P.T. (initialism for "playable teaser") was a 2014 interactive teaser for the video game Silent Hills, a cancelled installment in the Silent Hill series. It was a psychological horror game developed by Kojima Productions under the pseudonym "7780s Studio" and published by Konami Digital Entertainment. It was directed and designed by Hideo Kojima in collaboration with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, and was released for free on the PlayStation 4.
After the cancellation of Silent Hills, Konami removed P.T. from the PlayStation Store and made it impossible to reinstall. The decision prompted criticism and fan remakes. P.T. has been cited as among the greatest horror games of all time, with praise towards its direction and presentation while its puzzles drew mixed responses.
Gameplay
Unlike the third-person perspective in Silent Hill games, P.T. used a first-person perspective, which centers on an unknown protagonist, controlled by the player, who awakens in a haunted suburban house and experiences supernatural occurrences. 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 reiteration of the corridor. The only actions the player can use are walking and zooming. To progress, the player must investigate frightening events and solve cryptic puzzles. Each time a loop is successfully completed, changes appear in the corridor. Additionally, the player encounters a hostile ghost named Lisa. If she catches the protagonist, there may be a random chance of triggering a jump scare when turning the camera horizontally, in which case the current loop starts again.
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.
Plot P.T. centered on an unnamed protagonist who awakens in a concrete-lined room and opens a door to a haunted corridor, in which the player can only walk through a hallway which continuously loops and redecorates itself. The first time the player passes, a radio reports on a familicide, which was committed by the father, and later mentions two other cases exactly like it.
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 discovers a fetus-like creature crying in the sink. The protagonist exits, and he soon realizes that he is being watched and stalked by "Lisa". While it is possible to avoid the ghost completely, the protagonist will die when he is attacked by the ghost. After his death he returns to the first room of the game, and the loop starts all over again. In the first room the player will discover a moving bloody paper bag which tells him of a disturbing experience, 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 crying baby can be heard from the violently shaking refrigerator. 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 corridor stretches out into infinity. 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 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 man lost his job, and turned to alcoholism. His wife worked as a part-time cashier to financially support the family, but the manager was sexually attracted to her. 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 fake 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. The protagonist 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 states his intention to return with his "new toys". The protagonist steps out into the streets of a deserted town and is revealed to be portrayed by Norman Reedus. The credits reveal the nature of the playable teaser.
Development
Kojima Productions used their game engine, the Fox Engine, to develop P.T. 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.
P.T. was designed to take players at least a week to complete, and Kojima intended the puzzles to be very enigmatic and difficult. Despite this, a few gamers reportedly finished the game within hours after the release, surprising him. Kojima 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. 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". 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. He based his concept of P.T. on horror films and other media that he found frightening. 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.
A user was able to hack the in-game camera of P.T. to show that as soon as the player obtained the flashlight, the model of Lisa is tethered directly behind the protagonist away from the direction he 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. The user discovered an unused scene showing Lisa's headless corpse lying in the bloody bathtub, that the player-character is modeled after Reedus throughout all parts of the game and not just at the ending, and that much of the world outside of the interior rooms is an incomplete but detailed map of Silent Hill.
Release P.T. was originally announced at Gamescom 2014 as a demo for an eponymous mystery horror video game. It was released on 12 August 2014, on the PlayStation Network. 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. In September 2014, Sony announced during its pre-Tokyo Game Show press conference that P.T. had been downloaded over a million times.
Reception
The game received critical acclaim. David Houghton of GamesRadar+ praised it for its immersive, well-executed horror and for how the game's difficulty created online discourse: "By spreading out into the real world, by forcing solutions by way of hearsay, internet whispers, and desperate, rumoured logic, it has become its own urban myth." Eurogamers Jeffrey Matulef wrote that, through its emphasis on "sound effects, visual design, choreography, and difficult to decipher enemy placements" over traditional progress, the game became immersive and terrifying. However, the puzzles in P.T. received criticism. Patrick Klepek panned the puzzles, describing them as an "exercise in frustration". Matthew Reynolds of Digital Spy wrote that the final puzzle was a "source of frustration" which lacked a clear solution. In contrast, Matulaf stated that, while the puzzles ranged in cleverness and difficulty, they added to the horror of the game by being emotionally "uncomfortable".
P.T. was also placed on some "best-of" lists in 2014. GameSpot awarded it the "Game of the Month" for August 2014. IGNs Marty Sliva chose P.T. as an honorable mention on his list of the best video game trailers of the year, describing it as "one of the most interesting, gorgeous, and terrifying" games he played that year. Another reviewer for IGN, Lucy O'Brien, described the game as "the most genuinely frightening interactive experience in recent years", making it her choice for game of the year. Giant Bomb gave the Best Horror Game of the year award to P.T., saying that "P.T. reminded us what happens when unlimited resources are thrown at a horror experience." P.T. won "Scariest Game" at Bloody Disgustings FEAR Awards. The game also won Innovation in Game Technology at the 2014 National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers (NAVGTR) awards. Polygon ranked it as the tenth best game of the year, and Slant Magazines staff ranked it as the eighth best video game of the year. P.T. has been cited as among the greatest horror games of all time.
Themes and analysis
Reviewers have identified several themes in P.T. According to Eurogamers Jeffrey Matulef, the game's main theme is "cyclical mental anguish", supported by the obscure and confusing nature of the puzzles. 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." 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.
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. 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." 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." Matulef said that the claustrophobic and repetitive environment displayed in the game can hypnotize the player into a sense of vulnerability.