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Summary
The Short Message is a free-to-play Silent Hill spin-off set in modern-day Germany. Players explore a location known as The Villa from a first-person perspective.
Silent Hill: The Short Message News
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Pretty cool experience for free. Found the last bit unnecessarily difficult but maybe that's just my poor sense of direction.
Interesting experience
But not a silent hill
Not perfect, but definitely a good experience with quite the atmosphere.
The story was... pretty on the nose.
It wasn't really subtle, like you often expect from Silent Hill games, but this didn't really hurt it to much imo.
It was still very interesting and definitely had great moments.
The story, atmosphere and environment are also definitely the strongest part of the game because gameplay wise it almost feels like a walking simulator.
The chase sequences where good and tense for the most part, except the final one.
The final chase was just tedious and irritating.
As a free bite-sized game: this was a nice surprise. It’s nice to see Silent Hill making a comeback.
First, the bad: The dialogue and voice acting was some of the worst I’ve heard in recent memory. Corny would be the word to describe it. It’s also a shame that there is no language options from what i could tell…so you are basically stuck with this terrible English voice acting that looks and feels particularly bad whenever one of the “live action” cutscenes show up. I could have done without those in general, just…a really weird choice.
The good: the soundtrack and sound design is great. Basically, the ambience is on point whenever characters aren’t speaking. the story is okay if a bit ham-fisted, they are at least trying to spread awareness about a serious topic; the monster and chase sequences are tense and scary; and there’s a bit of PT-inspired puzzle sections sprinkled in to keep you on your toes.
Oh, also it’s FREE.
A mediocre experience honing in on trauma of guilt and themes of suicide and depression but is marred by uninspiring FMV scenes, poor dialogue, and repetitive chase scenes that quickly gets boring.
cool for a free game
This was an odd one for me as it was, bizarrely, the first game I played following c.24yrs away from gaming. I wanted to get a quick win under my belt, and this is short and dropped right at the time I got a PS5. It is not that good though, unfortunately. Essentially it is kind of boring. It wants to get an important message across, but it feels hackneyed and lacking nuance -Also I did not warm to the main character. It did start well and was very atmospheric – The chase scenes at the start really were exhilarating but they got old quickly and by the end they were annoying. Maybe I just have a crappy head for it, but the final maze relies pretty much on you memorising the correct route from trial and error, and given the maze size, this was very frustrating! Some form of HUD or guidance would have worked better. Overall, I would say play it as it is free and not terrible, but only if you have nothing else in your backlog.
Gives you chills for sure.