Silent Hill: The Short Message is free and out now on PS5

To tide Silent Hill fans over who are awaiting the many in-development projects Konami is working on, Konami has partnered with Hexadrive to release Silent Hill: The Short Message, a short free-to-play horror experience for PS5 which is out now.

In Silent Hill: The Short Message, you play as Anita, a young woman in modern-day Germany, who is exploring a spooky location known as The Villa while investigating what happened to her friend. The game puts you in Anita’s shoes in a first-person perspective. According to Konami producer Motoi Okamoto writing for the PlayStation Blog, the game began as an experimental project to try new things with the franchise, with assistance from Japan-based developer Hexadrive. The developers intended from the beginning for the game to be free to play, “so that as many people as possible could play it.”

Part of Konami’s mission to bring Silent Hill to the modern era is by exploring 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,” writes Okamoto. “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.”

Looking to the future of the franchise, the remake of the series’ most famous entry, Silent Hill 2, has revealed more gameplay footage showing off the game’s combat and monsters. Still no release date, unfortunately, but at least the spooky atmospheric fog which was mostly removed in the HD remaster on PS3 and Xbox 360 has been reintroduced.

Silent Hill: The Short Message is currently available to download on PS5, with the Silent Hill 2 remake still in development for PS5.