The game’s rating is a 2.4 out of 5 as of 2/2/24.

I make this note because unfortunately this game is being criticized unfairly for its attempt to tell a story with sensitive subject matter. However, over time, as is always with misunderstood and under appreciated games, people will look back at Silent Hill: The Short Message and think “wow, this game really was not that bad.” I’ll gladly be the first to admit it is not above criticism, but holistically this game is NOWHERE near as bad as these current reviewers are making it out to be.

It’s dishonest to consider this game bad. It’s mediocre at worst, beautiful at best, but never bad. This game is a celebration of the franchise taking the bits from each installment that made the games stand out and making something new and refreshing for both new and old fans. This is as much a return to form as it is an exploration for something new.

So let’s get to the issue I see people have with the game. The subject matter and the subject.

Silent Hill: The Short Message stars a mentally ill high school teenage girl, Anita, processing various forms of trauma. Just like our beloved 17 year old Heather Mason of Silent Hill 3 fame, she has behaviors and monologues/dialogues that can come off kinda cringe and irrational to the unknowing eye, but it’s honest behavior coming from a teenage girl still figuring out her emotions and place in the world. Keep in mind she is alone through all of this as well, so the constant self-talking while jarring is merely a coping mechanism when dealing with stressful situations alone. She’s definitely not the first person to behave the way she does or think the thoughts she has as dealing with mental illness as a teenager leads to irrational and anti-social behaviors.

Our impaired judgments are caused by the anxiety and depression we experience. This game isn’t about what you, the player, would do or how you would react. It’s a story about a teenage girl facing her demons as she spirals.

It’s pragmatic for a developer using adolescence to explore topics of mental health and bullying. We all tend to experience intense, complex emotions and trauma during these ages. Womanhood also has the unfortunate inheritance of violence, so under that same guise it is also accessible to relate to and understand a teenage girl starring in a game about psychological horrors. Nothing is more nightmarishly relatable than being a teenage girl; especially, whose anxieties and depressions are amplified through the “Silent Hill Phenomenon.” Such horrors are shown throughout the game:

Through context clues spread around a certain room in a game, we find out a girl kills herself out of defense against facing incestual rape from her own brother after finding out her parents cannot afford her college education, something she relied on to escape her brother’s abuse.

Anita, dealing with dysmorphia (a phenomenon very common with teenagers), was coerced online into posting a selfie of her smiling after her followers complained she never smiles in her photos. Shortly after they proceed to sexualize her despite the photo just being a modest, 100% SFW photo. An issue almost every girl online has experienced at least once.

Even in death there is also a need to appear beautiful and elegant as one of Anita’s friends obsesses over “becoming like a cherry blossom, elegant even when rotting off the tree, falling to the ground.” Alluding to her eventual suicide.

My point being, just like how horror through the experiences of women was explored in Silent Hill 3, Short Message does the same. That is why I believe people who strongly dislike the game are not approaching it honestly, or at the very least appropriately. I could think of no better set up for mental health and its nightmarish conditions being manifested from the “Silent Hill phenomenon” than using the perspective of a high school teenage girl with the addition of social media and a world damaged from a pandemic thrown in.

I know people have complained about the world building lacking severely, but I have to ask. What use is world building for a game that lasts 3 hours and is intended to be a demo to something bigger? Sometimes the world building doesn’t need to be an epic about a god casting a curse on humanity. Sometimes it's just a world affected by a pandemic and a German town faced with a curse for killing a witch. To demand intricate world building from a game like Short Message is just unnecessary.

Which brings me to my next point. The bullying aspect of the story while plausible does come off weak, but allow me to give context. Anita is a victim of parental abuse formed by generational trauma. Her mom, an abuse victim by her own mother, felt insecure of never finding a husband to help her take care of her and her children. She felt like her children ruined her life because men didn’t want to bear the responsibility of being a father when dating the mom, so she slowly started believing it was because of Anita and her brother that she struggled to remarry instead of just a lack of community not being there to help her and her children. After coming to this conclusion she starts to blame them and make it their problem. She abused and neglected her children from forcing them to starve to locking them in closets/the apartment to the destroying of their self esteem with words like “you should have never been born.” It went on till her brother died from the abuse, leading to the mother getting arrested for the murder.

With this context in mind, once Anita’s own insecurities and diminished self esteem got to the best of her we eventually discover that Anita bullied her own friend Maya, and is what drove Maya to suicide. In Anita’s eyes Maya was a far better artist than Anita. She not only looked up to Maya as a female role model that she lacked in her life, but she also compared herself to Maya. She also felt like she didn’t get the attention she wanted from Maya (very allusive to how social media affects our desire of attention from others as well as how her mother neglected her often) as someone else shows up in their relationship and makes Anita feel more nervous of the idea of losing Maya to someone else. This paranoia led to Anita weirdly enough bullying her friend to the point of suicide.

This is part of the story where it starts to fall apart a bit. While this kind of scenario is not impossible, it is a weird conclusion for someone to resort to bullying when insecure about possibly losing a friend to someone else. However, as I previously mention, mental illnesses can and will cause irrational behaviors and thought process out of all of us. At Anita’s age I have seen friends act self-destructive over ridiculous reasons, so it is not far-fetched for Anita to act this way, but definitely unusual. This part of the story could have used more work than what was received, but it still fits the overall message the game is trying to convey.

Short Message has a lot of subtext that definitely could have been done better as well as subject matter that could've been approached better too, I have no problem admitting that; however, the criticisms about Anita, the subject of mental health, suicide, and bullying feel more cynical than honest. Especially, considering the topics explored in Short Message, they are nothing new to Silent Hill. There is the horror we witness in our very eyes and then there is the horror in subtext if we take the time to process what we experience holistically. Alessa isn’t some ghost haunting Silent Hill, she’s a victim of abuse from a cult. James Sunderland isn’t some dude caught in the wrong place, at the wrong time. His guilt of murdering his ill wife has manifested in Silent Hill forcing him to literally face his demons. Heather Mason isn’t some 17 year old girl caught in some nightmarish cult, she is the metaphor of the horrors that women face in their everyday life. Silent Hill: The Short Message is not the exception or some kind of weird mistake, it is revisit of what has been done before, that was loved by fans of previous games but for modern audiences. It is a celebration of how far and beloved the franchise is and is an exciting first step in what will hopefully be a welcome revival after being dominant for nearly a decade.

For god's sake, it is a free high quality Silent Hill game made by some of the original Team Silent members!!!!! And there's no gacha/in-game purchases required to play the game!!!! Can nothing please you all??????