It’s one minute to midnight and you’re strolling down the front hallway of a seemingly ordinary American suburban home. The place is a little messy, but for a house that might house a young family, there’s nothing too unusual at first glance. The lights flicker intermittently, but that’s probably just the sound of the storm you hear outside.
A voice on the radio speaks soothingly of a man’s behavior – maybe you? – He murdered his wife and children. You take a closer look at the piles of trash on the floor and realize it’s all more sinister than you first thought. The lights dimmed again and a baby, with a voice so hoarse, began to cry somewhere in the house. Yes, something bad definitely happened here.
It’s a setting that many of us are very familiar with, although relatively few of us have actually played it.
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PT – Hideo Kojima’s playable trailer for the Silent Hill game he never made – was part of the unholy quartet that together kicked off the horror gaming renaissance in the summer and fall of 2014. and Five Nights at Freddy’s were released within just a few years of August’s release, and the one-two punch of terror was followed by Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within in October. This season of horror has left an indelible mark on gaming: marking the beginning of a rapid transition from the early 2010s’ hesitant action shooters to family-friendly cartoony ghost-hunting games and heartbreakingly sad depictions of zombies impossible parenting choices in the context of the apocalypse (this game is so good they did it twice!), and then back to a more cohesive point: to truly deserve classification, horror games should be terrible.
It’s no wonder that a decade later, you can still glimpse PT’s influence on many, if not most, new horror games. This was all despite the fact that the PT itself proved to be very short-lived.
The PlayStation 4 was less than a year old when PT was released, so even though it was a free-to-play game (all part of a short-lived strategy to present PT as an indie game from the fictional 7780s Studio), there were a lot of people who simply weren’t interested in it. Like PT. Luckily for those of us who didn’t have the budget to buy a brand new console at the time, 2014 was also the year that Twitch really hit its stride as gaming’s premier tastemaker, so within hours PT was Live broadcast everywhere.
Normally it would be a bit frustrating to see a stealth AAA horror trailer with ARG elements spoiled all over the internet within a day of its release, but on the bright side, this does mean we have A lot of game documentation, basically no longer exists. In April 2015, Konami canceled two of perhaps the most controversial moves in the history of game development: on the 15th, they canceled the full release of “Silent Hill”; in April 2015, the hype caused by PT had just died down; 26 On the same day, they removed “PT” from the PlayStation Store.
For horror fans, we’ve yet to see Silent Hill , co-directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, starring Norman Reedus and produced by horror comics legend Junji Ito ” game, this is still a bit of a sore spot. This sentence reads like such a blatantly fake game leak that it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that it really should have happened at some point. The fact that less than a million people have actually played PT for themselves just rubs salt in the wound, and it’s proven that ten years later you’re still paying surprisingly above-market prices for a regularly used PS4. a little.
But like its lanky ghost chief Lisa, PT still casts a long shadow despite its early demise. While Five Nights at Freddy’s was a huge success and certainly spawned imitators, the popularity of PT has led to the current indie horror trend of realistic one-click walking sims featuring environmental puzzles.
Games like Layers of Fear, Visage and the sadly never-finished Allison Road are already well-known in their own right, but in 2016 you can’t turn around in the horror genre without being struck by another game that aims to remake, explain Made-to-play games stumble. Acknowledge PT’s influence on their design and development choices.
But it would be too simplistic to boil PT’s legacy down to the explosion of indie horror walking sims in the mid-2010s, as its influence on triple-A horror game development was equally clear. Hideo Kojima’s first indie game Death Stranding borrowed many ideas from PT, and one compelling conspiracy theory is that Silent Hill was never actually expected to enter development and was instead made for the upcoming Kojima It’s always the demo version that creates the hype.
Even without wearing a tinfoil hat, it’s easy to recognize that Resident Evil – Silent Hill’s main rival in the battle for the most famous horror game series – after the release of Resident Evil 7’s PT demo , emerging from a long slump. The story of a search for a missing wife.
That’s not all. Despite its initially short lifespan, the PT itself is a ghost that continues to creep out from beyond the grave: as in 2019, YouTuber Lance MacDonald dug into the game’s files and revealed the PT’s main enemy Lisa will attach itself to your back and stay on your body hiding in your blind spot for most of the game.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes in PT, when your character takes a step forward, you hear three footsteps? It’s actually the sound of Lisa shuffling behind you. As a long-time horror fan, I thought I was pretty tired of the scare tactics of this genre, but I swear, when I learned that I’d been witnessing it so often over the past five years without even realizing it, I swear I feel like my amygdala has shrunk.
In fact, Layers of Fear – one of PT’s most famous successors – apparently impressed Konami so much that after completing a trilogy inspired by PT, developer Bloober Team started working on Making the long-awaited remake of Silent Hill 2. It’s a controversial choice, of course; but personally, it’s strange to see an aspect of PT’s legacy come full circle in this way after a decade.
Similarly, Silent Hill film director Christophe Gans said PT had a significant impact on the relaunched film series, which is expected to be released after a long hiatus. The third film based on “Silent Hill 2” will be released later this year.
Finally, the fact that there is still so much to say about PT a full decade after its release may be all that needs to be said. I personally consider it one of the best and most important games of the 2010s, and I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Not bad for a 90-minute game that’s walked down corridors and played by almost no one.
