Rad Bird Ravels

With this we I have designed the fourth game. Unfortunately this is probably my lowest ranked game. The short message is free so I want to pull my punch a tad, but at the same time I ran through the same dark maze like 10 times so I have my grievances. I had some fun playing this game with others but that could only do so much. First off despite being a silent hill game, the feeling of it being silent hill like at all is just missing. Ill admit I don’t remember the past games all that much and in Short Message there’s some visual nods like fog everywhere. However it always felt to me that a big part of SH was that it was a whole “could be anywhere” town and the other people encountered in the town. Instead SM feels like it wants to be what the PT trailer had going on back in the day, only that was a trailer so maybe not the best choice. Also the story itself also didn’t really land for me. Some stuff felt like it needed to be fleshed out more, like the main character is implied to have this whole made up fantasy in her mind that her mom that abused her was actually her step mom and that is barely present. On top of that I didn’t feel that strongly invested in the main character or her friends, but that may have just been a consequence of me not liking the rest of the game. Moving on to the game play, the chase sequences with the “Sakura head” monster often felt tedious and the last chase was frustrating with it suddenly turning my maze running into a key search with little warning. At least the Sakura head was interesting but its a shame they weren’t able to add other monsters or anything like that.

I tried to keep this one a little less detailed since I didn’t have to much that stuck out to me about this game. I did include the message the main character receives, one of the main pictures she finds and the cherry blossom petals because I felt that hit some pretty recognizable points of the game. Now that just leaves me with 3 more games to design squares for… wish me luck