"Easy there", Konami tells Silent Hill fans, before linking to a brand new Silent Hill Twitter account
"Sorry everyone, didn't mean to kill your Friday mood."
Konami has set Silent Hill fans' pulses racing with some cheeky tweets from the publisher's official Twitter account.
All it took was a gif of the iconic siren noise from Silent Hill and the message "Close your eyes. Always scary. Silent Hill 2 Siren" for the Silent Hill community to jump to attention, speculating wildly about why the company has chosen to refer to Silent Hill now.
"Easy there internet," Konami posted shortly thereafter. "We were watching streams of Dead By Daylight and thought we would share the noise and feel of being hunted. We won't take the tweet down and "backpedal", we just wanted you to enjoy it."
So far so what, right? Silent Hill fans are ravenous for clues about the fate of the seminal franchise, but Konami was quick to quash hopes that there might have been a reason for this tweet. And then this happened:
"We are sorry we got people fired up," Konami added (thanks, Silent Hill Heaven Forum*). "Anything official would come from first from @SilentHill or an event or something, not from us. We were just being fans and enjoyed the noise/memories. Sorry everyone, did[n't] mean to kill your Friday mood."
That Silent Hill account Konami oh-so-casually refers to? It has "official" in the header - which is meaningless, of course, without a verification mark - but perhaps more mysterious is the fact it's less than a month old. Why oh why would Konami be linking us to a new, unofficial "official" social media account, I wonder? And why does the publisher make explicit reference to "an event or something" when "an event or something" - say, a Sony State of Play later this month - is precisely what fans are currently speculating about?
One of two things is happening: either Konami has significantly upped its trolling game or there's news afoot. Watch this space, eh?
Konami confirmed at the beginning of the year that while it "cannot share anything at this point" about the Silent Hill games rumoured to be in development, it is "listening to customer feedback and considering ways to provide the next title", but it hasn't been enough to dampen speculation that a reveal is on its way.
Silent Hill movie director Christophe Gans has announced he's making not one but two new video game-themed movies - one based on the foggy town of Silent Hill, and another featuring the unsettling Japanese horror series, Fatal Frame/Project Zero.
In other Silent Hill news, secret features are still being discovered in the original PlayStation 2 version of Silent Hill 2 almost two decades after the seminal psychological horror game was released, too. Twitterers punk7890 and Bigmanjapan discovered that a secret mini-map and a Save Anywhere feature can be unlocked once players have completed the game and received the Dog Ending.
A group of volunteer developers and modders have also been quietly enhancing and improving the PC release of celebrated psychological horror, Silent Hill 2.
*Disclaimer: I own and operate the Silent Hill community, Silent Hill Heaven.
