P.T., the “teaser” for the never-released Silent Hills, is playable again after 12 years!
I don’t think gamers will ever forgive Konami for abandoning Silent Hills — a never-released PS4 video game that would’ve combined the talents of designer Hideo Kojima, actor Norman Reedus and director Guillermo Del Toro into a singularity.
It’s a long story. The gist of it is that Konami and Kojima had a falling out and the latter decided to shut down production of Silent Hills altogether out of spite (allegedly, anyway.) What makes it an especially unusual case is that Silent Hills had its own “playable trailer” released ahead of the title. Fittingly enough, it was called P.T. and it had survival horror fans in a tizzy.
For starters, it was a long teaser … as in, close to two hours of actual gameplay. Secondly, it took a VERY innovative approach to the established Silent Hill formula, employing a lot of psychological tricks that portended amazing things in the completed game. Of course, that full game never happened, and to this day, P.T. remains our only taste of what could’ve (and should’ve) been.
Now here’s where things get really freaky. After Kojima and Konami went their separate ways, Konami didn’t just remove the P.T. mini-game from online storefronts, they literally made it impossible to get it back if you accidentally (or intentionally) deleted it from your PS4. At one point, people were selling PS4s with the game installed on eBay for like, thousands of dollars, since that was the ONLY way to experience the title.
And so, P.T. became another piece of “lost media,” sort of the survival horror video game equivalent of London After Midnight. Now, a few homebrew projects temporarily resurrected the game from the grave over the years, but those never lasted very long before getting yanked for legal reasons.
So unless you still had a PS4 with the game downloaded, there really hasn’t been an authentic way to play P.T. over the last dozen years … until now.
I’m not going to bore you with the technical details, but right now we’re going through a mini-renaissance in the field of software recompilations. Basically, people are taking older console and PC games that have never been re-released or ported outside of certain systems and reverse engineering them into standalone computer games. And yep, some enterprising amateur engineer has finally cracked the code for P.T. — and assuming you’ve got a decent GPU in your laptop, you can download and relive the cult classic title right now. (Oh, and no, I’m not giving you the link — the legal team at Wicked Horror knows better.)
The “recomp” of P.T. is pretty much a one-to-one recreation of the PS4 mini-game. The graphics, the sound, the controls, the presentation … if it’s not a perfect port, it’s certainly edging close to it. You can play the game with mouse and keyboard controls, but yeah, it’s a lot smoother if you plug in a controller (especially one with “rumble” capabilities, as you’ll soon discover.)
P.T. is a game that’s VERY different from just about anything else you’ve ever played. It’s very opaque and surreal and captures the distorted sense of place and time from your wildest Benadryl-induced nightmares to a T. Saying too much about it kinda spoils the story, so I’ll try to keep things as vague as possible for those of you who have never played it before. Well, to some extent, anyway.
What makes P.T. different from other Silent Hill games is that it employs a first person perspective. You begin the game in an L-shaped home with debris scattered over the floor, a report about a mass homicide blaring on a radio and something in the bathroom making some truly horrible noises. As you make your way through the home, you realize that you’re caught in a Groundhog Day like time loop, where it seems like you’re experiencing the same thing over and over again — that is, until you make certain observations about your surroundings to extend the story.
It’s a very pared back game. You really only use two buttons to play it, with the primary “action” function being a zoom-in to elements into the game world. It obviously has a creepy vibe, made even creepier because you know your avatar … whoever it may be … is completely helpless. All you can do is rummage through piles of garbage and try to transcribe mysterious etchings on the walls until the nightmare cycle unfurls. I don’t think I’ve ever played another game that does what P.T. does — it doesn’t just keep you on your toes, it makes you feel vulnerable in a way very few video games does.
Of course, you don’t have to wait long until the freak show begins. Let’s just say this game has what HAS to be one of the single greatest jump scares in the history of anything, and it hits you out of freaking nowhere. Keeping with the phantasmic vibes, you’ll also encounter imagery straight out of an Elm Street movie (that bloody fridge!) and a certain character who bares an uncanny resemblance to the abomination from Eraserhead. And when I say “uncanny resemblance,” I mean “how did David Lynch not sue them for this?”
Kojima, of Metal Gear fame, is the king of video game mind screws and yeah, P.T. has plenty in that department. The final leg of the game is especially cryptic, as you have to physically, audibly yell into a microphone to progress any further (by the way, there’s a workaround for PC users if you don’t want to scream into the void — you can just preset a certain phrase in the recomp options menu.) As inventive and terrifying a P.T. is, one can only fathom what the never-realized Silent Hills could’ve delivered us.
The odds of Silent Hills *ever* happening, as originally envisioned, are about as slim as a subatomic molecule’s shadow. But at least we’ve got P.T. to give us an oh-so tantalizing and terrifying taste of what probably would’ve been a generation-defining video game.
I can write a lot about P.T., but this is definitely one of those things that’s better to experience on your own. Don’t take my word for it — and give it a play while you still can. These kinds of games sure do have a mystifying knack for simply disappearing overnight, you know …
