All Silent Hill games are said to be in development

On Wednesday, Konami will officially launch Silent Hill with “the latest updates” to a series that has been dormant for a decade. It’s a moment content-hungry fans have been waiting for for years. But what is shown?

We actually have a good idea as the Silent Hill rumor mill has been extremely busy for almost two years. So active in fact that it’s gotten quite confusing as multiple projects are being discussed and multiple developers are said to be involved – some new to the series, some not.

Here we do our best to sort through the reports out there and collate them into four main views. (Unless there are three…)

Silent Hill: The Short Message – a playable teaser?

The most tangible sign of Silent Hill’s activities leading up to Konami’s reveal event was the classification of a game named by the Korean Game Rating Board Silent Hill: The Short Message. The publisher is Uniana, which Gematsu notes regularly publishes Konami titles in South Korea.

The title implies a brief experience and fits reports of a playable teaser styled by ptthe infamous demo for Kojima Productions’ canceled series reboot, silent hills. Video Games Chronicle said that this teaser, codenamed Sakura, “is set to be released as a free digital title to build anticipation for something bigger [Silent Hill] Projects.” It’s not clear if this will be a fully standalone experience or a preview of a new Silent Hill game.

VGC also linked the teaser to a series of images said to be from a new Silent Hill game that was leaked in May 2022. Konami filed a copyright claim against the images in order to take them offline (which both failed and confirmed its objective). authenticity, as such claims usually do).

The images are said to be from 2020 and show a messy, run-down, and litter-strewn space; a woman’s face designed like a collage of scraps of paper, some scrawled with messages like “I hate myself”; a screenshot of another messy room with overlaid text; and two images of a hallway plastered with sticky notes with a flower-covered figure 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 works as part of the core development team for a new, untitled game and also retweeted Wednesday’s official announcement of Silent Hill’s update

The art is mysterious and evocative, although it’s important to remember that things may have changed in the last two years. However, that remains the most concrete prospect for Wednesday’s unveiling. After the sensation caused by ptrepeating the trick with a new teaser makes sense, and we can even hope for a simultaneous release The short message in this week.

A new Silent Hill base game made in Japan?

It’s logical that Konami’s efforts to revive the franchise would ultimately result in a sequel or reboot of the main Silent Hill series. Multiple reports suggest this is happening, although it’s not the only Silent Hill project in the works. NateTheHate, jeff gruband VGC all report that a “Mainline Entry” is in the works, among other projects.

That’s pretty much all that’s known about this project…unless the aforementioned images actually relate to the full new game rather than the teaser, or the game and teaser are closely related. Both are different possibilities.

In February 2021, VGC reported that Konami had outsourced a Silent Hill project to “a prominent Japanese developer”. This seems most likely to be the home of the new mainline game, although VGC noted that the Japanese project was “kind of a departure from previous Silent Hill games”. It would also be interesting because after 2004 Konami approached a number of western developers to make Silent Hill games Silent Hill 4: The Roomwith mixed results.

Alongside Ito, regular Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka shared the announcement of the event on Wednesday. In 2021, in a since-deleted video interview, Yamaoka said his next project is “the one you hope to hear about.” It seems Konami is trying to get at least a few key members of the original Silent development team together for its new Silent Hill projects.

A remake of Silent Hill 2 – by Bloober Team

Polish developer Bloober Team, the horror specialist who made layers of fear and The medium, has been closely linked to the Silent Hill series since last year. The speculation started when CEO Peter Babieno told GamesIndustry.biz: “We have been working on another gaming project, another horror IP, for more than a year and we are doing this with a very famous gaming publisher. I can’t tell you who. I can’t tell you what the project is, but I’m pretty sure people will be very excited when they realize we’re working on it.”

That the IP would be Silent Hill was more or less confirmed a few months later when Bloober announced it would be partnering with Konami. Bloober was also known for working on a new game with Yamaoka after contributing to the soundtrack for The medium.

For a time, Bloober was thought to be spearheading the Silent Hill reboot or sequel, until May of this year when reports from NateTheHate, Grubb and VGC all linked the developer to a 2001 remake Silent Hill 2 – which is considered by most fans to be the best game in the series. If the reports are correct, there will be a major overhaul of the game with several new endings and overhauled AI, animations and puzzles. Some reports indicate that the game will be exclusive to PlayStation.

Some Very poor quality images supposedly from the Silent Hill 2 Remake appeared on Twitter in September. Peering through the darkness, they seemed to agree on various details of the game. They are said to be from a pitch demo that Bloober made before the project even got the green light and don’t reflect its final quality.

An Episodic Series of “Short Stories”

There is a third or fourth Silent Hill project that may or may not be in production, but the evidence for this one is lighter.

Leaker Dusk Golem – responsible for the teaser or mainline game’s major image leak in May – said he heard back in 2018 that Konami Studios had asked for Silent Hill pitches for two projects. One was a “reboot”, the other an “episode game”. In May of this year, NateTheHate mentioned “side stories” as a project in development, and VGC referred to “a smaller, episodic series of “short stories.”

That has been reported Until dawn and dark images Developer Supermassive Games participated in this pitch process but was ultimately rejected. Another name linked to the episodic series by VGC sources was boutique publisher Annapurna Interactive.

This is the vaguest prospect – and it goes without saying that none of these projects are confirmed and they all could have been canceled or changed, even if real. However, one thing is certain. With so much rumor and reported activity, there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes at Silent Hill for a while. Konami seems determined to bring the series back in a big way, working with both outside studios and some of the series’ original talent. Here’s hoping it has something of substance to show for its efforts this week.