Today the Konami team is thrilled to share Silent Hill news coming out of State of Play. Fans will be able to play a new Silent Hill game starting today, and we have a new look at the anticipated Silent Hill 2 remake.
Planning and developing the free Silent Hill: The Short Message
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.
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 game started as something like an experimental project – an opportunity for us to try out different things, see what worked and what didn’t, and grow and polish our horror game expertise. We also had a lot of people who were relatively new in their career but still loved Silent Hill, and who really wanted to be involved in making a horror game, so we used this as a way for our team to build hands-on experience, too.
Of course, we also partnered with Hexadrive, who are very experienced and skilled developers, to help us bring everything together. But being as this is still an experimental title, it was our plan from the beginning to release it for free, so that as many people as possible could play it.
A message for a generation in pain
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.
Life under that shadow is only becoming more and more complex and challenging, and it leads to more and more people struggling in their lives. Especially for anyone growing up with that hanging over them – people who are feeling isolated in society, being hammered with insults and abuse online, dealing with bullying and ostracization in school. These are young people who are finding themselves up against a whole tide of serious issues.
We chose to set our story around young characters like this. Characters who are genuinely suffering and lost, where even one more minor setback can wind up pushing them even deeper into a spiral of anguish. But, in the same way, even the smallest kindness can be the thing that pulls them back from the brink. And that’s what also makes this game a message, from us to everyone living with that ever-present conflict and pressure.
We hope you’ll all give Silent Hill: The Short Message a try, and enjoy Konami’s vision of an all-new, contemporary Silent Hill.
New Silent Hill 2 remake footage revealed
And lastly, for everyone patiently awaiting news on our remake of Silent Hill 2, we’d like to share our latest trailer, with brand-new game footage. We hope to be able to share more details on the remake with everyone, so please stay tuned!
