‘PT’: the most terrifying video game never made
There’s a convincing argument to be made that PT is one of the single best video games of the 2010s. This is despite it also being one of the least enjoyable games of that decade as well. Yes, those two facts can work together, and here’s why.
Nothing about PT is meant to be a fun time. The game is nightmarishly difficult and nightmarishly frightening. Chucked onto the PlayStation Network as a free demo in August 2014, it was almost entirely unpromoted. The core gameplay loop involves walking through the same corridor over and over again. It’s almost gleefully unintuitive to the point that you’re meant to work out how to progress through the game from random chance rather than actually engaging with it.
It’s also deeply unforgiving. One wrong turn and you’re right back at the start, after the ghost that haunts you for the whole game has given you a heart attack, of course. This is also despite the fact that the game wasn’t really a game but, as the initials that give the game its title tell you, a “playable teaser”. What it was an actual teaser for isn’t revealed until after you’ve completed it. If you’ve spent much time in game culture, you almost certainly know what it was teasing, and have spent the last decade drinking away the pain of it all.
However, be honest with us now, you know it because you watched a lore video of it on YouTube, right? That’s definitely how I know about it. Because getting through PT makes your average Soulsborne game look like Animal Crossing. You are able to walk and zoom the camera in on something. That’s it. You have a corridor in a well-to-do house that has a bathroom you can sometimes walk into (and see something you’ll never, ever forget), a few chests of drawers, a front door you can’t walk through and a door to a basement that you can. However, that basement door will just take you back to the first door you came in from.
That’s what you’ll spend most of PT doing. Well, that and shitting bricks.
What’s the legacy of PT?
Once you’ve worked out how to get through the game (or let’s be real here, watched a walkthrough of it), the other shoe drops. PT is a “playable teaser” for Silent Hills, a new project in the Silent Hill saga that was a collaboration between Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro and the game’s lead actor Norman Reedus. PT immediately made Silent Hills arguably the most anticipated horror game ever… Then, in April 2015, barely a year after PT was uploaded to the PlayStation Network, the game was cancelled.
What’s more, Konami also pulled PT from the PlayStation network, making it impossible to reinstall and essentially making the game one of the most famous examples of lost media ever. Several people have tried to remake the game, but considering one of the puzzles in it is solved by speaking into the microphone hidden in the PS4 controller, few things without an AAA budget will ever quite replicate it. Put it this way, a PS4 on eBay will set you back about £150 at the very most. A PS4 with PT installed? You’re looking at paying £400 if you’re lucky.
It’s easy to mourn what might have been. Living in a world where we got a literal walking simulator in the form of Death Stranding rather than Silent Hills is a pretty bleak state of affairs. Yet, there is something perversely perfect in the legacy of PT. It was a spark in the darkness that no one will ever quite get back, no matter how hard they try. It will live forever as a legend. More folklore than actual gaming culture, and that’s the most genuinely Silent Hill fate it could have.
PT might never be easily played again. Yet still, it haunts the gaming world.