YMMV / Silent Hill: The Short Message

• Awesome Art: The game provides a damn good first impression for Silent Hill in The New '20s, evocative of the franchise's traditional aesthetic while also having its own identity. The dilapidated apartment complex that makes the game's setting, along with the explicitly industrial Otherworld segments look frightening and impressively visceral as expected, which are further spiced up by other creative motifs — the use of bright cherry blossoms, rooms covered ceiling to floor in sticky notes of disparaging messages, and various glitchy disruptions resembling digital corruption — leading to the most inventively "modern"-looking Silent Hill title yet.
• Awesome Music: Akira Yamaoka finally returns to the franchise after over a decade, and he immediately delivers an atmospheric, gorgeous soundtrack that sounds right at home with the series' trademark sound. Of particular note is the excellent credits song, "My Heroine."
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Even among critics, Sakura Head, the pursuing monster with a body of cherry blossoms, has gained quite a bit of praise for its unique design that merges beautiful and macabre and makes for a main monster for the series that seems to leave the shadow of Pyramid Head and no longer use him as a basis for design.
• Fanfic Fuel: The "Silent Hill Phenomenon" states that it's now common for people to have psychological hallucinations in the fog. And given that this takes place in Germany, one must wonder what type of Silent Hill experiences can be found in other parts of the world.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: While not a bad game by any means, most will agree that it is very short and feels more like a demo or tech demo. At best, you can finish the game in an hour.
• Narm:
  • A lot of the bullying dialogue has been lambasted as utterly edgy and overblown that it wraps right around to the hilarious and ridiculous.
    "No sexy pics, no likes!"
  • Anika's mother's voice acting is incredibly over the top with her distaste for her daughter to the point that she comes across as a caricature of an abusive parent.
  • The motion capture was a notable criticism of the game as, while it's obvious it was initially done in another language, the lip syncing was done pretty poorly, leading to players being brought out of the immersion due to watching what is effectively, bad Asian movie dubbing in a horror game.
• Narm Charm: Anika's mother is depicted in an extremely over-the-top fashion, but those who don't find it simply laughable have argued in favor of it being viewed as how her daughter saw her, being utterly deranged and sinister from her perspective.
• Only the Creator Does It Right: While the game itself received a rather polarized reaction, consistent praise was given towards its visuals and music, which many attribute to the fact that they were primarily done by series veterans Masahiro Ito and Akira Yamaoka, many years since they worked on the franchise in any major capacity, with Ito especially being warmly welcomed back as a primary artist after being mostly absent following Silent Hill 3. In addition to their work simply being high quality, just the fact that they were involved to the degree that they were gave many fans more faith in Konami's latest initiative to revive Silent Hill, where after the divisive American post-Team Silent games, the infamously cancelled Silent Hills, and the widely-panned Silent Hill: Ascension, they still plan on treating the actual games with a level of proper respect towards its creative roots.
• Paranoia Fuel: The Silent Hill Phenomena as revealed in the game means that anyone can experience the horrors of the fog town in the comforts of their own home. Moreover, it means the events of the series since the likes of Origins and 1 are so well-known that there are research papers involved in it. So now one doesn't have to travel to Silent Hill to be hit with their worst nightmares.
• Tough Act to Follow: While most people regard the Short Message teaser as competent, most agree that it's not nearly as good as the original P.T teaser.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Anita came off as this for a not too insignificant portion of players when it came to light that she was the one responsible for Maya's suicide, specifically because it was under the completely imagined belief that Maya was stealing Amelie. Even if Anita has been throwing herself into her own personal Hell since then out of guilt, it doesn't exactly change the fact that Anita pretty much got away scot-free with driving an innocent girl to suicide in the real world. It's also left ambiguous if Anita learned to let go of her possessive feelings towards Amelie by the end, as her guilt came more from finding out that Maya never was trying to steal Amelie away from her rather than the fact that her bullying drove her to commit suicide, period. Not that there aren't some players who believe the point was Anita realizing her behavior was no better than what she went through herself, but was being told to live with her mistakes rather than throw away any remaining chances to atone for them.

---