The recent release of Silent Hill: The Short Message has the fan base mildly excited for the franchise again for the first time in a decade. But it didn’t land with everyone, with some calling out Konami for essentially copying their own homework. But it made me look back at P.T. and think about just how significant an effect on the gaming industry it has had in the ten years since its release. So, whilst I’m probably not going to be saying anything particularly new here, what is P.T., what even happened, and why is this brief period of gaming history so important?
It’s August 2014 and Gamescom is in full swing. At the PlayStation conference acclaimed video-game creator Hideo Kojima comes to the stage with revered film director Guillermo del Toro to tease a new project they are collaborating on. They announce P.T., a playable teaser that once completed would reveal the true nature of the project, available for download straight away from the PlayStation Store, completely free of charge.
Gamers downloaded the mysterious title in their millions and the internet set ablaze with the community trying to work out what P.T. was, and how to complete it, as well as the game becoming a viral sensation because of its terrifying jump scares.
You awake in a dim concrete room and open the door in front of you to a home in the middle of the night. The radio crackling about a series of grisly murders, and the house looking like a total mess. As you venture down the hallway and enter the door at the other end, you find yourself looped back to the start of the hallway, but something’s different.
The more you loop the more things change, and the more you feel as though someone, or something is in the house with you. As time and reality begin to warp around you, can you put the pieces of the puzzle together before you’re claimed by darkness?
It’s August 2014 and Gamescom is in full swing. At the PlayStation conference acclaimed video-game creator Hideo Kojima comes to the stage with revered film director Guillermo del Toro to tease a new project they are collaborating on. They announce P.T., a playable teaser that once completed would reveal the true nature of the project, available for download straight away from the PlayStation Store, completely free of charge.
Gamers downloaded the mysterious title in their millions and the internet set ablaze with the community trying to work out what P.T. was, and how to complete it, as well as the game becoming a viral sensation because of its terrifying jump scares.
You awake in a dim concrete room and open the door in front of you to a home in the middle of the night. The radio crackling about a series of grisly murders, and the house looking like a total mess. As you venture down the hallway and enter the door at the other end, you find yourself looped back to the start of the hallway, but something’s different.
The more you loop the more things change, and the more you feel as though someone, or something is in the house with you. As time and reality begin to warp around you, can you put the pieces of the puzzle together before you’re claimed by darkness?
I’m going to be very up front here, because of everything that went down in May 2015 (I’ll come back to that later), I did not play P.T. for the purposes of this review. I mean it’s practically impossible now. But I think part of what makes P.T.’s legacy so enduring is that despite not having played the game in almost a decade I have never forgotten just how intensely terrifying that game is, and I don’t think I ever will. I did however give myself a bit of a refresher by watching a play-through online, and honestly, I could barely watch the thing without not directly looking at my computer screen, watching through my fingers, or having the volume so low I could barely hear it. So yeah, ten years later, P.T. is still the scariest game I’ve ever played by a significant margin.
Gameplay was barebones. The player can move, look, and zoom the camera in. There’s nothing to interact with as such, and the environment itself is a singular L-shaped hallway that takes just a few seconds to walk down. So, what were you supposed to do? Well, that was a lot of the appeal of P.T., and what made the game such a viral success. Hundreds of thousands of players were sharing their gameplay experiences online, with some able to discover secrets that triggered particular events. Kojima had envisioned it would take a week or so for the community to collectively finish the game, but it took around three days. You needed to trigger particular events in a particular order, without any kind of guide to tell you where things were or what the purpose of it all was, as well as avoid being killed by the terrifying ghost ‘Lisa’ as she became known, which could seemingly happen at random.
It was a huge hit, even without people trying to finish the game, people loved streaming it and getting their unaware friends to play it only to be scared to death by the sudden appearance of Lisa.
Despite the simple gameplay, P.T.’s greatest downfall proved to be its inaccessibility. The puzzles and riddles which needed to be solved are almost impossible to work out by yourself. There’s no indication as to what you need to do at any given time, and the only way in which the game was ever completed was by sheer brute force of thousands of players sharing their discoveries online. This of course was the way Kojima wanted the game to be played and experienced, but if someone went in totally blind to P.T. I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect that they’d ever work out how to finish the game without following tips from the online community.
The game looked phenomenal as well, going for a photorealistic art style. Because of the gameplay environment’s small scale, it meant that objects and lighting could be rendered in ridiculously high detail, and it wouldn’t be outlandish to say that P.T. is probably one of the best-looking games ever released on the PS4. The lighting in particular is really spectacular with real time shadows that make everything so much scarier to look at.
Plus, there’s the incredible sound design. A lot of what makes you so terrified when you’re playing P.T. is what you hear. The radio, a demonic cackle coming from the darkness, a screaming baby, hearing someone being repeatedly stabbed to death behind a door. The presentation and the obtuse gameplay work hand in hand to create a horror experience unlike anything else before it. That’s what made P.T. such a sensation for so long after its release.
Gameplay was barebones. The player can move, look, and zoom the camera in. There’s nothing to interact with as such, and the environment itself is a singular L-shaped hallway that takes just a few seconds to walk down. So, what were you supposed to do? Well, that was a lot of the appeal of P.T., and what made the game such a viral success. Hundreds of thousands of players were sharing their gameplay experiences online, with some able to discover secrets that triggered particular events. Kojima had envisioned it would take a week or so for the community to collectively finish the game, but it took around three days. You needed to trigger particular events in a particular order, without any kind of guide to tell you where things were or what the purpose of it all was, as well as avoid being killed by the terrifying ghost ‘Lisa’ as she became known, which could seemingly happen at random.
It was a huge hit, even without people trying to finish the game, people loved streaming it and getting their unaware friends to play it only to be scared to death by the sudden appearance of Lisa.
Despite the simple gameplay, P.T.’s greatest downfall proved to be its inaccessibility. The puzzles and riddles which needed to be solved are almost impossible to work out by yourself. There’s no indication as to what you need to do at any given time, and the only way in which the game was ever completed was by sheer brute force of thousands of players sharing their discoveries online. This of course was the way Kojima wanted the game to be played and experienced, but if someone went in totally blind to P.T. I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect that they’d ever work out how to finish the game without following tips from the online community.
The game looked phenomenal as well, going for a photorealistic art style. Because of the gameplay environment’s small scale, it meant that objects and lighting could be rendered in ridiculously high detail, and it wouldn’t be outlandish to say that P.T. is probably one of the best-looking games ever released on the PS4. The lighting in particular is really spectacular with real time shadows that make everything so much scarier to look at.
Plus, there’s the incredible sound design. A lot of what makes you so terrified when you’re playing P.T. is what you hear. The radio, a demonic cackle coming from the darkness, a screaming baby, hearing someone being repeatedly stabbed to death behind a door. The presentation and the obtuse gameplay work hand in hand to create a horror experience unlike anything else before it. That’s what made P.T. such a sensation for so long after its release.
So, what does all this have to do with Silent Hill? Upon completion of P.T., players were treated to a trailer starring Norman Reedus (of The Walking Dead fame) revealing that this was in fact a teaser for Silent Hills, a reboot or perhaps even reinvention of the franchise that was in development at Konami with Kojima and del Toro at the helm. This was massive news as Silent Hill fans had been let down time and time again following the closure of franchise creators Team Silent in the mid 00’s, with a string of titles that ranged from ok at best to insultingly awful at worst.
But as development of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain began to wrap up it became increasingly obvious that Konami and Kojima had fallen out. This came to a head in March 2015 following a staff restructuring at Konami that saw Kojima part ways with the publisher, placing the final months of The Phantom Pain’s development in jeopardy, but also cancelling Silent Hills.
This was a huge blow to horror fans, particularly the Silent Hill fandom, but there was the promise of Kojima, del Toro, and Reedus maintaining that they would continue to work together on a new project (what would later become 2019’s Death Stranding), and at least P.T. was still around and Konami could easily task a new studio with developing a new Silent Hill title in that demo’s image. But this is where things took a real turn.
In April 2015, just over a month since Silent Hills was cancelled, Konami announced that P.T. would no longer be available to purchase from the PlayStation Store. Whilst the game was free, it effectively meant that you wouldn’t be able to download P.T. unless you’d already done so previously. This isn’t uncommon for digital games that face license expiry for various reasons, and so whilst this was surprising considering the title wasn’t even a year old at this point, it was hardly the end of the world as it simply meant that if you wanted to play P.T. at some point in the future, you just needed to add it to your PlayStation Digital Library.
But in May 2015 the game was removed from the PlayStation Store entirely, and without warning. This meant that regardless of whether you had downloaded P.T. previously or not, unless it was installed on your hard drive at that moment in time, you’d never be able to play it again. This was devastating news to the entire gaming community, regardless of whether you were a fan of P.T. or not, because this kind of thing had never happened before on such a large scale. Whilst smaller indie titles might disappear from storefronts without a whisper, never had a game as high profile or as new as P.T. been deleted. To make matters worse, the game was only available on the PlayStation Store, there was no other platform to turn to, or a physical copy to rely on. Just as quickly as it had been brought into the world, it disappeared from it.
But as development of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain began to wrap up it became increasingly obvious that Konami and Kojima had fallen out. This came to a head in March 2015 following a staff restructuring at Konami that saw Kojima part ways with the publisher, placing the final months of The Phantom Pain’s development in jeopardy, but also cancelling Silent Hills.
This was a huge blow to horror fans, particularly the Silent Hill fandom, but there was the promise of Kojima, del Toro, and Reedus maintaining that they would continue to work together on a new project (what would later become 2019’s Death Stranding), and at least P.T. was still around and Konami could easily task a new studio with developing a new Silent Hill title in that demo’s image. But this is where things took a real turn.
In April 2015, just over a month since Silent Hills was cancelled, Konami announced that P.T. would no longer be available to purchase from the PlayStation Store. Whilst the game was free, it effectively meant that you wouldn’t be able to download P.T. unless you’d already done so previously. This isn’t uncommon for digital games that face license expiry for various reasons, and so whilst this was surprising considering the title wasn’t even a year old at this point, it was hardly the end of the world as it simply meant that if you wanted to play P.T. at some point in the future, you just needed to add it to your PlayStation Digital Library.
But in May 2015 the game was removed from the PlayStation Store entirely, and without warning. This meant that regardless of whether you had downloaded P.T. previously or not, unless it was installed on your hard drive at that moment in time, you’d never be able to play it again. This was devastating news to the entire gaming community, regardless of whether you were a fan of P.T. or not, because this kind of thing had never happened before on such a large scale. Whilst smaller indie titles might disappear from storefronts without a whisper, never had a game as high profile or as new as P.T. been deleted. To make matters worse, the game was only available on the PlayStation Store, there was no other platform to turn to, or a physical copy to rely on. Just as quickly as it had been brought into the world, it disappeared from it.
The impact was so profound upon the gaming community that immediately developers and publishers started capitalising on the P.T. vacuum by releasing games imitating the experience P.T. offered. Some were good, some were bad, and ironically a lot of the most promising ones such as Lillith LTD’s ‘Allison Road’ never saw the light of day. The entire horror genre started to shift towards a P.T.-esque gameplay model where players were put into a claustrophobic environment often with few mechanics to exploit and tasked with solving puzzles to survive. But I think the biggest success came from Konami’s most direct competitors, Capcom, with Resident Evil VII: Biohazard. It was a huge shift in style and tone from previous Resident Evil games, and it proved to be a massive success both critically and commercially.
Despite the original P.T. being long gone, now with the only way to play it being purchasing a PS4 that has it installed on eBay for extortionate prices, the game does live on through community remakes. Though all strong imitations, none of them quite match the original experience, and because the puzzle solutions always seemed so random these games have never quite captured that same sense of bewilderment.
Whilst Konami kept the Silent Hill franchise ‘alive’ by resurrecting its corpse in the form of Pachinko machines in Japan, P.T. would be the last that gamers heard of the franchise until the Silent Hill Transmission in 2022, announcing the return of the franchise with multiple new projects, most notably a Silent Hill 2 Remake from Bloober Team.
The release of Silent Hill: The Short Message seems like a clear callback to P.T., with it having been announced at a PlayStation State of Play and immediately released for free exclusively on the PlayStation Store. But that in itself may be that game’s greatest fault, because despite having a similar gameplay style it’s tonally nothing like P.T., so it feels like just another imitation that misses the mark rather than its own fully fledged title. But I’ll talk about that more in a separate review.
For now, P.T. may be gone but I don’t think games of the eighth generation will ever forget it, and it’s a massively important part of Silent Hill history despite never being an official Silent Hill game. Whilst it’s great to see the franchise back, there’s always going to be a part of me that will wonder what could have been with Silent Hills. I don’t think it would have resembled P.T. much at all, but I don’t doubt that some of P.T.’s most terrifying aspects would have been utilised in whatever way possible for Silent Hills. What might have been will never be known, but P.T. will always linger in the minds of those that played it, haunting their dreams and making them feel uncomfortable about dark hallways in their homes.
Despite the original P.T. being long gone, now with the only way to play it being purchasing a PS4 that has it installed on eBay for extortionate prices, the game does live on through community remakes. Though all strong imitations, none of them quite match the original experience, and because the puzzle solutions always seemed so random these games have never quite captured that same sense of bewilderment.
Whilst Konami kept the Silent Hill franchise ‘alive’ by resurrecting its corpse in the form of Pachinko machines in Japan, P.T. would be the last that gamers heard of the franchise until the Silent Hill Transmission in 2022, announcing the return of the franchise with multiple new projects, most notably a Silent Hill 2 Remake from Bloober Team.
The release of Silent Hill: The Short Message seems like a clear callback to P.T., with it having been announced at a PlayStation State of Play and immediately released for free exclusively on the PlayStation Store. But that in itself may be that game’s greatest fault, because despite having a similar gameplay style it’s tonally nothing like P.T., so it feels like just another imitation that misses the mark rather than its own fully fledged title. But I’ll talk about that more in a separate review.
For now, P.T. may be gone but I don’t think games of the eighth generation will ever forget it, and it’s a massively important part of Silent Hill history despite never being an official Silent Hill game. Whilst it’s great to see the franchise back, there’s always going to be a part of me that will wonder what could have been with Silent Hills. I don’t think it would have resembled P.T. much at all, but I don’t doubt that some of P.T.’s most terrifying aspects would have been utilised in whatever way possible for Silent Hills. What might have been will never be known, but P.T. will always linger in the minds of those that played it, haunting their dreams and making them feel uncomfortable about dark hallways in their homes.