This article contains spoilers for Silent Hill: The Short Message.

I’ve never seen as many links to real-world resources, in any work of art in any medium, as there are in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill: The Short Message. When you boot up the game, there’s a content warning alerting players of the game’s “depictions of suicide, self-harm, abuse, trauma, and bullying that some people may find distressing”, with links to two crisis lifeline websites and a phone number beneath it. Once you click through that and start the game, you’ll see the same resourc꧟e screen, minus the content warning, which you again need to click through to start the game. At the end of each of the game’s three chapters, that screen pops up again.

Once you get into the s🦄tory, it’s easy to see why. The Short Message is a game about suicide, and by the time you roll credits, it positions itself as a kind of parable (if parables can be incredibly literal) about suicide prevention. That’s an admirable goal, and if someone gets the resources they need from this game, that’s great. I just wish it was as effective at being a horror game as it is at being a PSA.

An eye glowing red from Silent Hill: The Short Message.

In The Short Message — which, as you might expect from the title, on𝔍ly takes about two hours to complete — you play as Anita, a high school girl who, as the game begiꦉns, wakes up in a decrepit abandoned building. She seems to remember coming to the building with her friend Maya, and so she sets out looking for her around its darkened corridors.

The Short Message is very concerned with the impact of phones and social media on teenagers. That theme can work its way into the game in very blunt ways — at one point, I passed by graffiti of a monster with a phone for a head — but in other ways the game is a little more deft. Anita is envious of Maya's social media presence and follower count, and whenever we see Maya, she's presented in FMV.

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Something about the way the image is shot or processed makes it look very close to CG, and I had a hard time telling if it was real or not. That effect is enhanced by her dubbed dialogue sounding too clean. It's obviously recorded in a booth, but the sound mix doesn't even attempt to make it sound natural. The audio sounds like it's floating over the scene. This drives home the game's key theme: is the life that Anita is jealous of real? Or is Maya's happy social media presence a carefully constructed image?

When Anita finds out later that Maya committed suicide, it makes it clear that it was the second. The game is at its best when it’s actually exploring these themes, though its presentation of the c♒auses of suicide and how to prevent it don’t really rise above what you might see in an after school special if that after sꦍchool special was particularly violent and included multiple depictions of attempted suicide.

Silent Hill: The Short Message is better as a lesson than it is as a horror game. The game looks great, and the moments when you can explore the environment can be effectively creepy. But on several occasions it defaults to having you run by everything ওthe environment artists so skillfully built, in some of the worst chase scenes I’ve encountered in a combat-less horror game (and I think chase scenes in combat-less horror games are almost always bad). One, late in the game, has you navigating a maze of near-identical looking hallways as you search for objects that Anita associates with key memories. The game doesn’t tell you that this is how you end the chase sequence, though, so you may spend way too much time trying to escape a monster you actually can’t escape.

It’s really unpleasant, and the game’s better bitꦉs aren’t good enough to excuse it. It’s intermittently atmospheric and has an admirable goal, but so much ౠof The Short Message is irritating to play that I mostly found myself grateful for the message while wishing for a shorter game.

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