Konami has revived the venerated Silent Hill franchise. What remains of the beloved series resembles a reanimated corpse.
Following the launch of the bizarre Silent Hill: Ascension, I’d wondered if some of the other projects that Konami announced as part of the series revival would go through retooling or even be outright cancelled as a result of the backlash. Based on the recent free release The Short Message, I do not think this is the case. Perhaps its because of the cost of producing a web series, a free release short video game, upcoming additional games from various studios that the train can’t slow down. One product will promote the next and so on simply by keeping the name in the public conscious. A decisively bad choose-your-own-adventure web series can be replaced by a free game that has all of the tact of a sack of hammers. That will ultimately be replaced by the anticipated remake of Silent Hill 2 by Bloober Team. Given the history of the series, one wonders if they will surface.
Putting aside my ongoing apathy for remakes – not to mention my complete lack of confidence in the Silent Hill 2 remake based on the trailers and reputation of the studio producing it – I find myself wondering if Silent Hill, as a series, should have just stayed dormant.
Part of what follows is a review of the free title, Silent Hill: The Short Message. Part of it is an assessment of what seems to be haunting Silent Hill as a concept. No, this will not be about the nebulous existence of Team Silent. Yes, the games I would claim as the “good” Silent Hill games comprise the first four titles, attributed to Team Silent in myth. However, PT is also a great Silent Hill. Yes, we will be talking about PT.
The Short Message
Silent Hill is a series known for many things. What comes to my mind, first and foremost, is surrealism. There’s something off about the world that the player explores. It bears the resemblance of an average small city, resembling any middle American vacation spot. It could even be the city where I live, whose downtown sits on the waterfront, and spells out a history of bloodshed and horror. This, of course, isn’t a rule. Silent Hill 4: The Room is tangentially connected to the city of it’s namesake. It is no less a Silent Hill experience.
Second, of course, is subtlety. The characters in Silent Hill games aren’t pouring out a novel’s worth of text. There are beautifully directed cutscenes, of course, but the dialogue isn’t natural. It’s the dialogue of a David Lynch character. It’s easy to trace a line from these games to a number of films – Jacob’s Ladder would be the one I always point to. The distorted Americana is all Twin Peaks, a series that inspired a lot of famous video games.
However, I’m sure that anyone reading this is aware of the lineage and aesthetic components of a Silent Hill. There’s something of a shorthand in place with the series at this point, one where it can be pointed to when any new horror game aims to copy it’s specific blend of uncanny storytelling and hellish environs. It is the thing that the weaker entries in the series can most easily copy, leaving us with games like Silent Hill: Homecoming, Origins, or the painfully awful Book of Memories.
Silent Hill: The Short Message starts here, with the aesthetics of a distorted reality. The protagonist, Anita, is dumped into the ruin of an apartment building, striking the bells of cliche by suddenly waking up and having to go and find a missing friend. The corridors of the old building are full of doors that do not open, trash, graffiti, and touches that foreshadow what will come in the last twenty minutes or so of the game. So far, so Silent Hill 2.
The problem is that Anita never stops talking.
Her constant speech breaks any connection that I, as the player, have with the narrative and experience. There is never a moment where I can put myself into what is happening in this dilapidated apartment complex because there isn’t enough space for me in this. It’s entirely Anita’s experience, through and through, and I am just there to watch it unfold. All subtlety is lost because there is no need to look into the visual storytelling – Anita will explain everything for you.
There is a certain amount of conversation that could be had about the script that I’m not entirely comfortable discussing. For one, I’ve seen the depictions of teenagers cited as realistic, accurate. I’ve seen defenses for the message of the game in regards to online bullying and abuse. I have also seen that this called trauma tourism, a comment that is itself damming (I could not find an original tweet referencing this, so I am linking to the recent Jimquisition on the subject.) I am going to limit my commentary to the issues I’ve had with the game.
The splicing of live action scenes into the story to break up gameplay was an okay touch. Honestly, the writing for Maya is far more interesting than Anita because she bears all of odd touches that make for a Silent Hill character. She’s a bit pretentious, which means I liked her more than anyone in the entire series, and there is a degree of unease that surrounds what she says despite how lively her paintings are.
See, I can say nice things too…but they aren’t about the gameplay. And the gameplay is really what kills this for me.
The Short Message seems to want to fill the space left by PT, itself a free game made in the leadup to a larger project. The player explores linear corridors and does a few light puzzles to proceed to the next story beat, and there is a loop to the experience where the story splits into three chapters. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a tedious romp. The building doesn’t change from loop to loop, just the access to a couple of new places, including a vibrantly lit high school hall. This is the place where the first of two puzzles is introduced, a tedious number search that feels completely out of place.
Between the slow crawls through repetitive corridors are sequences where Anita is chased down by a monster. Passing through a door marks a delineation between the exploration portion of the game and the Scary Monster Time portion. These parts are, mostly, incredibly easy. I didn’t see the monster at all until the second to last chase, and even then, it’s easy to avoid it.
This also describes any number of indie horror games that spawned out of the success of PT and ultimate cancellation of Silent Hills. The chase sequences also remind me of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
Except this isn’t scary.
Part of this is on me, of course. I saw the cherry blossom monster the first time and thought it looked like the cornflake homunculus from the Jimquisition, and that immediately killed any terror it might have inflicted.
But more than that, separating the monster chase hallways from the rest of the setting means that there is no reason to feel tense at any other stage of the game. It’s just a place where cutscenes happen and a character constantly talks and texts people. There is no isolation, there are no threats. The game does not engage with the player beyond sticking the movie in their face.
So, it’s not a good game. That’s okay. We haven’t had a good Silent Hill game in a long time, and this didn’t change that. Why would this keep the series on my mind for days after?
The Looming Spectre of P.T.
PS4 consoles containing PT still sell for hundreds of dollars. Efforts remain ongoing to keep the promise of a brilliant Silent Hill in the form of this experimental demo alive years after it was taken off of the PS4 online store. There’s a reason for this – it’s genuinely an incredible little game, and thanks to a single publisher’s poor thinking, one that will be impossible to play someday. Hardware fails us all, eventually.
Lamentations continue for the death of Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills, a game that promised to bring back the unease and terror of the legendary series, snuffed out in the night by Konami much like their relationship with the esteemed creator at the helm of the experience. PT remains a point of discussion when talking about video game preservation, and there have been numerous efforts by fans to recreate the game for PC. The shadow of this little game loom large over the series, as it truly was a promising glimpse of what Kojima Productions could have done with Silent Hill.
Comparisons of The Short Message to PT are not an accident. It is no doubt an effort to fill some of the space where the conversation of PT took place. But it lacks everything that made PT worth discussing. It’s far to easy and straightforward. There wasn’t a concerted effort by players to figure out how to finish this game because it folded over within 90-120 minutes of effort. What’s more, The Short Message lacks any meaningful interactivity as the player proceeds through its environment. The only inputs required by the player are for movement and opening doors. PT didn’t ask much of the player beyond a few light puzzles, but even some moments required the use of a the zoom button, which pushed the tension up for some quick jump scares.
Cheap? Sure. But usually effective because of how it uses interactivity to drive the experience.
Part of what makes PT special is that it exists as an allusion to Silent Hill while bearing few of its hallmarks. There is no thick cloud of fog on a lakeside town. There are no unusual side characters. There is only one monster, and doesn’t have a simple symbolism attached to it akin to any number of post-Room Silent Hill entities. It is raw and it is itself. It can bear the name of Silent Hill without directly making visual references.
And it didn’t even need a Pyramid Head stand-in.
The Legacy of Silent Hill 2
Silent Hill 2 is often considered the best horror game ever. It is frequently cited as one of the best video game narratives. It certainly deserves those accolades. I would call it my favorite in the series as well. However, do not take this as a sign of my bias against other entries in the series. That isn’t the point of this section, nor is it to continue gushing about one of the most over-analyzed and celebrated video games.
Silent Hill can not get out of the shadow of Silent Hill 2.
The upcoming remake is cashing in on the iconic Red Pyramid Thing just as games like Silent Hill Homecoming before it. Like the 2006 film Silent Hill before it, which was a soft adaptation of the first game in the series, not Silent Hill 2. Even when the towering monster rapist (look, that’s just what I see in the first scene with Pyramid Head, you can have your interpretation if you want) isn’t in a new Silent Hill, the very basic idea is there. There is a symbolic monster that wants to kill the protagonist. Anita has a flower covered Pyramid Head in The Short Message. Why was it in the movie? Homecoming? Because it was expected by a certain group of people who didn’t buy the other games in the series, I guess. Sales of SH3 and The Room certainly didn’t size up to Silent Hill 2. So what’s a business to do to make money other than copy the successful thing that they did twenty years ago?
I’m rambling. I am. It’s 1AM. So let me put it this way:
Silent Hill 2 is great for all of the ways that it differentiates itself from the other three games that surround it. This can be said for the other three games as well. Art means creating and saying new things with the craft, with the medium being used. Later Silent Hill games were the kinds of products that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty railed against.
Still, the series grinds ever onward, dragging its legacy out to be redressed for another age. Silent Hill is now about playing the hits and hoping the old fans still show up to the concert.
So much of what made the series special seems locked in the past. The production cycle of modern video games is almost completely alien to the processes of the PS1 and PS2 eras. Even the explosive reaction to PT is nearly impossible to recreate in today’s social media landscape, which has evolved away from that of even a decade ago. The technical limitations of the PS1 created so many of the hallmarks of the Silent Hill series, and developers are still mired in those ideas over twenty-five years later, unable to meaningfully iterate on the mere idea of what Silent Hill can be.
For now, it will just be a character and how they are haunted by symbols of trauma.
WordsThing 