P.T. – 10 years of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro's horror micro-masterpiece

By August 2014, the indie horror game had firmly established itself as critical darling and reliable commercial prospect. Titles such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Outlast and Slender laid the template, and before long dozens of uninspired knock-offs flooded the market. Players knew going into these games that they could expect a first-person adventure that cranks up the tension, lays the jump scares on thick, and delivers half-glimpsed monstrosities that send them fleeing into the darkness. 

When unknown developer 7780s Studio released a brief trailer for P.T. as part of Gamescom that year it largely passed without comment. Once people started playing the short game however, it soon became clear that this was something a lot more intriguing than the studio had led everyone to believe. One of the most important horror video games of all time was birthed to a flurry of confusion, delight, revulsion and sheer terror.

At first, P.T. appears to be every bit the generic indie horror. The loading screen shows the image of a forest before the bland studio logo appears with a spooky sound effect. There’s a cryptic quote: “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 player finds themselves waking up on the floor of a cell-like room. Upon exiting they are confronted with an L-shaped hallway in a dimly lit but seemingly normal suburban American home. A digital clock shows 23:59 as a radio newscaster relays details of a brutal murder in which a father killed his two children and his pregnant wife. Rain streams down the windows from outside, the phone is off the hook, and pills and rubbish are piled up around family photos. 

The player continues cautiously around the corner. A light fixture swings ominously from a gloomy landing overlooking the front entrance. The only open door rests at the end of the corridor. Heading through, the player descends a few stairs and opens another door, where they unexpectedly find themselves back at the beginning of the L-shaped hallway again. 

Now the nightmare truly begins, and one of the most immersive ghost stories ever told unfolds on screen. Playing with headphones in a darkened room is a challenge for even the most hardened horror game fans. The game drips with a dreadful atmosphere – the truly unnerving sound design will have you spinning to glance behind you for a half-heard breath or footstep, and the first glimpse of the apparition in the house is a truly heart-stopping moment. It recalls the notorious bedroom sighting of Pipes in the BBC’s groundbreaking, Ghostwatch TV show. 

P.T. is innovative in numerous ways. The short game is completely free of any on-screen HUD (heads-up display) – the visual information that a game would usually relay to indicate things such as health, status or objects of interest that can be interacted with. The player’s only available actions are to move and slightly zoom in on things. With visual noise silenced, the player is trapped in this horrific netherworld with not even the comforts of video game norms to remind them that this isn’t real. In much the same way as Nancy screams “it’s only a dream!” to Freddy Krueger to wake herself up in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the player desperately scans the screen for the HUD as a familiar video game signifier. Something to remind themselves that this is indeed only a game. 

Dream logic permeates every moment of P.T. It successfully recreates those hazy nightmares where a place can seem familiar yet alien, a pedestrian interior that seems to change and morph with every step. Although the influence of David Lynch is clear (witness what lies in the bathroom sink), there is also an element of the films of Lucio Fulci throughout. Objects disappear and then reappear in other locations, everything seems to exist just outside of recognisable space and time, and there’s even some ocular trauma on display when the unfortunate player comes face to face with Lisa, vengeful mother of the household.  

P.T. also pushed the boundaries on how puzzles could be presented in a traditional video game framework. With no HUD it isn’t clear what can be interacted with or even where the puzzle is located, and it’s no surprise that players soon found themselves trapped in the hellish loop with no way forward. This led to a kind of mass crowd-funding for solutions – message boards lit up with theories and speculation on how to progress through this deliberately vague and disconcerting maze of mirrors. 

Wilfully frustrating, the puzzles are often ill-defined and prone to the instability that characterises the game as a whole. One of the most disturbing puzzles in the game involves graffiti scribbled on the wall, as it gradually (and horrifyingly) dawns on the player what the missing word from the sinister sentence “I can hear them calling to me from ________ “, must be. It’s probably the closest that video games have come to an M.R. James ghost story moment, where all the pieces of the nebulous puzzle come together to unveil something truly frightening.

Players struggled through the nail-biting game together, but the biggest shock was saved for the final moments of the experience. After finally managing to escape the house and into a fog-shrouded street, the camera switches to a third-person view as words appear on the screen. “Hideo Kojima. Guillermo del Toro. Norman Reedus in Silent Hills.” Reedus’s character disappears into the fog to the strings of Akira Yamaoka’s unnervingly iconic Silent Hill theme.

The entire thing was a ruse – a demo for a game from two masters of their craft, presented as an indie game from an unknown studio. Horror fans had longed for the resurrection of Konami’s dormant Silent Hill series, so the unconventional announcement that visionary director Del Toro, and lauded Metal Gear Solid creator, Kojima, were collaborating on the secret project set expectations sky high. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, P.T. was abruptly pulled from the PlayStation store in April 2015, just seven months after its startling debut. The project was cancelled by Konami. The game became something of a ghost itself, briefly glimpsed but terrifyingly impactful to all those who had experienced it.

Ten years later and the legacy of P.T. lingers. The massively popular horror game franchise Resident Evil successfully reinvented itself using a similar first-person perspective, featuring a stripped-down aesthetic. Resident Evil Village’s petrifying House Beneviento is an obvious homage, and even comes terrifyingly close to capturing the same fear and dread. 

Now that the original P.T. is all but unplayable, developers have been desperately trying to recreate it in various game engines, and there have been more than a few obvious clones. People are still discovering secrets in the game, and theories on the ambiguous plot and characters persist today. The fervour for P.T. even led to a frenzied internet campaign where a new indie horror game was suspected of secretly being a continuation of the project. Another official Silent Hill project – Silent Hill: The Short Message – makes it clear that it follows somewhat grudgingly in the footsteps of the short that came before it. It seems P.T. will continue to haunt the industry for years to come, an unseen presence lurking in every horror game that sits in its long shadow.