Back in the day, I remember the first time I encountered Silent Hill on the OG Playstation. It was an impulse buy, back when I had more money than sense and games weren't cripplingly expensive - and you actually got the 'full game' in the box, not just a hollow shell waiting for DLC.
The Playstation 1 wasn't the most powerful games machine but it was just about capable of rendering a gameworld that was chock-full of atmosphere, menace and horror. Putting aside wibbly textures and janky animation, Silent Hill ushered in a new era for survival horror games, less of the bombastic gunplay of Resident Evil but more of the kind of horror that the Japanese excel at, something that isolates the player and truly makes them believe that they are mere seconds away from death at every turn.
The franchise built on the success of the first game with an incredible follow-up but veered off the path a bit with subsequent games. It feels like the world has been waiting for at least two decades for a new game that can strongarm the power of modern consoles to build on that itchy feeling of menace and pervasive danger that the original two games managed so well.
Almost out of nowhere, "Silent Hill - The Short Message" was released on PS5 as a freebie. What? A free game, in an era where major publishers are nickel-and-diming their customers at every opportunity? That does not compute. But here it is...and here's what I think of it.
You start the game as a slightly geeky girl who is catching up with friends via her mobile phone, but finds herself in a derelict block of flats, trying to work out what she's doing there and how she can escape. As ever, Konami drops you into the game with the minimum of information, encouraging you to 'fuck around and find out' but with some fairly standard first person controls so you're on familiar ground. The game engine lends itself well to producing the sort of filthy decrepit urban environment that you could only imagine back in the PS1 days. Every inch of the place feels like it's filled with kipple and rubbish, and it's up to you to find your way around the labyrinth of rooms to decode clues left by your dead friend, a promising graffiti artist who committed suicide by jumping off the very building you find yourself in.
Konami is quick to ensure that anyone playing the game understands the implication of the core themes, and offers helpline links and numbers as a support mechanism. Even so, it's a fairly uncomfortable play for a 50 something old bloke, so I can only imagine what this is going to feel like for someone my daughter's age.
In the era between the original Silent Hill games and today, smartphones have replaced the crackling static of the old radio you used to tote around in the old games, and you don't even get a torch any more, just your phone's torch. Being an old luddite I felt that the game lost something through this, and the weirdly Twin Peaks-ey cut-scenes coupled with the tedious text message clues brought me back to the real world all too effectively, but it's understandable that modern gamers would instinctively understand and bond with a character who is as married to their phone as every other teen in the world.
In terms of what this game looks like, it really does pour on the grubby pretty and smooth experience that modern current-gen games have, in terms of producing a believable and all too realistic game world to mooch around in. Though the game offers visual clues for things you're supposed to investigate more closely as part of the narrative, sometimes you just get caught up in looking at the amount of junk and discarded objects that clutter each room. There really is an incredible amount of detail on show.
The game character herself is a bit of a doofus, full of self-doubt and angst, and a real sense of not yet knowing who they are or who they want to be. She's believable but I found it hard to make any kind of bond with her as I played. Her personality felt like it was designed to ensure you kept your distance from wanting to know about her or care about her fate, which is really odd.
Overall, you can't complain about getting this free 'preview' of the sort of tech Konami are using for their upcoming games, in particular their remake of Silent Hill 2 which I'm looking forward to immensely. With the recent Resident Evil 4 remake looking fabulous and playing like a dream, it feels like we're on the cusp of a survival horror revival and I'm so down for that!
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