Konami and Sony have taken a page from the Microsoft playbook by shadow-dropping Silent Hill: The Short Message, a first-person horror game that’s free and available to download and play on PlayStation 5 right now.
The game made its debut at today’s State of Play after originally being leaked by a South Korean rating board back in 2022.
“Silent Hill: The Short Message is a new, short-form Silent Hill title, featuring a young, contemporary protagonist. In 2022, we announced a revival for the Silent Hill series, along with several new titles in development, and this marks the first of that new wave of games to be released. We’re excited to deliver today’s surprise release.” wrote Motoi Okamoto on the PlayStation blog.
We’re releasing the whole game for free, so if you’ve never played a Silent Hill game before, we hope you’ll take this chance to get a taste of what Silent Hill is all about.
This new short-form experience takes Silent Hill in a new direction, as Okamato explains.
“We wanted to make a new, modern Silent Hill. As part of that we explored how we could incorporate contemporary problems. We ended up looking at how modern youth communicate online and through phones, and the role that could play in a psychological horror story. For instance, a frightening thing about social media is how even insignificant individual comments can, en masse, build and build until they become this overwhelming wave of hate crashing down on you.”
The State of Play also included a look at the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake from Bloober Team which was revealed back in 2022. Since then, the game has been pretty quiet. After 2 years of near silence, it was surprising that we didn’t even get a release date for the remake. It was even more surprising that Konami and Bloober Team opted to focus on the combat for the trailer, revealing some janky animations.