Silent Hill: The Short Message kind of stumbles to its point, and the acting and gameplay are really a distraction from what it gets right.
The acting is pretty atrocious, it took me out of it literally every time it popped up, which sucks because it happens A LOT. The Live Action scenes also just clash with the rest of the game. This is not a meta Alan Wake narrative, I dont even know why it was done, other than them just not wanting to do one extra character model. Considering how bad the main character looks, I can't say I'm surprised.
The chases are literally everything wrong with this "chase horror" survival horror genre that all these walking simulator horror games have done for a decade now. You start the game, unnerved. You are afraid to see the monster, this begins the building of tension at seeing the monster/getting a jumpscare. You walk through the game world until you encounter it finally, and now the first chase is a heart pounding experience where you don't want to be caught. The second you do get caught in any of these games though, the illusion is broken. You watch the canned, one hit/grab kill animation, you're sent back to the last checkpoint, and you start the chase again. Every subsequent time you repeat this, the scariness and threat of the monster is depleted, and the chase becomes more repetitive. Eventually the action of getting caught and dying becomes an annoyance, and resetting to start the chase over and over again brings the player to hate the monster. Not scared of it, hate it. Hate playing the game they are playing. This style of horror game SUCKS. The game also runs like ass during a couple of these moments.
It did have a couple things I think are really good. The music is great, it makes you feel like you're in a classic Silent Hill game, and it carries the tone a lot of scenes, despite the bad acting. The look of the building is great, and the monster is also very well designed. It looks creepy as it walks, and it makes you wonder, "what am I looking at?"
Problems aside, I can't get into people saying they shouldn't have even tried with this subject matter. Really? I'd so much rather them try and stumble to do something different than have the same SH2 twist that they've been doing over and over again since Homecoming to decreasing effectiveness each time. Yeah the acting sucked and we shouldnt hear our protagonist voice their thoughts so much to the player (This is a game, *I* am supposed to be the one getting scared. It's impossible to do when the character won't shut up!), but there is a message here. And I found myself thinking about my own situations I found similar to the story's.
All in all, the parts are here for something good, but it doesn't live up to its full potential. Still, I feel like I can't give this a bad rating. It's not even like they charged for it and we got ripped off. It could have been much better, but it could have been much worse. And Silent Hill fans have experienced much worse than The Short Message.
The acting is pretty atrocious, it took me out of it literally every time it popped up, which sucks because it happens A LOT. The Live Action scenes also just clash with the rest of the game. This is not a meta Alan Wake narrative, I dont even know why it was done, other than them just not wanting to do one extra character model. Considering how bad the main character looks, I can't say I'm surprised.
The chases are literally everything wrong with this "chase horror" survival horror genre that all these walking simulator horror games have done for a decade now. You start the game, unnerved. You are afraid to see the monster, this begins the building of tension at seeing the monster/getting a jumpscare. You walk through the game world until you encounter it finally, and now the first chase is a heart pounding experience where you don't want to be caught. The second you do get caught in any of these games though, the illusion is broken. You watch the canned, one hit/grab kill animation, you're sent back to the last checkpoint, and you start the chase again. Every subsequent time you repeat this, the scariness and threat of the monster is depleted, and the chase becomes more repetitive. Eventually the action of getting caught and dying becomes an annoyance, and resetting to start the chase over and over again brings the player to hate the monster. Not scared of it, hate it. Hate playing the game they are playing. This style of horror game SUCKS. The game also runs like ass during a couple of these moments.
It did have a couple things I think are really good. The music is great, it makes you feel like you're in a classic Silent Hill game, and it carries the tone a lot of scenes, despite the bad acting. The look of the building is great, and the monster is also very well designed. It looks creepy as it walks, and it makes you wonder, "what am I looking at?"
Problems aside, I can't get into people saying they shouldn't have even tried with this subject matter. Really? I'd so much rather them try and stumble to do something different than have the same SH2 twist that they've been doing over and over again since Homecoming to decreasing effectiveness each time. Yeah the acting sucked and we shouldnt hear our protagonist voice their thoughts so much to the player (This is a game, *I* am supposed to be the one getting scared. It's impossible to do when the character won't shut up!), but there is a message here. And I found myself thinking about my own situations I found similar to the story's.
All in all, the parts are here for something good, but it doesn't live up to its full potential. Still, I feel like I can't give this a bad rating. It's not even like they charged for it and we got ripped off. It could have been much better, but it could have been much worse. And Silent Hill fans have experienced much worse than The Short Message.