When Silent Hill: The Short Message made its free-to-play debut on PS5 last year, I was sorely disappointed. The horror walking sim vibes weren't the problem – if anything, I admired the PT-like slant – but the themes definitely were.
I stand by my assertion that conversations around teenage girlhood in The Short Message are stilted by its own format, addressed "with as much subtlety as a brick to the face". Here, the psyche of young girls is trivialized to the point of mockery – how silly they are! How shallow! How little they understand of the world! – as its protagonist languishes in adolescent misery. Think 13 Reasons Why, but condensed into two hours.
The Short Message did nothing to complicate the stereotype of female hysteria. If anything, it bolstered it, asserting that suicide is a dramatic, tragic, somewhat stupid occupational hazard of being a girl.
Enter: Silent Hill f. The latest addition to the mainline series delivers not only our first female protagonist in decades, but a powerful, unflinching statement that never forgets its roots. Those sit in the 1960s Japanese view of family and womanhood, but they also reach back to what The Short Message laid the foundations for without us ever knowing it.
