Silent Hill Short Message
Warning: This essay discusses issues of suicide and bullying among other things, feel free to skip to the next page.
In Short Message your player character throws herself off the dilpidated concrete building that a week earlier her friend had done the same. As you fall it immediately cuts to black and this appears.
It immediately cuts back to gameplay with the teenage girl waking up screaming that she just killed herself. It then makes a bunch of hand waves that maybe chasing The Likes on social media is not good, for society.
Within its brief run time it will also tackle bullying, stalking, lesbianism, being in the closet, idolation, idolizing your peers, and that the true beauty of Sakura blossoms is in their brevity. It will also cover the failure to revitalize German mining towns with Chinese investors pulling out following the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Actual note of criticism: at one point your character’s cartoonish high school school desk is full of bullying post-its like “Slut” and “No One At This School Likes You.” Both of these are hilarious for a variety of reasons, but I can’t help but think 9 out of 10 times a note that just said “slut” on it would be a joke.
Silent Hill Short Message is swinging a sledgehammer in a parking lot somehow failing to hit anything, not even the ground, as we yell from a fair distance, “You might hurt someone.” It handles themes and ideas without an ounce of grace or care and simultaneously believes itself to be really saying something about cyber-bullying and growing up in a dead-end German town that is also somehow American High School.
I couldn’t believe it as I played as it introduced another slid-off the plate onto the linoleum floor theme that the Japanese used to think suicide was honorable but that all changed after the war. This is said with a heavy dose of nostalgia and orientalism before I found out the game was developed by Japanese.
Short Message was released for free with almost no fanfare on the Playstation 5 when there were and still are barely any games to play on it. It is the most memorable Silent Hill project released this year. It exists in the razor-edge if it was just a tiny-bit more something it would be Grade-A Transgressive-Bad Art.
On the other hand, when your game is about why teenagers commit suicide maybe it is impossible to have a fun time. But also maybe everything is happening because this German town got cursed by a Japanese witch they burned at the stake a hundred years ago. Is the message witches are real?
It is a mille-feuille of Poorly Executed Ideas. My buddy Dylan watched a long-play after in a Saizeriya, I described it. He sent me many more really dumb realizations.
The preceding hasn’t been a review of Silent Hill 2 (2024). This is: a 12 hour B- school assignment to remake Silent Hill 2.
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