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Silent Hill: The Short Message review - a potent but hardly subtle parable

Eurogamer's review of Silent Hill: The Short Message, which has some upshots despite living under the long shadow of P.…

Image credit: Konami / Eurogamer At thirty minutes in, though, as much as I enjoyed exploring the Villa, I found Anita – whilst more authentic and empathetic than most in-game teenagers penned by men in their forties and fifties – a little whiny, her voice performance a little uneven, and her awkward character model jarringly at odds with the sublime and atmospheric environmental design. Yes, it's up there with one of Masahiro "Red Pyramid Thing/Pyramid Head" Ito's most striking designs, and I'll admit that when it was coupled with famed Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka's astonishingly unsettling audio, I only ever felt abject terror when I could hear the thing trilling and stomping behind me. For its lack of tact and elegance elsewhere, some of TSM's darkest themes are buried beneath layers of intimation and suggestion, but maybe that's intentional (I recall Bloober Team's The Medium made us sit way too long in a painful place where we were supposed to sympathise with a character that absolutely deserved no sympathy).

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