Hell is a teenage girl, or that's what Silent Hill: The Short Message would have you believe. Subtle as a brick to the nose, Konami's compact horror game-slash-walking simulator foregoes any metaphorical flair in favor of simply screaming its themes in your face repeatedly. It's as if the writers picked five or six of the most traumatic things they could possibly imagine happening to a young woman and condensed them into a single video game experience. I stifled more laughs than I did screams, though, because I've never seen such delicate matters handled with so clumsy a touch.
As a Silent Hill fan, I don't consider the whole thing a waste of my time, but the very concept of The Short Message feels wasted on itself. There are multiple missed opportunities for deeper, symbolic storytelling, from questions of physical displacement, hopelessness, and the distinct ways that Eastern versus Western cultures view death by suicide. But all this just makes Konami's approach to its subject matter even more bizarre. The Short Message opts for garish shock value and predictable trivialization of teenage girlhood in its attempt to stay current, bold, and daring, and through doing so, has blunted my emotional response to it entirely.
