PlayStation controversial free game passes 1 million downloads

The following article contains references to suicide that some readers may find distressing.

Konami’s controversial Silent Hill: The Short Message has officially surpassed 1,000,000 downloads, despite featuring divisive and upsetting content.

Sony’s first State of Play of the year was largely a success. Hideo Kojima fans got a fresh look at Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, while the auteur also announced a new IP that, by the sounds of it, could be a PlayStation 6 launch title. Until Dawn was confirmed to have a PlayStation 5 remake, while new trailers also dropped for Stellar Blade and Rise of the Ronin. Konami stopped by with the first gameplay trailer for the remade Silent Hill 2 although this left fans feeling a tad cold, not as cold though as what turned out to be the rather controversial Silent Hill: The Short Message.

Take a look at the game in action below.

As reported by IGN, Konami took to the Japanese Silent Hill twitter account to announce that The Short Message had achieved over 1,000,000 downloads since shadow dropping during last week’s State of Play. Following the announcement, many fans naturally excitedly took to the PlayStation Store to download and dive into the game. Upon loading it, all would have been informed of “strong suicide themes” included throughout, and it was the handling of these themes that quickly caused a sour taste to develop.

While developers were hoping to highlight the issues young people face growing up in today’s technology-heavy world, the handling of suicide has been criticised by some as being too romanticised whilst also leaning too heavily on teenage stereotypes and suicide as a narrative catalyst and not an issue to be explored with nuanced sensitivity.

At the time of writing, the release has a score of just 53 on Metacritic, with its heavy-handed approach to such themes drawing a large majority of the criticisms.

There are various resources that can help provide mental health support, including MIND (Call on 0300 123 3393), Samaritans (Call on 116 123), Safe In Our World and CALM.