-limbed and clad in white, it’s bound up in rope and covered in cherry blossom. Ito has dropped the sexual undertones that seethed through his work on Silent Hill 2, with its grimy nurses and skittering legs. Instead we home in on the adolescent dread of stagnation. The monster may be the apparition of a girl, a friend of Anita’s named Maya, who attained fame online for her graffiti art, was fixated on cherry blossom, and who leapt to her death from the top of the apartment building. At one point, we read an interview with Maya: “The flowers represent the girls overcoming past traumas,” she says, “or at least their desire to do so.” Ah, thanks!
This is the first Silent Hill since the clammy P.T., which came out ten years ago and has clung to the memory of anyone who played it. It was a demo, teasing us for a game we never got, called Silent Hills, but it was more perfectly complete than most finished games could dream of being. Unsurprisingly, Anita’s journey cribs from that project. We get domestic disarray, a welter of prescription pills, a refrigerator smeared with something red and sticky, and a looping hallway. But whereas that game, also in first person, held its horrors still and let them set in, staying calm in the knowledge that you were anything but, The Short Message feels frantic. There are good shocks, and your heart cools when you spot something awful at the end of a long corridor, but the chill barely has time to register, as you are pushed into another panicky chase sequence.
The result is that none of it lingers. Short messages can have as much power as long ones, but only if you let them breathe. Still, there are reasons to be cheerful. It’s been too long since I was last scared by Silent Hill, rather than for it. There are sights here where you can feel life seeping back into the series. Look at the glimpse you get of the outside, from a balcony, as a grey frost hangs over the street lamps. Or the pile of black plastic bags, a couple of which begin to groan and twitch. Ito’s Otherworld, which periodically oozes into ours, is a nightmare of chain-link fences and rusty blood. And look at the darkly scrawled circle on Maya’s wall, a nice nod to the hole in Silent Hill 4: The Room, which appeared next to a man’s toilet and beckoned him into another realm.
Despite its name, that game took place in a town called Ashfield, and, just as Silent Hill: Homecoming unfolded in a place called Shepherd’s Glen, the new game touches on the idea that any town can become a Silent Hill. All you need is choked ambition and restless dreams in order to see it. And a curse wouldn’t hurt. (Bloober Team tapped into this notion for The Medium, which was set in a milky-aired patch of Poland, after the crumbling of Communism, and that studio is now working away on the remake of Silent Hill 2.) There are hints, in Anita’s struggle, that this long mismanaged series could be on the mend, and HexaDrive knows it. Hence the pamphlet we find, on the planned redevelopment of Kettenstadt. “The abandoned properties developed by Japanese Corporations,” it says, “have long been a problem, but by repurposing them, we can cut costs substantially and better realise our vision.” It could be an internal memo from the offices of Konami. The theme, we are told, is “Revitalisation.” We’ll see.
Game: Silent Hill: The Short Message
Platform: PlayStation 5
Developer: HexaDrive
Publisher: Konami Digital Entertainment
Release Date: February 1, 2024
