Silent Hill: The Short Message is free, bite-sized and available now for PS5

Silent Hill is back, and sooner than you might have expected. Sony and Konami teamed up to create a brand new title in the series as a PlayStation 5 exclusive. Best of all, Silent Hill: The Short Message is free and you can play it today.

The game brings the series bang up to date. For one thing, we see protagonist Anita using a smartphone. She ventures inside a crumbling apartment block after receiving messages from her friend. But this is no ordinary building. There have been rumors of suicides there, and it won’t be long until Anita discovers “bizarre, otherworldly spaces, haunted by a twisted monster.”

This is the first of several new Silent Hill games that are in the pipeline. Producer Motoi Okamoto wrote on the PlayStation Blog that The Short Message started as an experimental project that helped newer developers who are Silent Hill fans get some hands-on experience with the franchise. The team also wanted to explore how social media could fit into a psychological horror game. Konami and Sony decided to release it for free to help newcomers to the series get a sense of what it’s all about (hint: scary stuff).

Meanwhile, Sony and Konami also offered a fresh look at the Silent Hill 2 remake Bloober Team is developing. There’s still no timeline for that project’s arrival just yet, unfortunately.