P.T. (video game)

Unlike in the Silent Hill games, the player character has no means of defense against the hostile ghost Lisa (pictured).[2][3] Her design has drawn comparisons to the yūrei and ubume in Japanese folklore.[4]

Unlike the third-person perspective in Silent Hill games, P.T. uses a first-person perspective,[5] which centers on an unknown protagonist, controlled by the player, who awakens in a haunted suburban house[6] and experiences supernatural occurrences.[7] Available areas to explore in the home consist of an L-shaped corridor with two rooms adjacent to it: a bathroom, and a staircase which leads to the room in which the player starts a loop, or a continuous reincarnation of the corridor.[3][6] The only actions the player can use are walking and zooming.[5] To progress, the player must investigate frightening events and solve cryptic puzzles.[6][8] Each time a loop is successfully completed, changes appear in the corridor.[3] Additionally, the player encounters a hostile ghost named Lisa.[3] If she catches the protagonist, the player has a random chance of triggering a startling jump scare when turning the camera horizontally and is sent back to the beginning of the current loop.[3]

After the player solves the final puzzle, a cryptic and unrevealed puzzle that allows the player to escape, a trailer reveals that P.T. is a "playable teaser" for a new game in the Silent Hill series, called Silent Hills, directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, with the protagonist portrayed by Norman Reedus.[9]

P.T. centers on an unnamed protagonist who awakens in a concrete-lined room and opens a door to a haunted corridor,[lower-alpha 1] in which he can only walk through a hallway which continuously loops and redecorates itself. The first time he passes, a radio reports on a familicide, which was committed by the father and later mentions two other cases exactly like it.[4]

Later on, the protagonist encounters a hostile and unstable female apparition, presumably named Lisa. Upon entering the bathroom and being locked inside, he obtains a flashlight and finds a creature resembling an underdeveloped fetus crying in the sink.[12][13] He soon gets out but finds out that the apparition is watching him. While it is possible to avoid the ghost completely, if the protagonist is attacked by the ghost he reawakens in the first room of the game, beginning the loop again. In this room there is a bloody moving paper bag that speaks to him, telling him of a disturbing experience and stating the same quote seen at the start of the game: "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?"

The next few loops feature a refrigerator hanging from the ceiling, leaking blood. The muffled sound of a hysterically crying baby can be heard from the refrigerator, which shakes violently. After the player completes a puzzle and enters the next loop, the refrigerator is absent and the radio issues a Swedish message referencing the 1938 radio drama The War of the Worlds. In the next loop, the lamps turn completely red, the player's vision blurs, the protagonist moves abnormally quickly, and the door leading to the staircase at the other end of the corridor is replaced by infinite repetitions of the same loop. Eventually, the protagonist discovers a hole in the wall and looks through it to hear a woman being stabbed to death in the bathroom, while a voice on the radio rants about societal instability. After the sounds of the radio and the killing stop, the bathroom door opens by itself and the player enters upon the fetus-like creature telling the protagonist that ten months earlier, an unspecified person lost his job and turned to alcoholism. His wife then worked as a part-time cashier to financially support the family, but the manager was sexually attracted to her.[14] The corridor then corrects itself and the protagonist eventually hears a voice uttering "204863" repeatedly. The player's perspective distorts, and the game displays a false crash message.

When the game is restarted, the protagonist awakens in the concrete-lined room and continues the next and final loop with only the flashlight as a light source. He discovers the torn pieces of a photograph scattered throughout the hall and reassembles it in its frame. After the picture is completed and a set of tasks is done, a telephone rings; the protagonist answers the phone to hear the words, "You've been chosen." The protagonist hears a door unlock and leaves the building.

In the subsequent cutscene, a voice remarks about having lived a life of regularity until his father killed him and his family without any creativity; he then states his intention to return with his "new toys".[4][15][16] The protagonist steps out into the streets of a deserted city and is revealed to be portrayed by Norman Reedus. The credits then reveal the nature of the Playable Teaser.

Hideo Kojima, the designer of P.T.

Kojima Productions used their game engine, the Fox Engine, to develop P.T.[17][18] Hideo Kojima's intention when creating P.T. was to scare people in a unique way, as well as to deliver an interactive teaser experience instead of releasing trailers and screenshots of Silent Hills.[18]

P.T. was designed to take players at least a week to complete, and Kojima intended the puzzles to be very enigmatic and difficult.[7] Despite this, a few gamers reportedly finished the game within hours after the release, surprising him.[7][19] Kojima also intended for P.T. to be a mystery in order to make it a more frightening experience. There is little, cryptic, information given in the game on events that take place, and there are few clues as to how to solve the puzzles.[18] He chose the corridor as the setting as opposed to "a ruin" because he wanted the teaser to emotionally affect the player regardless of "cultural background".[20] Kojima elaborated that P.T. and Silent Hills have no canonical and direct relation, and that Silent Hills would have been enhanced by elements that were never in P.T.[18] He based his concept of P.T. on horror films and other media that he found frightening.[18] When creating the game, Kojima refrained from using graphic violence to build up suspense, as he felt that too many horror games rely on the trope. He wanted to elicit a more "genuine, thoughtful and permeating" type of fear.[18]

A user was able to hack the in-game camera of P.T. to show that for most of the game, the model of Lisa is tethered directly behind the player away from the direction the player is looking. This enabled the game to show fleeting shadows of Lisa and some of the sound effects associated with her that the player experiences throughout the game.[21] The same user discovered that the player-character is modeled after Reedus throughout all parts of the game and not just at the ending,[22] and that much of the world outside of the interior rooms is an incomplete but detailed map of Silent Hill.[23]

P.T. was originally announced at Gamescom 2014 as a demo for an eponymous mystery horror video game.[24][25] It was released on 12 August 2014, on the PlayStation Network.[7][26] Instead of formally announcing a new Silent Hill game, director Hideo Kojima decided to release P.T. as a game demo from a nonexistent gaming studio called 7780s Studio.[27][lower-alpha 2] In September 2014, Sony announced during its pre-Tokyo Game Show press conference that P.T. had been downloaded over a million times.[28]

Danielle Riendeau from Polygon compared P.T.'s fetus in the sink (pictured) to the deformed baby in David Lynch's film Eraserhead (1977).[41]

Reviewers have identified several themes in P.T. According to Eurogamer's Jeffrey Matulef, the game's main theme is "cyclical mental anguish," supported by the obscure and confusing nature of the puzzles.[31] Danielle Riendeau of Polygon wrote that P.T. uses two primary themes from the Silent Hill series; "a sense of family trauma and domestic violence and the duality of the 'real world' and the nightmare world."[41] She suggested that P.T. and Eraserhead shared thematic content, writing that both included a crying, deformed infant and that the film's protagonist journeyed from reality into a terrifying world.[41]

P.T.'s ceaselessly looping hallway has been a source of critical discussion. Rob Crossley of GameSpot wrote that it induced "mild claustrophobia" and "a familiarity with your surroundings." He remarked that while the length of the first part of the corridor worked to create tension, the design of the second part intentionally prevented the player from being able to keep everything in view, causing the player to feel vulnerable.[17] David Houghton of GamesRadar described the looping corridor as "the conduit for everything that it builds," along with saying that "it fills that structure with an unbroken feedback loop of 'horror' ... every time you leave is a monumental relief, and every simultaneous instance of returning is a moment of primal foreboding at how things might, and almost certainly will, escalate, compounded by the knowledge of the seemingly countless iterations before." Houghton felt that the game understood how to evoke horror by working "within the realm of psychology."[8] Polygon quoted a game player who said that "P.T.'s greatest asset is its looping hallway," elaborating that it not only invokes fear, but also "curiosity, or a desire to know what will happen next."[42] Matulef said that the claustrophobic and repetitive environment displayed in the game can hypnotize the player into a sense of vulnerability.[31]

The majority of what is said and depicted in the game is open to interpretation, leading fans to develop and discuss theories about the nature of the events that occur in the game.[43][44] Let's Players Voidburger and Bob from the video-game related podcast The Grate Debate opined that the open-ended nature of the game is one of its greatest aspects.[42] They also said that there may be something in the game that has not been discovered yet. They noted the changing colors of the flashlight's beam in the final loop as something they still had not figured out,[42] and they felt that the game hinted that the radio may be the main culprit behind the father's murderous actions.[4] The podcast's YouTube channel released a video in August 2019, claiming that the whole game was a metaphor for Kojima's discontent with Konami and how he was allegedly treated by them, drawing allusions to key moments leading up to his leaving of the company in October 2015.[45]

The game also contains a Swedish line in the radio describing a radio drama from 1938 being true, which gamers suggested may be a nod to Orson Welles's radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds.[4][46] This possible reference to alien invasions was noted as a continuation of a Silent Hill tradition of having secret endings that included aliens.[46] Another theory commonly discussed is deciphering the identity of the player character.[43] The fetus talking to the player character about his remembering moments "ten months back" seems to imply that he is the father who killed Lisa and the kids, although there is speculation that the player character may be the protagonist that was to be in Silent Hills, as shown in the trailer following the ending of P.T.[4]

Journalists have expressed confusion about whether the game should be described as a teaser, video game, or demo.[34][37] Despite ongoing debate, the game won awards for best trailer while also winning game of the month and best horror game of the year awards.[33][5][6][17] While naming P.T. as an honorable mention for best trailer, Marty Sliva from IGN felt that P.T. was more of an "interactive experimental film/puzzle game".[33] "Demo" has been one of the more common descriptions,[41][42] though GameSpot was reluctant to categorize it as such.[6][17] Despite it being commonly called a demo of Silent Hills, there is no evidence that it was going to be a part of Silent Hills aside from the reveal of the trailer and title after the end of the game.[17] Hideo Kojima himself explained that it was not a demo of Silent Hills and described it as a "teaser" in a tweet.[18][19]

Christopher Grant from Polygon likened P.T. to Pixar's animated shorts shown before its full-length animated feature films.[37]

P.T. has also been alluded to in other video games. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, another game directed by Kojima, includes several direct references to P.T., such as radio dialogue and sound used in the teaser.[47] Additionally, the first-person survival-horror video game Allison Road was heavily inspired by P.T. Allison Road is to take place in a haunted townhouse in the United Kingdom and feature a male protagonist who attempts to unravel the mystery behind his missing family over five nights.[48] In the demo, some wall graffiti directly alludes to P.T. by repeating a statement made in the game.[49] The Park, a spin-off game from The Secret World, has a sequence inspired by P.T.,[50][51] and the horror games Layers of Fear and Visage were heavily inspired by P.T. as well.[52][53][54]

In February 2016, the YouTube channel known collectively as "Oddest of the Odd" released a short film titled "Silent Hills P.T. in real life". The film draws heavily from its source material, as an unseen protagonist explores a two-story hallway loop in the first-person camera perspective. The short film was featured by IGN describing it as "incredible" while GameRant's Alexander Pan described the video as being "complete with the demo's much-touted disturbing content and eerie atmosphere."[55][56]

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was also compared with P.T. during its announcement at E3 2016 thanks in part to the Beginning Hour Demo, its first-person perspective, and its photo-realistic graphics. Jordan Amaro, the level designer of Silent Hills, was responsible for the creation of Resident Evil 7's design and setting,[57] although he has denied that his work on Resident Evil 7 was influenced by P.T., claiming that he "wasn’t part of the core team of P.T." and that "Silent Hills would have been quite different from Resident Evil 7 anyway".[58]

• Official website