As we are approaching towards the release date of Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima’s new game that is as highly anticipated as highly divisive among the gaming community. What to expect from Kojima regarding Death Stranding especially after all the mystery surrounding the game : a bomb or a cult game ? Whatever to expect from Kojima, to say that the wait surrounding the game never stops unleashing passions clearly is an understatement.
But today is not a day like the others for the many Kojima... and Silent Hill fans here. It was on the day of August 12th 2014 that P.T., a.k.a Silent Hills was revealed to the world for the first time. That’s right, P.T. turns 5 years old today, and I was to believe justice has to be done to the legacy of Silent Hills celebrated throughout a commemorative thread unlike anything you’ve seen yet on NeoGAF.
So without further ado, let’s jump into why P.T. is still mindblowing to this day.
Feels old man. *sad emote*
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Watch out. The gap in the door... it's a separate reality.
The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you ?
It all started 5 years ago, on this day of August 12th. At that time, the Gamescom was taking place and Sony took the occasion during their press conference to announce the release of a mysterious demo dubbed « P.T. » produced by the nothing-less mysteriously named 7780s Studio. Many people wasn’t aware of the existence of this studio. Which makes sense... since it never actually existed.
It was only a few hours after the demo went live on the PlayStation Network Store on PS4 that a Twitch streamer who’s name has been forgotten since then, discovered what the real deal was all about : Hideo Kojima, creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, is working hard with famed director Guillermo del Toro, who is used to create dark and unsettling worlds like in Pan’s Labyrinth, on a new entry of the Silent Hill franchise, starring none other than Norman ‘ Daryl Dixon ‘ Reedus as the main character : Silent Hills !
The dream team we didn’t knew we needed, but we don’t deserve.
Not only was it a subtle way to take by surprise players, but the name of the fictional studio itself turns out to hide a very elaborated easter egg. 7780 is actually the postcode of a little town located in the south of Tokyo named Shizuoka, which we could translate into... « Quiet Hills ». Even though Shizuoka isn’t related to Silent Hill from a historical or architectural point of view, it shows how Kojima, who was relatively new to the horror game genre at the time P.T. was created, already appropriated himself the myths of one of the most popular survival-horror series in gaming history.
A picture of the Shizuoka town, which sure matches up to the name of “ quiet hills “.
As soon as the news broke in, the demo immediately gained a lot of traction and more and more people discovered blind the « Playable Teaser » of Silent Hills. A community of first-hour fans already uncovered an incredible amount of lore and theories regarding the background story and puzzles of P.T., to which from Kojima’s perspective, forced people to reach out other people to solve the last puzzle before the end of the demo, a concept that Kojima could perhaps later on reuse for his upcoming Death Stranding game, which gameplay-wise is heavily rumored to revolve around a large-scale collaboration of players not physically, but perhaps more centered around the P.T. gimmick, or something similar to Dark Souls where you could see the ghosts of other players in order to assist you in order to make it.
Lastly, gaming outlets and popular influencers welcomed P.T. with nothing but universal praise regarding the visuals, complex storytelling, direction, and paranormal horrific tension build, although the puzzles and solutions aspect didn’t receive that same much of praise.
At this point, everything was said : not only would Silent Hill make a long-awaited comeback after having gone through a series of more or less questionable tryouts ( Homecoming, Shattered Memories, The Room ) only to be handled by one of the most unexpected dream-teams in the name of Kojima-del Toro-Reedus, but it was also the time for Kojima to prove that he wasn’t only the best when it comes to the infiltration genre and reinvent the legacy of Silent Hill. To the point where even more unexpected team members would have had a chance to demonstrate their personal expertise regarding the vision of Silent Hills. Junji Ito, who is widely considered as one of the greatest horror mangakas of all time, has been approached to assist development. Even Cliff Bleszinski, former key figure from Epic Games and creator of the Gears of War series, has initially been approached to work on Silent Hills, even though he soon after declined the offer pretending that he would have fucked up Silent Hills and doing this to a franchise this valuable as Silent Hill would have not interested him. If only Konami understood the notion of value as much as Cliff...
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It would have been interesting to see Junji Ito’s potential monster designs considering his past works.
Of course, it sounded and looked too good to be a thing. Sure enough, one year later, rumors started to arrose regarding internal conflicts between Kojima Productions and Konami, going on as far as removing mentions of Hideo Kojima’s name from the box art of Metal Gear Solid V and renaming « Kojima Los Angeles » into « Konami Los Angeles ». It was only a matter of time before two members of the dream-team behind Silent Hills del Toro and Reedus, affected by the ongoing conflicts opposing Kojima to its employer Konami, one by one declares that development on Silent Hills has been cancelled and that as a result, the P.T. demo will be permanently removed from the PSN Store soon after.
While Konami’s decision to cancel Silent Hills already was received with major disappointment from journalists, gamers, and del Toro/Reedus themselves despite Konami stating that they will continue to work on the Silent Hill franchise ( this is where Konami’s dignity towards their fanbase went by the way ), it was nothing compared to Konami’s decision to also remove the P.T. demo that started it all from the PSN Store. The backlash was huge, instantly spawning the famous #FucKonami hashtag among thousands of gamers and Silent Hill(s) fans who have had the chance to play the demo and that people will never get the chance anymore to tryout a « demo » that has already become part of gaming culture. A change.org petition was created in order to continue development on Silent Hills and above all, keep the demo available to download ( To this day, the petition received a staggering 195,000 signatures even though as you’d expect, nothing came out from it ).
And after the P.T. demo was inevitably removed from the PSN Store, a couple of people tried to cash in the occasion by selling several PS4 copies with P.T. still installed on it for more than 1000$ on eBay, even though the website systemically terminated the offers. More recently, fans have attempted to recreate the P.T. demo thanks to games like Dreams.
Even to this day, gamers and Silent Hill(s) fans are still hoping for either a revival of the ill-fated Silent Hills project or at the very least a new « true » entry in the franchise. And while this rocky story has dissuaded Kojima from ever attempting to create a horror game, and return partially to the infiltration genre that revealed his talent to the gaming community while also trying out ( from the sounds of del Toro/Reedus, which Kojima called again after Silent Hills’s cancellation ) something that has presumably never been done before with Death Stranding, many people consider to some extent Death Stranding as the spiritual successor to Silent Hills. Are Death Stranding and Silent Hills connected ? Some people are willing to say yes and go on to elaborate out-of-reach-for-the-mortal-gamer-being theories throughout dozens of videos on YouTube.
Looking back, what exactly has been considered ( and still is ) special about P.T. to the point of having spawned a cult following among the gaming community following Konami’s hazardous decision to cancel Silent Hills and remove the demo from stores ? What could it have meant for the hypothetical final version of the game ?
A more surprising gameplay element : there is no combat system or weapons in P.T., a first in the series ( unless it could have returned in the final game ? ). According to Kojima’s sayings, when players have weapons in their possession it lessens the sense of fear and helplessness. So when Lisa starts randomly attacking you, you can’t kill her or anything, you just pretend to stand on a corner face to the wall and wait until she’s gone from your sight !
But right where P.T. proves to be more original than your typical Silent Hill game is regarding the level design itself. During the entire playthrough, you walk around a L-shaped hallway and that’s it. That’s the whole game. You go through that same hallway over and over again, suggesting that you are stuck into a loop. However it’s Silent Hill we’re talking about here, so don’t get yourself carried away just yet.
See, each time you make it till the end of the hallway and start again the loop, you’ll notice how there always seems to be an event, a detail that you didn’t notice last time you went thought the hallway : appearance of cockroaches, straight up cryptic messages on the walls first then coming out from the cellphone and the radio, moaning and crying noises from either the bathroom ( or the fridge hanging on the ceiling that leaks blood ? ) or the cellphone, hallway that suddenly turns into red, portraits replaced by moving pictures of eyeballs, etc etc...
The father must have been drunk to the point of abusing on the liquor, unless...
It’s this type of extensive detail that nevertheless keeps the player engaged despite having to go through the same repetitive hallway during the rest of the game : since the demo revolves around a pretty restrained-sized playzone, it forced the developers to get creative with the more or less minor details that makes this hallway from an abandoned house ( and supposedly haunted ) look authentic, partly thanks to the proprietary in-house game engine Fox Engine which offered us incredible visuals that still hold up to this day ( especially the work done on the light/shadow rendering ).
It also excels into building up tension as soon as you start facing all kinds of horrific oddities such as the bizarre-looking fetus from the bathroom, the weird talking brown paper bag from the dark hollow room in the beginning, and a haunting body that turns out to be the ghost of a murdered woman called Lisa...
The weird fetus from the bathroom, who looks like it came out from the movie Eraserhead.
The ghost of Lisa.
This is obviously a callback to what the Silent Hill series is best known for : offering complex and dark stories where going down the “ rabbit hole” always offers its most disturbing highlights of the playthrough. The first time you go through the hallway, you are greeted by the distant voice of the radio narrating the radio report of the murder of two families who were slaughtered by their respective fathers. The father of the first family was married to the woman in question that is Lisa, the same one who unsurprisingly attacks the player. A sinister story narrated efficiently throughout not only the radio but also through decorative details the player must interact with in order to have a chance to make it past the loop.
And that’s another aspect P.T. does brilliantly well in its gameplay. Each time you make it past the hallway and as the puzzles get more and more cryptic, you’ll have to inspect throughout the hallway by interacting with everything on your sight in order to trigger an event that will unlock the door at the end. One such example is the puzzle where you had to face a photo of the family couple and press X on your controller ( given through a subtle clue as noted on the photo itself ) to trigger a hole on the face of what was presumably meant to be Lisa ( which also symbolizes the tragic fate of Lisa ) in order to open the door. As you’d go on again and again across the hallway, ways of unlocking the door becomes more and more elaborated and it forced the player to prove his sense of deduction and search all around for eventual clues and notice details that he hasn’t seen until now that may well possibly change everything.
The portrait puzzle in question, where you had to “gouge it out” by pressing the X button.
If P.T. is the opportunity for Kojima to change the codes of the series to draw the deepest fear out from the player, he does not forget his long-time obsession which he does not forget to demonstrate here : breaking the fourth wall. Kojima fans have in mind the insane boss fight against Psycho Mantis in Metal Gear Solid on PS1 as one such example. To show-off his inhuman telekinetic skills, Psycho Mantis would go on to read your memory card and enumerate all games saved on it, he even goes on to make the controller move by itself to further on prove his sayings ( the controller only rumbles normally as a reaction ). However the main issue there was that as long as the controller was plugged onto the PlayStation, he could anticipate all your moves and make the fight impossible to win over. The only legitimate solution ( or course ! ) according to the general that calls in to help Solid Snake would be to... unplug the controller from Slot 1 and plug it in Slot 2. Genius.
When mentioning the infamous « colored screen of death » moment from P.T., it’s impossible for me not to think about what Eternal Darkness tried to do with the Sanity Meter effects where the game would pretend to crash and show fake display glitches. Sure enough, that’s what comes up in mind with the « CSoD » moment. After having gone through another memorable event in the game ( the Infinite Red Hallways ), the game seems to be returning to normal only to offer you a breeze of fresh air until display distorsions suddenly appear, making the illusion that the camera is broken. But then the 204863 message starts continuously appearing again. As the background music becomes more and more grave and sinister and the display continues tearing up, you don’t know what to do in this sort of situation. Questions like « are we supposed to do something with the 204863 number ? Are we meant to call someone using the cellphone ? » come back in mind as the number continues to be mentioned by the radio. You tried attempting to interact with the cellphone but the game apparently wouldn’t let you, the tension get more and more pushed on until the game suddenly crashes back on the player... or that’s what people thought.
This once again demonstrates Kojima’s cheeky obsession to break the fourth wall and toy in with the gamer’s nerves, but unlike in Metal Gear Solid, P.T. breaks the fourth wall in a different yet efficient manner. Right where the Controller plugged in Slot 2 moment required the player’s attention in order to achieve a determining action against Psycho Mantis, the fake crash screen moment from P.T. served as an element of surprise that occurs while the player is stuck in the worst situation he could possibly imagine. After having just gone through the Infinite Red Hallways, the game seemed to have returned to normal only to make the player realize that display distorsions starts to appear and everything turns back again into sinister and grave noises. What’s even more bizarre about the fake crash screen is that there are 6 different variants of the screen and each one appears to have a cryptic error message for some variants ( « I’ll call later », « I’m heading there now » ), while the other error messages tend to break furthermore the fourth wall such as a sarcastic message complaining about fixing « this damn bug ! » before the game release, another message implying that development on the game has been halted as a result of the bug, and finally a message that is here to remind you that this all just fiction, and that it cannot harm you in any way, shape, or form...
The build in tension coupled with the haunting messages and moaning sounds that continuously surrounds the player demonstrates how Kojima perfectly simulated a fundamental aspect of Silent Hill’s core tone : the simulation of claustrophobia. You’ll remember that there used to be another door located on the left side before the door at the end of the hallway that, no matter what you did, remained locked. This is actually a smart callback to the first Silent Hill game with its absurd amount of locked doors synonymous of « The lock is jammed. This door can’t be opened. ». Even though there isn’t as many more doors in P.T. as in Silent Hill ( only 4 ), the fact that the only « level » you’re going through is this tiny L-shaped hallway makes the noises and other unsettling details way more harder to ignore. P.T. excels more in a visual/acoustic form of claustrophobia unlike previous Silent Hill games more focused on the level size.
And finally, we already mentioned this previously but the cryptic nature of the puzzles in P.T. leaded to the creation of vast communities composed of experts and Silent Hill fans as a result. This is perhaps the first time that a game this elusive regarding its lore and the ways to solve the puzzles obsessed this much the gaming fanbase. Since Kojima decided to go for a completely invisible user interface, you never see button or text pop-up signs during actual gameplay ( except for the auto-save icon and if you turned on the subtitles ) aside from the ones in the pause menu. Not only does it immerge the player in a totally realistic perspective but it also amputates the player from any clue, say words to help him on or even count on a possible source of « presence » to lessen the fear inside the player. The past Silent Hill games never went as far as hide all the UI icons such as the health bar, the weapon inventory, aside from the text that pops up when founding an object of reading a sign for example.
But Kojima didn’t seem to hear this of a good ear, and decided to cut all forms of possible assistance. Therefore, no weapons, no health bar, no button signs in order to simplify the command of an action of whatsoever. You’re just striped from any pre-set indications, purposely destabilized by the lack of instructions whom you have counted your gamer skills on during countless of game playthroughs in your life. The only legitimate way to find a source of assistance when your were stumped by a puzzle too clueless to solve ( in a common case the final puzzle ) or when the background story was way too complicated to dismantle... was to help each other. And that’s how a series of steps was found out in order to achieve the final puzzle and leave for good this nightmarish claustrophobic loop on the last sentence coming out from the possessed radio, and not less cryptic :
Chosen ? By who ? For what reasons ? So many questions that will sadly never meet a satisfying conclusion.
And that my friends, was P.T.
You’ve seen it say probably experienced it by yourself by now. With its structure, tone, gameplay and theme evocation, P.T. dismantles the codes of Silent Hill only to better rebuild them. And dozens of YouTubers seemed to have understood it.
P.T. Is one of those rare games where it feels as immersive watching others play rather than playing themselves. Many popular YouTube figures seemed genuinely enthusiastic having to play a hypothetical game as breathtaking as P.T. was, especially after discovering who was behind development. It’s simple, no one has ever played or seen something like P.T. Regardless of if you like the man or not, Pewdiepie’s playthrough of P.T. often comes back in mind as an example of how memorable of an impression P.T. left on gamers. The highlight of this Let’s Play comes when Pewdiepie ( who originates from Sweden ) hears out the demonic speech on the radio only to realize that it is in Swedish. He seemed genuinely spooked that the game presumably knows he’d Swedish, to the difference of all the other ( english ) YouTubers who were confused about what the radio actually meant. This remains one of the most priceless reactions to P.T., to the contrast of other reactions mostly consisting of jump-scares or whatsoever. ( For those who want to watch the reaction in question , it occurs starting from 16:00 )
It’s still very saddening to see the faces of millions of dreams brutally crushed by what remains to this day Konami’s worst decision it ever had to take in its lifespan : cancel Silent Hills and terminate the P.T. demo from existence. In my case, I’ve never been a big fan of horror games, and I wasn’t aware of Silent Hills’ existence until I saw Pewdiepie’s Let’s Play of P.T. ( In fact, it was only until I saw Pewdiepie’s playthroughs on Silent Hill that I discovered the series )
But after I saw gameplay of it, man was I so bummed that this never got the chance to be transposed into a full-scale game. Silent Hills legitimately could have reinvented the wheel not only for the Silent Hill franchise, but also for the horror genre in general. Not only that, but the fact that this was supposed to be Kojima’s first attempt into horror games and already looked like he proved himself capable of creating a brilliant retelling of the Silent Hill legacy ( and on its first try ! ) makes us dream over how the final game would have likely be even more memorable of an experience if Konami didn’t decide at this moment to shot themselves in the foot.
With all of that said, there is one remaining question that still deserves to be discussed when reminiscing Silent Hills : Would it have played entirely like P.T. ? Since P.T. remains to be considered just an « interactive teaser », therefore implying that P.T., despite some core gameplay elements that likely would have remained in the final game ( namely the first-person perspective ), wouldn’t have entirely been representative of the final Silent Hills game. To this day, no game design documents or gameplay elements of Silent Hills sadly haven’t leaked on the Internet, making Silent Hills’ true nature remain an eternally elusive enigma to be solved.
In the end, we could easily declare that the spirit of Silent Hills still heavily surrounds not only Death Stranding, but the survival horror genre as a whole, with several games released in the years following Silent Hills’ cancellation that are more or less heavily influenced by P.T. ( such as Layers of Fear and to some extent Resident Evil 7 ), showing how dedicated gaming culture remains attached to the legacy of an interactive teaser that offered those who had the chance to try it an experience unlike any other. The many Kojima-enthusiasts out there will never say this enough : if Silent Hills didn’t exist, Death Stranding would perhaps have never seen the light of day.
It is with those last words from the final sentence before the end of P.T. that I shall close this thread, in the manner the most respectfully possible a game enthusiast would have proved towards the legacy of an ill-fated masterpiece. A sentence that has the nerve of ending on a huge cliffhanger obviously paving the way for the mad trip that would have been Silent Hills, but a quirk of fate had to decide otherwise.
But today is not a day like the others for the many Kojima... and Silent Hill fans here. It was on the day of August 12th 2014 that P.T., a.k.a Silent Hills was revealed to the world for the first time. That’s right, P.T. turns 5 years old today, and I was to believe justice has to be done to the legacy of Silent Hills celebrated throughout a commemorative thread unlike anything you’ve seen yet on NeoGAF.
So without further ado, let’s jump into why P.T. is still mindblowing to this day.
Feels old man. *sad emote*
Watch out. The gap in the door... it's a separate reality.
The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you ?
It all started 5 years ago, on this day of August 12th. At that time, the Gamescom was taking place and Sony took the occasion during their press conference to announce the release of a mysterious demo dubbed « P.T. » produced by the nothing-less mysteriously named 7780s Studio. Many people wasn’t aware of the existence of this studio. Which makes sense... since it never actually existed.
It was only a few hours after the demo went live on the PlayStation Network Store on PS4 that a Twitch streamer who’s name has been forgotten since then, discovered what the real deal was all about : Hideo Kojima, creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, is working hard with famed director Guillermo del Toro, who is used to create dark and unsettling worlds like in Pan’s Labyrinth, on a new entry of the Silent Hill franchise, starring none other than Norman ‘ Daryl Dixon ‘ Reedus as the main character : Silent Hills !
The dream team we didn’t knew we needed, but we don’t deserve.
Not only was it a subtle way to take by surprise players, but the name of the fictional studio itself turns out to hide a very elaborated easter egg. 7780 is actually the postcode of a little town located in the south of Tokyo named Shizuoka, which we could translate into... « Quiet Hills ». Even though Shizuoka isn’t related to Silent Hill from a historical or architectural point of view, it shows how Kojima, who was relatively new to the horror game genre at the time P.T. was created, already appropriated himself the myths of one of the most popular survival-horror series in gaming history.
A picture of the Shizuoka town, which sure matches up to the name of “ quiet hills “.
As soon as the news broke in, the demo immediately gained a lot of traction and more and more people discovered blind the « Playable Teaser » of Silent Hills. A community of first-hour fans already uncovered an incredible amount of lore and theories regarding the background story and puzzles of P.T., to which from Kojima’s perspective, forced people to reach out other people to solve the last puzzle before the end of the demo, a concept that Kojima could perhaps later on reuse for his upcoming Death Stranding game, which gameplay-wise is heavily rumored to revolve around a large-scale collaboration of players not physically, but perhaps more centered around the P.T. gimmick, or something similar to Dark Souls where you could see the ghosts of other players in order to assist you in order to make it.
Lastly, gaming outlets and popular influencers welcomed P.T. with nothing but universal praise regarding the visuals, complex storytelling, direction, and paranormal horrific tension build, although the puzzles and solutions aspect didn’t receive that same much of praise.
At this point, everything was said : not only would Silent Hill make a long-awaited comeback after having gone through a series of more or less questionable tryouts ( Homecoming, Shattered Memories, The Room ) only to be handled by one of the most unexpected dream-teams in the name of Kojima-del Toro-Reedus, but it was also the time for Kojima to prove that he wasn’t only the best when it comes to the infiltration genre and reinvent the legacy of Silent Hill. To the point where even more unexpected team members would have had a chance to demonstrate their personal expertise regarding the vision of Silent Hills. Junji Ito, who is widely considered as one of the greatest horror mangakas of all time, has been approached to assist development. Even Cliff Bleszinski, former key figure from Epic Games and creator of the Gears of War series, has initially been approached to work on Silent Hills, even though he soon after declined the offer pretending that he would have fucked up Silent Hills and doing this to a franchise this valuable as Silent Hill would have not interested him. If only Konami understood the notion of value as much as Cliff...
It would have been interesting to see Junji Ito’s potential monster designs considering his past works.
Of course, it sounded and looked too good to be a thing. Sure enough, one year later, rumors started to arrose regarding internal conflicts between Kojima Productions and Konami, going on as far as removing mentions of Hideo Kojima’s name from the box art of Metal Gear Solid V and renaming « Kojima Los Angeles » into « Konami Los Angeles ». It was only a matter of time before two members of the dream-team behind Silent Hills del Toro and Reedus, affected by the ongoing conflicts opposing Kojima to its employer Konami, one by one declares that development on Silent Hills has been cancelled and that as a result, the P.T. demo will be permanently removed from the PSN Store soon after.
While Konami’s decision to cancel Silent Hills already was received with major disappointment from journalists, gamers, and del Toro/Reedus themselves despite Konami stating that they will continue to work on the Silent Hill franchise ( this is where Konami’s dignity towards their fanbase went by the way ), it was nothing compared to Konami’s decision to also remove the P.T. demo that started it all from the PSN Store. The backlash was huge, instantly spawning the famous #FucKonami hashtag among thousands of gamers and Silent Hill(s) fans who have had the chance to play the demo and that people will never get the chance anymore to tryout a « demo » that has already become part of gaming culture. A change.org petition was created in order to continue development on Silent Hills and above all, keep the demo available to download ( To this day, the petition received a staggering 195,000 signatures even though as you’d expect, nothing came out from it ).
And after the P.T. demo was inevitably removed from the PSN Store, a couple of people tried to cash in the occasion by selling several PS4 copies with P.T. still installed on it for more than 1000$ on eBay, even though the website systemically terminated the offers. More recently, fans have attempted to recreate the P.T. demo thanks to games like Dreams.
Even to this day, gamers and Silent Hill(s) fans are still hoping for either a revival of the ill-fated Silent Hills project or at the very least a new « true » entry in the franchise. And while this rocky story has dissuaded Kojima from ever attempting to create a horror game, and return partially to the infiltration genre that revealed his talent to the gaming community while also trying out ( from the sounds of del Toro/Reedus, which Kojima called again after Silent Hills’s cancellation ) something that has presumably never been done before with Death Stranding, many people consider to some extent Death Stranding as the spiritual successor to Silent Hills. Are Death Stranding and Silent Hills connected ? Some people are willing to say yes and go on to elaborate out-of-reach-for-the-mortal-gamer-being theories throughout dozens of videos on YouTube.
Looking back, what exactly has been considered ( and still is ) special about P.T. to the point of having spawned a cult following among the gaming community following Konami’s hazardous decision to cancel Silent Hills and remove the demo from stores ? What could it have meant for the hypothetical final version of the game ?
Don’t touch that dial now, we’re just getting started.
To start with, unlike all past Silent Hill games where you played from a third-person perspective, P.T. ( and Silent Hills ? ) was played in first-person view. Therefore the only way to know what the unknown character we are playing as looks like is to reach the end of the demo ! In order to keep the suspense regarding the character’s actual identity, the mirror in the bathroom is deliberately broken so that his face doesn’t show up !
A more surprising gameplay element : there is no combat system or weapons in P.T., a first in the series ( unless it could have returned in the final game ? ). According to Kojima’s sayings, when players have weapons in their possession it lessens the sense of fear and helplessness. So when Lisa starts randomly attacking you, you can’t kill her or anything, you just pretend to stand on a corner face to the wall and wait until she’s gone from your sight !
But right where P.T. proves to be more original than your typical Silent Hill game is regarding the level design itself. During the entire playthrough, you walk around a L-shaped hallway and that’s it. That’s the whole game. You go through that same hallway over and over again, suggesting that you are stuck into a loop. However it’s Silent Hill we’re talking about here, so don’t get yourself carried away just yet.
See, each time you make it till the end of the hallway and start again the loop, you’ll notice how there always seems to be an event, a detail that you didn’t notice last time you went thought the hallway : appearance of cockroaches, straight up cryptic messages on the walls first then coming out from the cellphone and the radio, moaning and crying noises from either the bathroom ( or the fridge hanging on the ceiling that leaks blood ? ) or the cellphone, hallway that suddenly turns into red, portraits replaced by moving pictures of eyeballs, etc etc...
The father must have been drunk to the point of abusing on the liquor, unless...
It also excels into building up tension as soon as you start facing all kinds of horrific oddities such as the bizarre-looking fetus from the bathroom, the weird talking brown paper bag from the dark hollow room in the beginning, and a haunting body that turns out to be the ghost of a murdered woman called Lisa...
The weird fetus from the bathroom, who looks like it came out from the movie Eraserhead.
The ghost of Lisa.
And that’s another aspect P.T. does brilliantly well in its gameplay. Each time you make it past the hallway and as the puzzles get more and more cryptic, you’ll have to inspect throughout the hallway by interacting with everything on your sight in order to trigger an event that will unlock the door at the end. One such example is the puzzle where you had to face a photo of the family couple and press X on your controller ( given through a subtle clue as noted on the photo itself ) to trigger a hole on the face of what was presumably meant to be Lisa ( which also symbolizes the tragic fate of Lisa ) in order to open the door. As you’d go on again and again across the hallway, ways of unlocking the door becomes more and more elaborated and it forced the player to prove his sense of deduction and search all around for eventual clues and notice details that he hasn’t seen until now that may well possibly change everything.
The portrait puzzle in question, where you had to “gouge it out” by pressing the X button.
When mentioning the infamous « colored screen of death » moment from P.T., it’s impossible for me not to think about what Eternal Darkness tried to do with the Sanity Meter effects where the game would pretend to crash and show fake display glitches. Sure enough, that’s what comes up in mind with the « CSoD » moment. After having gone through another memorable event in the game ( the Infinite Red Hallways ), the game seems to be returning to normal only to offer you a breeze of fresh air until display distorsions suddenly appear, making the illusion that the camera is broken. But then the 204863 message starts continuously appearing again. As the background music becomes more and more grave and sinister and the display continues tearing up, you don’t know what to do in this sort of situation. Questions like « are we supposed to do something with the 204863 number ? Are we meant to call someone using the cellphone ? » come back in mind as the number continues to be mentioned by the radio. You tried attempting to interact with the cellphone but the game apparently wouldn’t let you, the tension get more and more pushed on until the game suddenly crashes back on the player... or that’s what people thought.
This once again demonstrates Kojima’s cheeky obsession to break the fourth wall and toy in with the gamer’s nerves, but unlike in Metal Gear Solid, P.T. breaks the fourth wall in a different yet efficient manner. Right where the Controller plugged in Slot 2 moment required the player’s attention in order to achieve a determining action against Psycho Mantis, the fake crash screen moment from P.T. served as an element of surprise that occurs while the player is stuck in the worst situation he could possibly imagine. After having just gone through the Infinite Red Hallways, the game seemed to have returned to normal only to make the player realize that display distorsions starts to appear and everything turns back again into sinister and grave noises. What’s even more bizarre about the fake crash screen is that there are 6 different variants of the screen and each one appears to have a cryptic error message for some variants ( « I’ll call later », « I’m heading there now » ), while the other error messages tend to break furthermore the fourth wall such as a sarcastic message complaining about fixing « this damn bug ! » before the game release, another message implying that development on the game has been halted as a result of the bug, and finally a message that is here to remind you that this all just fiction, and that it cannot harm you in any way, shape, or form...
Below are the six possible variants of the fake crash screen.
Going back to the « rabbit hole » aspect that partly makes the strength of the Silent Hill series, Kojima takes it to a whole other level with P.T. The more you progress through the loop, the more you will hear cryptic messages starting to appear in all sorts of places : on the walls, on the radio, on the phone... The player is steadily getting surrounded by more and more enigmatic and obscure voices announcing that « we’re just getting started », that society is « rotten to the core », and that soon « the gates to a new dimension will open ».
Many people haven’t heard the last sentence mentioned above during their playthrough for a good reason. It was in Swedish. For the trivia, the radio drama mentioned in the Swedish demonic radio is actually taken from the infamous radio drama The War of the Worlds performed on October 30, 1938. The broadcast was presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. While obviously very few people had fluent understanding of Swedish to the point of not even knowing that it was speaking in Swedish, some Swedish lads translated the dialogue for us and this is what the paragraph was meant to say ( credits to silenthillmemories.net ) :Close your eyes. Let your ears listen to the radio.
Do you hear my voice? Can you hear your own soul's scream?
Let us choose. My voice that tells the future.
Or your tortured mind. Well, what do you choose?
You can choose. Your life, your future.
Wise as you are you might already have discovered it.
Yes, the radio drama from 75 years ago was true.
They are here on our earth and they monitor and see all.
Don't trust anyone.
Don't trust the police.
They are already controlled by them.
That's the way it has been for 75 years now.
Only our best will prevail.
You have a right. A right to become one of us.
So, welcome to our world.
Very soon the gates to a new dimension will open.
204863. 204863.
Do you hear my voice? Can you hear your own soul's scream?
Let us choose. My voice that tells the future.
Or your tortured mind. Well, what do you choose?
You can choose. Your life, your future.
Wise as you are you might already have discovered it.
Yes, the radio drama from 75 years ago was true.
They are here on our earth and they monitor and see all.
Don't trust anyone.
Don't trust the police.
They are already controlled by them.
That's the way it has been for 75 years now.
Only our best will prevail.
You have a right. A right to become one of us.
So, welcome to our world.
Very soon the gates to a new dimension will open.
204863. 204863.
The build in tension coupled with the haunting messages and moaning sounds that continuously surrounds the player demonstrates how Kojima perfectly simulated a fundamental aspect of Silent Hill’s core tone : the simulation of claustrophobia. You’ll remember that there used to be another door located on the left side before the door at the end of the hallway that, no matter what you did, remained locked. This is actually a smart callback to the first Silent Hill game with its absurd amount of locked doors synonymous of « The lock is jammed. This door can’t be opened. ». Even though there isn’t as many more doors in P.T. as in Silent Hill ( only 4 ), the fact that the only « level » you’re going through is this tiny L-shaped hallway makes the noises and other unsettling details way more harder to ignore. P.T. excels more in a visual/acoustic form of claustrophobia unlike previous Silent Hill games more focused on the level size.
And finally, we already mentioned this previously but the cryptic nature of the puzzles in P.T. leaded to the creation of vast communities composed of experts and Silent Hill fans as a result. This is perhaps the first time that a game this elusive regarding its lore and the ways to solve the puzzles obsessed this much the gaming fanbase. Since Kojima decided to go for a completely invisible user interface, you never see button or text pop-up signs during actual gameplay ( except for the auto-save icon and if you turned on the subtitles ) aside from the ones in the pause menu. Not only does it immerge the player in a totally realistic perspective but it also amputates the player from any clue, say words to help him on or even count on a possible source of « presence » to lessen the fear inside the player. The past Silent Hill games never went as far as hide all the UI icons such as the health bar, the weapon inventory, aside from the text that pops up when founding an object of reading a sign for example.
But Kojima didn’t seem to hear this of a good ear, and decided to cut all forms of possible assistance. Therefore, no weapons, no health bar, no button signs in order to simplify the command of an action of whatsoever. You’re just striped from any pre-set indications, purposely destabilized by the lack of instructions whom you have counted your gamer skills on during countless of game playthroughs in your life. The only legitimate way to find a source of assistance when your were stumped by a puzzle too clueless to solve ( in a common case the final puzzle ) or when the background story was way too complicated to dismantle... was to help each other. And that’s how a series of steps was found out in order to achieve the final puzzle and leave for good this nightmarish claustrophobic loop on the last sentence coming out from the possessed radio, and not less cryptic :
You’ve been chosen.
Chosen ? By who ? For what reasons ? So many questions that will sadly never meet a satisfying conclusion.
And that my friends, was P.T.
You’ve seen it say probably experienced it by yourself by now. With its structure, tone, gameplay and theme evocation, P.T. dismantles the codes of Silent Hill only to better rebuild them. And dozens of YouTubers seemed to have understood it.
P.T. Is one of those rare games where it feels as immersive watching others play rather than playing themselves. Many popular YouTube figures seemed genuinely enthusiastic having to play a hypothetical game as breathtaking as P.T. was, especially after discovering who was behind development. It’s simple, no one has ever played or seen something like P.T. Regardless of if you like the man or not, Pewdiepie’s playthrough of P.T. often comes back in mind as an example of how memorable of an impression P.T. left on gamers. The highlight of this Let’s Play comes when Pewdiepie ( who originates from Sweden ) hears out the demonic speech on the radio only to realize that it is in Swedish. He seemed genuinely spooked that the game presumably knows he’d Swedish, to the difference of all the other ( english ) YouTubers who were confused about what the radio actually meant. This remains one of the most priceless reactions to P.T., to the contrast of other reactions mostly consisting of jump-scares or whatsoever. ( For those who want to watch the reaction in question , it occurs starting from 16:00 )
It’s still very saddening to see the faces of millions of dreams brutally crushed by what remains to this day Konami’s worst decision it ever had to take in its lifespan : cancel Silent Hills and terminate the P.T. demo from existence. In my case, I’ve never been a big fan of horror games, and I wasn’t aware of Silent Hills’ existence until I saw Pewdiepie’s Let’s Play of P.T. ( In fact, it was only until I saw Pewdiepie’s playthroughs on Silent Hill that I discovered the series )
But after I saw gameplay of it, man was I so bummed that this never got the chance to be transposed into a full-scale game. Silent Hills legitimately could have reinvented the wheel not only for the Silent Hill franchise, but also for the horror genre in general. Not only that, but the fact that this was supposed to be Kojima’s first attempt into horror games and already looked like he proved himself capable of creating a brilliant retelling of the Silent Hill legacy ( and on its first try ! ) makes us dream over how the final game would have likely be even more memorable of an experience if Konami didn’t decide at this moment to shot themselves in the foot.
With all of that said, there is one remaining question that still deserves to be discussed when reminiscing Silent Hills : Would it have played entirely like P.T. ? Since P.T. remains to be considered just an « interactive teaser », therefore implying that P.T., despite some core gameplay elements that likely would have remained in the final game ( namely the first-person perspective ), wouldn’t have entirely been representative of the final Silent Hills game. To this day, no game design documents or gameplay elements of Silent Hills sadly haven’t leaked on the Internet, making Silent Hills’ true nature remain an eternally elusive enigma to be solved.
In the end, we could easily declare that the spirit of Silent Hills still heavily surrounds not only Death Stranding, but the survival horror genre as a whole, with several games released in the years following Silent Hills’ cancellation that are more or less heavily influenced by P.T. ( such as Layers of Fear and to some extent Resident Evil 7 ), showing how dedicated gaming culture remains attached to the legacy of an interactive teaser that offered those who had the chance to try it an experience unlike any other. The many Kojima-enthusiasts out there will never say this enough : if Silent Hills didn’t exist, Death Stranding would perhaps have never seen the light of day.
It is with those last words from the final sentence before the end of P.T. that I shall close this thread, in the manner the most respectfully possible a game enthusiast would have proved towards the legacy of an ill-fated masterpiece. A sentence that has the nerve of ending on a huge cliffhanger obviously paving the way for the mad trip that would have been Silent Hills, but a quirk of fate had to decide otherwise.
Dad was such a drag.
Every day he'd eat the same kind of food,
dress the same,
sit in front of the same kind of games...
Yeah, he was just that kind of guy.
But then one day, he goes and kills us all!
He couldn't even be original about the way he did it.
I'm not complaining... I was dying of boredom anyway,
But guess what?
I will be coming back,
and I'm bringing my new toys with me.
Every day he'd eat the same kind of food,
dress the same,
sit in front of the same kind of games...
Yeah, he was just that kind of guy.
But then one day, he goes and kills us all!
He couldn't even be original about the way he did it.
I'm not complaining... I was dying of boredom anyway,
But guess what?
I will be coming back,
and I'm bringing my new toys with me.
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All this for a glorified looping hallway demo that lasted like 30 mins.
