It's pretty much undeniable at this point that this is Konami desperately trying to prove that "SILENT HILL IS BACK" - look, it's a free game with a looping, time-warping structure, just like PT! You loved PT, right? Well, this is just like that! Aren't you happy yet? And yes, there's a part of me that's genuinely happy to see Silent Hill back in any form; Ito and Yamaoka, the biggest holdovers from the series's past here, are still working at the top of their game, and there's undeniably some promise.

And yet.

There's a tendency in terms of games criticism to consider "walking simulators" as something lesser, and I don't quite agree with that - sometimes the best way to tell a story in an interactive form is from a spectator's point of view. There is nothing wrong with The Short Message being a "walking simulator"; the same could be said of PT, and I still hold that as one of the best works of short-form fiction in all of gaming. There's nothing wrong with the themes it tackles, either, or its focus on depression, anxiety, and suicide. The issue is the execution of those ideas.

Silent Hill: The Short Message wants to be a film - that's plain to see from the countless dolly-zoom shots it uses in its cutscenes, let alone in its use of FMV. In trying to be an interactive film, though, it becomes so linear and direct that it undercuts its own medium's best abilities. The story of something like Gone Home comes directly from the way you experience and unravel it, from the choices you make in putting the pieces together, from the places where you choose to linger. That, in itself, is the point of a walking sim: experiencing space and absence rather than clear narrative, allowing atmosphere and architecture to carve out a mood. In The Short Message, you're supposed to move from one point to the other to experience it exactly how the developers want you to with no other interpretation, and there's nothing to reward you for lingering. It's a work stuck in a weird limbo between genres; too linear and unambiguous to be experimental, but too simplistic and sparse to work well as a conventional game (god forbid I mention the fact that its final gameplay loop is lifted almost directly from Slender).

Those issues, though, are all secondary to the game's writing. Admittedly, The Short Message's roughest parts are in its first loop, where its attempts to discuss social media pressure and cyberbullying come off as painfully blunt "kids these days and their INSTAGRAMS" moralizing written without any real understanding of how the current generation engages with the internet. As it goes on, it opens itself up to quieter, darker touches, working to dig deeper than that "what if phone bad" simplicity as it builds to a legitimately harrowing depiction of abuse and neglect in its final loop. But even as it manages to improve from that first impression, there's a bluntness to it that doesn't quite click with me - and, more importantly, doesn't quite click with its chosen franchise.

Silent Hill is not a conventional narrative franchise. Even compared to other "auteur" game series like Metal Gear Solid and the Remedyverse, its interests fall closer to art-house and experimental cinema than they do to the typical cinematic reference points, with directors like Lynch and Cronenberg being held up from the start as significant inspirations. There are things in Silent Hill that are never explained, doppelgangers and impossible landscapes, and their purpose is to complicate any single easy reading of the story; its stories and their themes lean heavily on metaphor, built on the principle that suggesting what's going on below the surface is the scariest way to convey something. The Abstract Daddy from SH2 is terrifying not because the game tells you what it is - it's because it gives you the outline of something horrible before releasing your hand, trusting you to take that step into the void yourself.

The Short Message doesn't trust you to take that step. It's dealing with meaningful ideas, but that meaning is always one-to-one, spelled out in a way that leaves no room for ambiguity. Continuing its story requires you to read texts that tell you exactly what that story is about, impressing upon you that This Is Important; any suggestion has gone out the window by the time you're directly winding your way through characters' memories, revealing that the story's monster is a stand-in for one very specific character. Story isn't something that intertwines with theme into one inextricable entity; it's a pure, blunt vehicle for theme.

Of course, there's going to be an argument that this criticism is just being too hard. This is saying something important, right? Shouldn't we be applauding this work for making a statement? That doesn't ring true to me. At the end of the day, The Short Message feels like it wears its themes as a shield, a way to deflect any potential criticism about its own lack of sensitivity. It doesn't matter that its treatment of suicide boils down to "just text your friends sometimes" rather than exploring underlying issues with mental health, or that its execution of those issues requires the player to watch the main character leap off a building to her death several separate times. It doesn't matter that it spends more time telling the player it's being empathetic than it does actually being empathetic. It doesn't matter that it doesn't trust you to interpret its protagonist's experiences on its own. All that matters is that the IP you love is back, and that the people who are making it definitely understand it - or some simplified version of it, at least.