Underwhelmingly mediocre, A Short Message decides to subvert your expectations by...meeting your expectations.
What made P.T. so engrossing and interesting was it's ability to keep you on your toes. It was one corridor, you could really only walk around and look at things with very bare minimum interactions. With so little, it managed to cement itself as a premium piece of psychological horror media, and it was merely a demo.
A Short Message doesn't pretend it's P.T., it's trying to be something else. The DNA of P.T. is there, it's a first person, graphically impressive short experience in the world of Silent Hill, and it has the protagonist stuck in a loop. It starts off with some interesting ideas, centred around the suicide of a young social media influencer, it taps into the toxic dynamic between young people and online engagement, craving status and the fragility of that vindication. But it's all very surface level, the game has nothing more interesting to say about it other than "Social Media Bad. Bullies Also Bad."
It instead pivots toward how the protagonist was implicit in her death somehow (because of course she is, why else would she be in a Silent Hill game) and the traumas that led her here. Which, again, wouldn't be so bad if it all wasn't incredibly surface-level. Nothing new or interesting is said here, just when you think you're about to have twist thrust upon you the game goes in the direction you'd expect it to go.
Match this with some truly awful chase sequences and you find yourself with a really middling experience. It's graphically impressive, and at times the Villa can feel really unsettling, but it never really sticks the landing. Given how long audiences have been waiting for Silent Hill to make its triumphant return, it feels like a magician putting on a grand spectacle for their buildup for about 20 minutes before pulling a rabbit out of a hat; sure, it's impressive, but we've seen it before, and did you really need all that razzle dazzle just for that?
What made P.T. so engrossing and interesting was it's ability to keep you on your toes. It was one corridor, you could really only walk around and look at things with very bare minimum interactions. With so little, it managed to cement itself as a premium piece of psychological horror media, and it was merely a demo.
A Short Message doesn't pretend it's P.T., it's trying to be something else. The DNA of P.T. is there, it's a first person, graphically impressive short experience in the world of Silent Hill, and it has the protagonist stuck in a loop. It starts off with some interesting ideas, centred around the suicide of a young social media influencer, it taps into the toxic dynamic between young people and online engagement, craving status and the fragility of that vindication. But it's all very surface level, the game has nothing more interesting to say about it other than "Social Media Bad. Bullies Also Bad."
It instead pivots toward how the protagonist was implicit in her death somehow (because of course she is, why else would she be in a Silent Hill game) and the traumas that led her here. Which, again, wouldn't be so bad if it all wasn't incredibly surface-level. Nothing new or interesting is said here, just when you think you're about to have twist thrust upon you the game goes in the direction you'd expect it to go.
Match this with some truly awful chase sequences and you find yourself with a really middling experience. It's graphically impressive, and at times the Villa can feel really unsettling, but it never really sticks the landing. Given how long audiences have been waiting for Silent Hill to make its triumphant return, it feels like a magician putting on a grand spectacle for their buildup for about 20 minutes before pulling a rabbit out of a hat; sure, it's impressive, but we've seen it before, and did you really need all that razzle dazzle just for that?