Horror Games Special Feature – P.T.

Posted on 30th October 201527th November 2015 by

With Halloween just around the corner, we felt it was time to delve into some of the horror classics of gaming!
In the nights leading up to All Hallows Eve, we’re going to do a short feature of some of the more notable horror games that have been released. This isn’t a list of the best or even our favourites.
Just some Horror games which have stood out to us, for one reason or another.

It seems only fair to save the spookiest entry until last, for Halloween.
For those select few who have never heard of it, allow us to present P.T. (AKA Playable Teaser), the skin-crawling demo that could have become the lamentably cancelled Silent Hills.

It would be easy to slap this game up here on Halloween and say it’s noteworthy for being the most likely game to make you wet yourself (something not many people would be able to argue against).
But P.T. actually has more going for it than that because of its current, almost inaccessible status.
P.T. has the potential to become a gaming urban legend, a sort of Bloody Mary for gamers everywhere.

For those who don’t know much about it, P.T. showed up mysteriously on the Playstation Store with little-to-no fanfare. No one had heard of this game before, there were no listings for it anywhere online, it was a mystery on an almost global scale.
It quickly became an Internet sensation however, with people sharing horrified Let’s Play videos, screaming at undead ladies and swinging fridges full of blood. It was mysterious, sure, but thrilling.

Then, after hours of spine-chilling experimentation, someone actually managed to solve the obscure puzzle game, which, among other things, required you to listen for a baby crying specifically three times and actually speaking to ghosts in the game using a microphone.
Having done this, the ending trailer was revealed and the Internet exploded: it was a teaser video for the Silent Hill reboot, collaborated on by Hideo Kojima (!), Guillermo Del Toro (!!) and starring Norman Reedus (!!!).

A bad-dream team like this was just too good to be true, unfortunately. Earlier this year, Silent Hills was cancelled when Kojima announced that he was leaving Konami, the company that held the rights for Silent Hill. Fans wept. Bad dreams crept silently back into the shadows. And a lot of fruitless petitions were set up.
But hey, if nothing else, at least the self-contained and wholly terrifying P.T. demo was still available for us to play endlessly, right?…right?

…afraid not. Once Kojima left Konami, it was decided that the P.T. demo should no longer be available to download and it was pulled from the Playstation Store. Unless you were one of the select few who downloaded the game at the time of release, it is now impossible to access. PS4s that have the demo saved on its hard-drive are currently selling on eBay for upwards of €1,000.

If there was anything Konami could have done to solidify P.T.’s status as a legendary game, this was it. In a few years, once this generation has moved on to other games, they will talk casually about the terrifying demo that you can’t play anymore. The demo that caused people to switch all the lights on, but you couldn’t buy anywhere. The demo whose proof of existence may one day even be called into question.

And the next generation will surely lap it up. How much intrigue and mystique can a game generate, with a reputation for being utterly terrifying and totally unobtainable? This is the forbidden fruit of survival horror. It’s the movie at 1am that your parents wouldn’t let you watch when you were a kid. It’s your first cigarette behind a bike shed. It’s your first glimpse at a racy magazine at your friends house when their mom’s not home.
P.T. is all of those things, but worse because you’re never going to be old enough to play it, and it’s not your parents keeping it out of reach; it’s Konami. This is a pleasure that only a select few have indulged in and, if you haven’t, will forever tantalize your imagination.

Best Moment:
There are so many brilliant scares in P.T. that trying to come up with one feels like an impossible task. But certainly the bit that seems to terrify people the most in those Let’s Play videos was the first time you see Lisa, the ghost.
The game sees you explore an L-shaped corridor on a loop and, after the 2^nd or 3^rd time, you turn the corner to see the decomposing corpse of Lisa… just standing there. Waiting. After a second, the light where she was standing goes off and its pitch black. And the only way to progress further in the demo is to walk through that darkness.

Where is the franchise now?:
Hideo Kojima has been known to pull impressive marketing stunts like this before. There is the slight possibility that this is an enormous ploy to garner interest in the project, yet it seems unlikely.
On the plus side, a game called Allison Road, which the developers have quoted as “a spiritual successor to P.T.” is currently in development and being published by Team 17. And while it doesn’t look quite as intense, it still looks pretty damn good.