Highlights
- The decapitated baby doll sets a creepy tone for the entirety of Silent Hill: The Short Message, accompanied by the eerie cry of a baby.
- The visual outlook of the bathroom in the game is similar to the infamous one in P.T., creating a strikingly creepy atmosphere.
- The encounter with the sakura-covered monster is bone-chilling, with fast movement and grotesque animations that induce fear in players.
Silent Hill: The Short Message may be limited in its runtime and scope of the narrative, but it has its generous fill of moments to make some players’ spines tingle with terror. From mild atmospheric scares to a straight-up jittery monster in players’ sights, The Short Message sets the tone for the future of the franchise.
The entries below shed light on some of the most creepy moments in the short playable experience. The article takes into account the eerie vibes of a scene, the disturbing nature of the content, and the sheer fear the visuals might induce in their players. So it goes without saying, that this compilation may not be for the faint-hearted.
Silent Hill: The Short Message Feels More Like Layers of Fear Than Silent Hill
Silent Hill: The Short Message's short horror experience is much more aligned with the Layers of Fear series than its source property.
5 The Infant's Cry
A Terrifying Baby Doll
In any horror game, one way to make players feel uneasy is to project the sound of a baby crying into the desolate and abandoned setting. This is also the case in the early minutes of Silent Hill: The Short Message when Anita comes across a toy infant on one of the shelves. At first glance, the toy seems to be a mere untouched and harmless figure.
However, upon making the way back to the same room later in the first chapter, an eerie cry of a baby accompanies Anita’s return. Now the head of the baby doll has been decapitated and is lying in a pool of blood. This perfectly marks and sets the creepy tone for the entirety of this short experience.
4 A Familiar-Looking Bathroom
P.T. Through And Through
The influence of Kojima’s P.T. has not been lost on any horror game fans, let alone Silent Hill series enthusiasts. When Silent Hill: The Short Message was revealed at the State of Play, a huge portion of the audience must have immediately caught some major visual cues to P.T. The overall vibe, while not replicated in the slightest, is still somewhat prevalent in the experience of Silent Hill: The Short Message.
Silent Hill: The Short Message - How Long to Beat & Chapter List
Silent Hill: The Short Message was revealed during Sony's State of Play and is available to download now.
One of the moments that cement this vibe is present in the first chapter when Anita visits an uninviting bathroom. From the bloody bathtub to cockroaches crawling all over the wall to the untidy mirror, the visual outlook between this bathroom and the infamous one of P.T.’s is strikingly similar, and also strikingly creepy.
3 Menacing Cardboard Cutouts
Brown Bags For Heads
As players progress further into Anita’s story, they will be given tidbits of info on her troublesome past and the burdens of society that she has to cope with daily. One of the themes of the playable experience is the desire to crave attention on social media. Though the social commentary isn’t exactly subtle, the visual representation of this thematic element is still terrifying, to say the least.
After pondering on one of the artworks by Anita’s close friend, Maya, she turns around to be greeted by a group of creepy cutouts of schoolboys with brown paper bags covering their heads. It’s sudden, it has emotional weight, and it’s downright creepy in this setting.
2 The Spiraling Path
When The Surreal Bleeds In
Silent Hill has always been an atmospheric horror series, front and center. The use of mundane, traditional lived-in environments against the backdrop of surreal horror really makes the series stand out among horror games. With Silent Hill: The Short Message, the environment is a living and breathing character with all the dynamic animations and the visceral sound effects that complement it. In one of the scenes during chapter 2 of the experience, players will eventually make their way to the high school Anita used to attend as she uncovers more truths about her connection to Maya and Amelie.
The Unwritten Rules of the Silent Hill Franchise Explained
Silent Hill is a vast and complex survival horror series, but its many frights are supported by a consistent set of unspoken rules.
Eventually, she comes across a visually disorienting spiral pathway that is draped in a disturbing red palette. The intensity creeps in quicker than ever, with this Remedy-style surreal horror sequence, and gives players another reason to continue past it to find more resolution.
1 Cherry Blossom Aka Sakura Head
The Monster That Doesn't Stop
The most bone-chilling part of the entire experience is, of course, the encounter with the monster, a terrifyingly animated, fast-moving, and beautifully grotesque monster that is covered by sakura flowers. Although there are in total three encounters that players have with the monster, and it can be argued that the final one is the toughest, the scares come in rushing when Anita first catches a glimpse of it. The earliest encounter is during the first chapter of The Short Message, and the mood is set when Anita’s smartphone starts glitching out without any explanation.
As she moves through the door and enters a creepy set of twisting corridors, the previously hinted-at “Cherry Blossom” monster is right there, front and center in the player’s view, before the immediate fight-or-flight response kicks in, which in this case, is mostly just flight. The visual is not worth beholding for longer than a second given the terrifying intent of the monster to chase and brutally stab Anita, so it becomes a mini-game of a cat-and-mouse chase, only with a much scarier cat that moves in a frightening manner and carries a sharp weapon.
