Silent Hill: The Short Message review | Unsettling in parts, but really just a glorified tech demo

Too much trauma?

The Short Message is set in the fictional German town of Kettenstadt in the post-COVID era, where suicide seems to be the only solution for an alarmingly high percentage of teens.

The protagonist of this short piece (it took me around 90 minutes to roll the end credits) is Anita, who finds herself in the "Villa." This is an abandoned apartment complex that is both a well-known graffiti haven, and notorious as a place where many teenage girls have taken their lives. She is besieged by trauma and self-harm stemming from being bullied in school and an abusive relationship with her mother. Through a set of phone calls and SMSes with her friends Maya and Amelie, we learn more about Anita, including that she is supposed to be meeting her friend Maya at the Villa.

(Gameplay captured on PlayStation 5)

Visually, The Short Message looks competent enough, with great details lavished on bringing the decrepit to life. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have you spending much time in some of the nicer-looking areas, with most of the action taking place in samey corridors.

A few minutes into the game it becomes clear that the Villa  is beset by all sorts of supernatural goings-on, and that it’s actually Anita’s nightmare within which we are trapped. And over three chapters, the game peels back layer after layer to expose the sources of her suffering, with a few twists along the way.

Without going into too many details and spoiling the experience for you, there are a couple of bone-chilling moments and a sprinkling of jump scares, but if the template for this whole exercise was PT, The Short Message falls woefully short of the brief.

For starters, the gameplay in this first-person horror game is extremely limited. Beyond walking through corridors, clicking on highlighted objects (for exposition or cutscenes), and fleeing the apparent illegitimate offspring of a Clicker from The Last of Us and a cherry blossom, there is precious little to do. If you’re in search of puzzles, there is all of one through the entire duration of The Short Message.

The ‘fleeing’ gameplay loop entails speeding through dark corridors with the flashlight of your mobile phone to illuminate the way, and it’s mostly an exercise in trial and error. Take the right path and you’re home free. Take a wrong turn and you run into the cherry blossom creature and are sent back to the last checkpoint. It’s pulse-racing the first time, but turns awfully repetitive and mundane by the fifth or sixth instance.

(Gameplay captured on PlayStation 5)

This would’ve been fine if the story was compelling, but sadly it leans heavily on cliché and very unsubtle messaging to tell a cautionary tale. What’s worse is that the ending is extremely predictable after you’ve spent a few minutes in the second chapter. Finally, Anita isn’t well fleshed-out at all, and the game’s parsimony with sharing details about her makes her appear simply as a bundle of trauma. And this does the overall message a great disservice.

Only the tip of the iceberg

For all the doom and gloom I’m laying on what is essentially a short and free appetiser and an interactive tech demo for want of a better phrase, there’s reason for Silent Hill fans to be hopeful.

And that is because while it may have been The Short Message that ended the drought, there are — at the time of writing — at least four Silent Hill titles on their way. These include the Silent Hill 2 Remake that was showcased in the form of a trailer at last week’s PlayStation event.