Summary

• Silent Hill: The Short Message tells a complete story despite its brief length.
• Its protagonist, Anita, grapples with her guilt over her friend Maya's death as she becomes stuck in a time loop.
• Anita finds hope and escapes, thanks to positive memories and from her friends.

Content warning: This article contains mention of child abuse and suicide.

Silent Hill: The Short Message is a mystery from start to finish, taking players on a wild ride through its protagonist's inner turmoil. Spanning about two hours of gameplay, The Short Message focuses on a teenage girl named Anita living in the German town of Kettenstadt. Once a thriving little burg, Kettenstadt was left desolate by a high rate of unemployment. After Anita's friend Maya takes her own life, she is lured to an abandoned building by a series of mysterious text messages that appear to be coming from Maya's number.

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for Silent Hill: The Short Message.]

As she delves deeper into a fog-shrouded, decrepit apartment building once known as The Villa, Anita finds herself trapped in an infinitely recurring loop, having lost her memories of the outside world. Each time she tries to escape by jumping off the roof, she wakes up back at the beginning. Anita is also pursued by a murderous monster, and haunted by cryptic texts from Maya instructing her to find an unknown object. While the game doesn't give any easy answers, it does come to a satisfying conclusion. Here's everything that happens at the end of Silent Hill: The Short Message.

Anita's Guilt Is The Monster In Silent Hill: The Short Message

It's strongly implied that the monster chasing Anita is a manifestation of her guilt over Maya's death. On each loop through the abandoned building, Anita notices more and more of Maya's graffiti, which depicts various girls surrounded by tree branches. She recalls Maya's explanation that the branches represent growing past trauma. Maya's tag is C.B., short for Cherry Blossom, a flower she views as a metaphor for the ideal life. Maya had always said that, like a cherry blossom, one should live briefly and fall beautifully.

It's no coincidence, then, that the monster is covered in cherry blossoms, and wears the same white sweater Maya has on in Anita's flashbacks. Anita also recalls Maya claiming her grandmother was a witch. Later, as the apartment building twists and morphs into a high school, Anita finds herself in the library. Several books there include differing s of Kettenstadt's history, with most agreeing that there was once a witch who blessed the town with prosperity. However, after a fire destroyed Kettenstadt's industrial infrastructure, she either took her own life, or was hunted by the villagers in revenge.

As a result, Kettenstadt is often said to be under a witch's curse. It's that curse that amplifies Anita's guilt, creates this terrible labyrinth, and traps Anita within. But why? In Anita's fractured memory, she repeatedly sees images of a sheet of paper sitting at the bottom of a locker. The apartments loop back around into the high school hallways again, and Anita searches Maya's locker, then their mutual friend Amelie's locker, before finally opening her own.

Anita's locker can only be opened through a unique puzzle that involves matching colors: the colors of numbers painted on the walls, and those of the letters “LIAR” written on Maya's desk. The letters are painted in black, red, yellow, and blue from left to right, which makes the combination 0312.

The note is from Maya, addressed to Amelie. In it, Maya laments losing someone close to her, and expresses a wish to run away with Amelie. Suddenly, Anita re: she found this note in a book Maya lent her. Consumed with jealousy, Anita picked a fight with Maya, accusing her of trying to "steal" Amelie, whom she believes to be her only true friend. This was their last interaction, and as a result, Anita blames herself for Maya's death.

Anita Recalls An Abusive Childhood

Eventually, The Villa's twisting halls lead Anita into an accurate recreation of her own childhood home. As she explores it, she reads a series of journal entries written by her mother, who describes the grief of losing her husband. Anita's mother takes solace in the love of her two children: Anita and her baby brother. However, she soon grows frustrated at the kids' failure to accept her new boyfriend. Eventually, she begins to lock Anita and her brother in the closet nightly, which drives her boyfriend away. She blames the children for this, and continues to neglect them.

The apartment loops back in on itself, but this time, it's covered in stinking trash bags, empty liquor bottles, and skittering roaches. Anita hears a baby crying from inside the refrigerator, which slowly becomes distorted as the entire building begins to quake. Opening the closet door, she finds a newspaper clipping. It reveals that her mother's neglect caused her brother's death, after which her mother hid his body in the freezer. Horrified, Anita escaped to alert a neighbor, and she and her brother were soon seized by a child welfare agency.

Anita holds herself responsible for ruining her mother's life, and believes she's inherited a curse. The curse she's talking about is actually a generational cycle of abuse: Anita's mother was berated by her own parents, Anita was neglected by her mother in turn, and Anita's fear of abandonment caused her to upset her friends with explosive outbursts of jealousy.

Anita Finds Hope At The End Of Silent Hill: The Short Message

As Anita leaves her apartment, she's pursued by the monster again - but this time, images of positive memories, like her mother complimenting her art, or Amelie giving her advice, disrupt the chase. She escapes into Maya's studio, where she flips through her friend's sketchbook. On the final page, she finds a design for a mural depicting her, surrounded by cherry blossoms in Maya's usual style. This makes Anita realize that Maya loved her every bit as much as she loved Amelie, which only worsens her guilt.

Anita goes up to the roof again, where she makes a final call to Amelie. Through tears, she apologizes profusely as she steps toward the edge. Anita hangs up before Amelie fully realizes what's going on, but just as she steps forward, she's startled by a notification on her phone.

It's Amelie, inviting Anita out shopping the next day. She wants to discuss everything that's happened, and reminds Anita how much she cares. Anita falls backwards, landing safely on the roof as the fog disappears. She sees the sun rising in the distance, and realizes that she's escaped the loop, having found what Maya wanted for her: hope. In an epilogue, Amelie recounts her move-in day at college, explaining how Anita's help alleviated her stress. The game's final image is a completed mural showing Anita and Amelie surrounded by cherry blossoms, embracing.

And that's where The Short Message ends. It's a brief, but complete story - this isn't a demo for a longer game, and has a beginning, middle, and end all its own. However, it's the first game to be released as part of the wider Silent Hill revival, not counting the widely hated interactive series Silent Hill: Ascension. If this is a sign of what's to come, then with all its similarities to the series' greatest hits, Silent Hill: The Short Message is a good first step.

Source: PlayStation/YouTube