Silent Hill: The Brief Message is the primary product in 12 years to launch with the Silent Hill title on it, and selecting up the place the Silent Hill HD Assortment and PS Vita title E-book of Reminiscences left off, it does not precisely put the sequence’ finest foot ahead. As a substitute of a horror expertise stuffed with creative puzzles and constantly scary sequences, Konami — alongside developer HexaDrive — has put collectively a strolling simulator that harkens again to when the style was truly nearly placing one foot in entrance of the opposite. It is free and roughly 90 minutes lengthy, so the one factor The Brief Message asks of you is your free time. The difficulty is you possibly can simply spend it taking part in a considerably higher sport.
Unrelated to previous entries within the sequence, a brand new protagonist Anita and her forged of teenage buddies take care of a number of very heavy themes: suicide, abuse, melancholy, and bullying. It is discomforting sufficient that Konami felt the necessity to show a splash display on the finish of every chapter providing steering and hyperlinks to suicide hotlines in actual life, so it isn’t a story to be taken in any respect calmly. The plot sees Anita battle her demons in an deserted house constructing with a status for suicides; a tragic destiny that has befallen her pal Maya.
Sadly, there’s little in the best way of correct gameplay to help it. Your solely interactions are strolling (and in some circumstances working) and interacting with notes and books to learn them. The sport ushers you down linear hallways inside the dilapidated constructing, revealing plot factors by work, graffiti, and full-motion video. You then attain some extent the place it loops and also you’re again at first, compelled to discover those self same rooms over once more, besides with new interactive parts and extra paths to open up. You are by no means doing something greater than pushing on the left thumbstick and urgent X to have a learn or contact of one thing; it is a strolling simulator from earlier than the style developed into one thing extra.
The total-motion video does no less than arrange some extra fascinating scenes — notably after about an hour of gameplay. They are not well worth the time you will want to speculate to really attain them, however getting in blind, we discovered ourselves considerably intrigued by them greater than the rest. They break up the minimal gameplay properly and arrange some story explanations.
The one different gameplay prompts to talk of are answering textual content messages (simply urgent the X button to ship pre-written replies) and chase sequences, which turn out to be more and more irritating the extra you progress. Throughout sure sections — and solely in these areas — a monster will begin searching you down and you will want to flee its clutches. That is fairly easy the primary two instances, however the third and last encounter must be a lesson in how not to do chase sequences for different builders.
You are tasked with discovering a number of photos inside a maze in an effort to take away padlocks off a door blocking your progress, all of the whereas the monster chases you. The surroundings is so non-descript and tough to navigate that you find yourself working round like a headless hen blindly looking for these photographs. You possibly can by no means actually get your bearings, and the door you should unlock is at a useless finish, so should you mess up, you have principally killed your self. The very best half is should you do fail, it’s a must to restart the complete course of once more. It is terrible.
You would say the identical of the sport’s body price, which makes an attempt a easy 30 frames-per-second however by no means achieves it. Normal gameplay constantly hitches when you’re exploring the house constructing, after which takes a nosedive throughout the aforementioned chase sequences. It struggles to maintain up with the pace of our dash, resulting in slight enter lag and missed alternatives to flee the monster.
All of it makes for an expertise that simply is not excellent, however when The Brief Message is barely asking for 90 minutes of your time, it is a tad harder to actually slate it. We would not advocate setting apart the time wanted to see the sport by to its conclusion — what it has to supply merely is not value it. Nonetheless, it is free, so the barrier to entry is just a little bit of your free time. Perhaps you will discover one thing to like.
Conclusion
Extremely bland gameplay and a few overly irritating chase sequences make Silent Hill: The Brief Message a chore to play a lot of the time. Whereas there are some intriguing full-motion cutscenes and heavy story particulars, they don’t seem to be value pushing by the boring sequences in between to expertise them. Silent Hill: The Brief Message is totally free, although, so all it is asking for is 90 minutes of your time to see should you take pleasure in it greater than us.
