Look behind you.
I said, look behind you.

The you should play is sadly more wishful thinking than anything else. I haven’t myself even been lucky enough to play the original PS4 demo, having missed out back in 2014. However, I have watched a lot of gameplay videos, some with commentary, and some without, as well as played Unreal P.T., a fan recreation of P.T. by developer and 3D artist Radius Gordello.

For the rest of this article, if you are at all interested in experiencing P.T. blind for yourself, I’d recommend leaving and going and watching a gameplay video, preferably with no commentary, at least the first time. I can recommend the Survival Horror Network’s playthrough as being suitably immersive and horrifying.

It’s easy to look at P.T. from a distance and sort of scoff at the idea. The concept almost feels too minimalist. You play as a nameless person in a single hallway with a bathroom, an entry foyer bit, a staircase, two doors and one extra dark room. Each time you leave through the door, you enter back in at the start of the hallway, and watch as reality begins to decay, just a little each time, until you are completely sucked in, completely immersed in complete terror.

Haunting.

In doing some reading around the game, I did hear that some people considered the ghost Lisa’s design to be fairly “derivative”. I suppose to some degree she is, if you’re looking simply at “original ideas”, but she looks pretty damn terrifying to me. She’s a disturbing refinement of Japanese ghost stories, creating a grotesquely animated, tragic and hideous ghost.
It’s not just her look though, but the way she is used. She is used sparingly, and to great effect. The game’s sound design, much like the other Silent Hill games, is masterful. There’s not a single sound that isn’t haunting in some way or another – not just Lisa’s laugh-weeping.

The initial radio broadcast is immediately disturbing, talking about a father who went crazy and murdered his whole family. But the radio announcer knows things that he probably shouldn’t know. How did he know that the little girl was wise enough to hide, but was coaxed out when the father said “it was just a game”? Also, how come that line still sends chills down my spine, even though I was just remembering it, and not even listening to it? It speaks to the caliber of the design, the impressive nature of just the core idea itself, that it is haunting to this day.

The wailing of the child strikes fear into basically anyone, but specifically affects those who have either young siblings or children of their own. The slamming of doors and crackle of static is again reminiscent of the original Silent Hill games, which had minds and lives of their own – or so it feels as you play it.

P.T. functions of course as a teaser for a new Silent Hill game that will never see the light of day. And, of course, P.T. was certainly not going to be what the new Silent Hill would look like. It was a teaser meant to hide the fact that Silent Hills was coming – or, as some convincingly believe, a final message from Kojima to Konami. Or perhaps a third option – an auteur piece by Kojima about familicides and masculinity. I’d like to get into that in a future post – hopefully next week I’ll have a more in-depth piece about P.T.

P.T. remains to this day a mystery. So much of it remains elusive, and so much of it will forever remain so. The puzzles at the end seem to have multiple solutions. The mystery behind the central plot will never be answered. And the promise of Kojima’s Silent Hills will forever be wasted. Perhaps one day Kojima will make a horror game. Perhaps Konami will one day revive Silent Hill as an IP. But whatever Junji Ito, Guillermo del Toro, Hideo Kojima, and Norman Reedus were planning on doing with the industry’s greatest horror IP will go forever untouched.


Sadly, you can no longer play P.T. unless you pay a ridiculous amount for a hard drive. But, and don’t tell anyone I told you this, you should be able to find a download for “Unreal P.T.” somewhere. Good luck, and make sure to play alone and in the dark, with headphones. There’s nothing (okay, very little) quite as scary as P.T. in games, other than the rest of the Silent Hill series, and if it’s existential, moral dread you’re after – play Pathologic. But for now, immerse yourself in the creepiest damn ambience in any demo, ever.