Silent Hill f Builds on Silent Hill: The Short Message the Worst Game in the Series

Silent Hill f has a wildly successful week and a half. I’ve said it so many times, but I never tire of it. It’s become my top game of 2025, and I am still enjoying my playthrough of it. On the other hand, Silent Hill: The Short Message made its PS5 debut last year, and wasn’t as well recieved, in fact, it’s been named the worst game in the franchise. Why? And how does Silent Hill f build on The Short Message?

Silent Hill: The Short Message

Silent Hill: The Short Message was released on PS5 last year. Receiving a 52 Metacritic score, it wasn’t well-received and had mixed reviews, falling short as a game within this iconic franchise. It follows the story of a teen girl who starts receiving messages from a friend who committed suicide and has to search for clues in an abandoned apartment building. The game explores themes of bullying, social media, and suicide; however, players and critics felt the game was callous in terms of presenting these themes cohesively, in a horror game.

Silent Hill f

Silent Hill f deals with a lot of the same themes as The Short Message; however, the content material is set in the 1960s. Besides the obvious differences, Silent Hill f delivers a powerful story of a young girl living during such an oppressive time, and how the turmoil she experiences in her mind coincides with the outward turmoil of the nightmare that is Silent Hill, and it can be argued that The Short Message laid the foundation of Silent Hill f.

Connections and What Silent Hill f Fixed About The Short Message

With both games dealing with similar themes, it’s no surprise that people find that Silent Hill f builds on The Short Message. The Short Message is a short game, only two hours long, so of course, the game had no time to unpack all the themes of the game. This newest game fixes that issue, diving deeper into the social and cultural issues young women faced in the 1960s and currently.

Hinako, the main protagonist of Silent Hill f, faces constant psychological torment, and it best represents the issues both games touched upon. However, it doesn’t discredit The Short Message in any way. Like I said, Silent Hill f builds on what The Short Message tried to be, and one game could not exist without the other one.