32-bit era nostalgic and gadget enthusiast Tom has been writing for Eurogamer and Digital Foundry since 2011. His favourite games include Gitaroo Man, F-Zero GX and StarCraft 2.
Revealed during the latest PlayStation State of Play, Silent Hill: The Short Message is a new free-to-play horror game that stealth-dropped on the PSN store. As well as being worth playing in its own right, this 12GB PS5-only demo also hints towards what the next mainline Silent Hill entry might look like.on PS3, many years back. The whole thing can be finished in less than two hours, and has an entirely self-contained story spanning three chapters.
The idea of using your phone's flashlight for dark rooms also works well. It's something of a horror game trope by this point, but having light bounce across each object in a room, casting shadows, creates a wonderfully chilling effect. The way Hexadrive changes the detail around you generates an instant jump-scare that's well exploited. Post process tricks like camera blur, film grain and a glitch effect also help in this aspect, by reducing visibility.
The cut-scenes in The Short Message have unique issues too. The real-world filmed footage here is presented with a 30fps cap and uneven frame-pacing - an odd quirk that introduces judder that's most likely not present on the original recording. Still, these filmed elements are cleanly presented and work surprisingly well in building the story. Swap over to the in-engine scenes though, and inevitably the limits of real-time character rendering stick out.