Konami is finally bringing back Silent Hill after a decade away. Here we round up every rumored project in development, including Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake, a teaser, a mainline series reboot, and an episodic series
On Wednesday, Konami will officially kickstart Silent Hill with “the latest updates” on a series that has been dormant for a decade. It’s a moment that content-starved fans have been waiting for for years. But what will be shown?
We actually have a decent idea, as the rumor mill has been extremely busy around Silent Hill for the best part of two years now. So active, in fact, that it’s become rather confusing, with multiple projects mooted, and multiple developers said to be involved — some new to the series, some not.
Here we do our best to sort through the reporting out there and compile it into four main prospects. (Unless it’s three…)
The most concrete sign of Silent Hill activity in the lead-up to Konami’s reveal event was the Korean game rating body’s classification of a game called Silent Hill: The Short Message. The publisher is Uniana, which, as noted by Gematsu, regularly publishes Konami titles in South Korea.
The title implies a brief experience, and matches up with reports of a playable teaser in the style of P.T., the infamous demo for the Kojima Productions’ canceled series reboot, Silent Hills. Video Games Chronicle said that this teaser, codenamed Sakura, “is intended to be released as a free digital title to build anticipation for the larger [Silent Hill] projects.” It is not clear if it is a completely stand-alone experience or a preview of a new Silent Hill game.
VGC also linked the teaser to a series of images purporting to be from a new Silent Hill game which leaked in May 2022. Konami made a copyright claim against the images in an effort to take them offline (which both failed in its aim and confirmed their authenticity, as such claims tend to do).
The images are supposedly from 2020 and show a messy, dilapidated and trash-strewn room; a woman’s face styled like a collage of scraps of paper, some scrawled with messages like “I hate myself”; a screenshot of another messy room with text overlaid; and two images of a hallway plastered in post-it notes, with a figure covered in blossom lurking at the end.
One of the latter images is signed by Masahiro Ito, the art director and monster designer who worked on the first three games and created the famous Pyramid Head character. Ito has said he is working as part of the core development team of a new, unnamed game, and also retweeted the official announcement of Wednesday’s Silent Hill update
The art is mysterious and evocative, although it’s important to remember that things may have changed in the past two years.
