Playable Teaser has caused irreparable damage to the horror genre in gaming.
Indie horror games have a subgenre sometimes called “looping hallway games.” These are, to keep it plain, horror experiences in which you control a character walking through a looping hallway and get jumpscared. There was a period where “P.T. Clones” were their own genre of entertainment, something only egged on by the bloodthirst players felt when Konami canned the project. People really, really wanted P.T., and they were willing to do just about anything for it. This game is as much about it’s story as it is the hype that followed.
P.T. uses a style of gameplay that people sometimes call “walking simulator.” You know, in a mean way. Personally, however, I think that’s way too broad: P.T. is more like a digital Halloween attraction. You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there. The horrified scrawling of a mad man, alluding to a terrible, terrible thing happening in that very house, maybe just in that room you’re about to venture into. It’s only a suggestion. A possibility. You open the door.
You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there…
Progression in Playable Teaser is still an enigma. While P.T. has been dissected and even mined in the years following its release, it’s not actually known what triggers some in-game events. It seems almost completely random, and maybe it is. In horror games, there’s a veil of control between the player and the game— an agreement is made when you put one on, really. You can always shut the console off, or look up a guide. There's always some semblance of control, of linearity, in a horror game. By having a seemingly randomized progression system, P.T. wretches control out of the player’s hands. It breaks the agreement. This isn’t unique, really. Screwing with the player is a common thing in horror games, but P.T. 's execution of it is what made it so noteworthy. Even if it hadn’t been an announcement for a Silent Hill game by Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito and Guillermo del Toro starring Norman Reedus, it would have done surprisingly well for itself based on it's execution.
It isn’t that P.T. is scary, necessarily. It’s that it shows an adept hand at creating tension. There’s moments in the game that feel like a child’s desperate attempt at a jumpscare— the loop in which you wander down the hall and look up to see a shaking fridge while a child screams inside it comes to mind. Maybe that was the intention, though. Part of the long con by the devteam was that they were prepared for people to take up to a week to finish the demo, and they expected people to buy that they were an indie studio during that time. What happened, instead, was that it took one stream that finished shortly after the announcement. The boom was immediate, and heard across the internet.
I could write at length what the experience of P.T. 's release was like, but it’s documented well. The rise and fall of Kojima Productions’ Silent Hill reboot is something that most people interested in games already know. We were all there, and it is intrinsic to P.T. to know it. Playable Teaser is, after all, the announcement for Silent Hills.
A lot of P.T. relies on technology feeling out of your hands, out of your control. The radio pumps paranoia into the hallway by babbling about the tap water, reporting on crimes, numbers that seem random but aren’t, effectively injecting patterns where there aren’t any. The flashlight loses power, and to disorient you further, the game itself “glitches.” Even the technology in your hands cannot be relied upon. Even the trailer that advertised it as an indie game cannot be trusted.
In an interview, Kojima stated that people said they knew there was no way P.T. was made by a small, independent team upon seeing the Playstation Experience trailer. He expressed that he wished he had pushed harder for the game to resemble something by a smaller team, but the Fox Engine renders things in a way that looks distinctly AAA. When you know P.T. was made in the same engine as MGSV, it’s very easy to tell. We’re seven years past the release of the game, and it still looks great. Dust particles dress the game well, with details painted on in an excruciating fashion. The hallway looks lived in. It’s used. It’s a home full of ghosts, of stories, where madness reigns king. There’s a poison infecting the home. You can see it, from the lovingly rendered cockroaches to the revolting vomit coating Lisa’s face.
A lot of the scares are effective, but not because they’re necessarily good or unique. The tension building does most of the work, with foley doing the heavy lifting. Sound in P.T. cannot be underpraised, in my opinion. The steps of the protagonist echo heavily, making the game feel empty when it isn’t. Doors creak loudly, floorboards sigh with the weight of the character model. Lisa’s groans are haunting and filtered to sound unnatural, as if you’re listening to a radio play that’s gone off the rails. A fitting design choice since there’s a reference to War of the Worlds within P.T., likely shoehorned in as a nod to the UFO endings in Silent Hill.
The story of the home is delivered through babbling, through auditory clues and visual hints. It gets hamfistedly explained near the end, but even the closing scene feels mysterious, as if I’ve played a game of telephone with my friends regarding an urban legend. P.T. feels like an urban legend, taped together by people’s memories of retellings they’ve heard. It’s a ghost story, told again and again with newer, finer details that sometimes feel tacked on, like the person telling the story thought it sounded scary. Each hallway is a new retelling. Playable Teaser is a playable urban legend.
P.T. is an exercise in claustrophobia. It asks, “how can I deliver a story in an unsettling, unnatural way in a small space?” To answer that question, it drops you right into the thick of it. You are forced to navigate the obscure clues for progression on your own from the moment you hear about P.T. The game goes beyond the screen— maybe in some way, it’s still going.
Indie horror games have a subgenre sometimes called “looping hallway games.” These are, to keep it plain, horror experiences in which you control a character walking through a looping hallway and get jumpscared. There was a period where “P.T. Clones” were their own genre of entertainment, something only egged on by the bloodthirst players felt when Konami canned the project. People really, really wanted P.T., and they were willing to do just about anything for it. This game is as much about it’s story as it is the hype that followed.
P.T. uses a style of gameplay that people sometimes call “walking simulator.” You know, in a mean way. Personally, however, I think that’s way too broad: P.T. is more like a digital Halloween attraction. You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there. The horrified scrawling of a mad man, alluding to a terrible, terrible thing happening in that very house, maybe just in that room you’re about to venture into. It’s only a suggestion. A possibility. You open the door.
You pay admission to a haunted house and there’s ghouls and ghosts around every corner. The monsters follow you. There’s a constant threat of seeing something you shouldn’t. You walk through the hallway, expecting a jumpscare or a peek of the ghost haunting the house. You descend the stairs into the basement, and there are manic scribblings there…
Progression in Playable Teaser is still an enigma. While P.T. has been dissected and even mined in the years following its release, it’s not actually known what triggers some in-game events. It seems almost completely random, and maybe it is. In horror games, there’s a veil of control between the player and the game— an agreement is made when you put one on, really. You can always shut the console off, or look up a guide. There's always some semblance of control, of linearity, in a horror game. By having a seemingly randomized progression system, P.T. wretches control out of the player’s hands. It breaks the agreement. This isn’t unique, really. Screwing with the player is a common thing in horror games, but P.T. 's execution of it is what made it so noteworthy. Even if it hadn’t been an announcement for a Silent Hill game by Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito and Guillermo del Toro starring Norman Reedus, it would have done surprisingly well for itself based on it's execution.
It isn’t that P.T. is scary, necessarily. It’s that it shows an adept hand at creating tension. There’s moments in the game that feel like a child’s desperate attempt at a jumpscare— the loop in which you wander down the hall and look up to see a shaking fridge while a child screams inside it comes to mind. Maybe that was the intention, though. Part of the long con by the devteam was that they were prepared for people to take up to a week to finish the demo, and they expected people to buy that they were an indie studio during that time. What happened, instead, was that it took one stream that finished shortly after the announcement. The boom was immediate, and heard across the internet.
I could write at length what the experience of P.T. 's release was like, but it’s documented well. The rise and fall of Kojima Productions’ Silent Hill reboot is something that most people interested in games already know. We were all there, and it is intrinsic to P.T. to know it. Playable Teaser is, after all, the announcement for Silent Hills.
A lot of P.T. relies on technology feeling out of your hands, out of your control. The radio pumps paranoia into the hallway by babbling about the tap water, reporting on crimes, numbers that seem random but aren’t, effectively injecting patterns where there aren’t any. The flashlight loses power, and to disorient you further, the game itself “glitches.” Even the technology in your hands cannot be relied upon. Even the trailer that advertised it as an indie game cannot be trusted.
In an interview, Kojima stated that people said they knew there was no way P.T. was made by a small, independent team upon seeing the Playstation Experience trailer. He expressed that he wished he had pushed harder for the game to resemble something by a smaller team, but the Fox Engine renders things in a way that looks distinctly AAA. When you know P.T. was made in the same engine as MGSV, it’s very easy to tell. We’re seven years past the release of the game, and it still looks great. Dust particles dress the game well, with details painted on in an excruciating fashion. The hallway looks lived in. It’s used. It’s a home full of ghosts, of stories, where madness reigns king. There’s a poison infecting the home. You can see it, from the lovingly rendered cockroaches to the revolting vomit coating Lisa’s face.
A lot of the scares are effective, but not because they’re necessarily good or unique. The tension building does most of the work, with foley doing the heavy lifting. Sound in P.T. cannot be underpraised, in my opinion. The steps of the protagonist echo heavily, making the game feel empty when it isn’t. Doors creak loudly, floorboards sigh with the weight of the character model. Lisa’s groans are haunting and filtered to sound unnatural, as if you’re listening to a radio play that’s gone off the rails. A fitting design choice since there’s a reference to War of the Worlds within P.T., likely shoehorned in as a nod to the UFO endings in Silent Hill.
The story of the home is delivered through babbling, through auditory clues and visual hints. It gets hamfistedly explained near the end, but even the closing scene feels mysterious, as if I’ve played a game of telephone with my friends regarding an urban legend. P.T. feels like an urban legend, taped together by people’s memories of retellings they’ve heard. It’s a ghost story, told again and again with newer, finer details that sometimes feel tacked on, like the person telling the story thought it sounded scary. Each hallway is a new retelling. Playable Teaser is a playable urban legend.
P.T. is an exercise in claustrophobia. It asks, “how can I deliver a story in an unsettling, unnatural way in a small space?” To answer that question, it drops you right into the thick of it. You are forced to navigate the obscure clues for progression on your own from the moment you hear about P.T. The game goes beyond the screen— maybe in some way, it’s still going.