P.T. (2014)

This is another one where I don't fully get the "this is the scariest game ever!" perspective. I think it's spooky, it has a great atmosphere, but I wasn't particularly scared during it, perhaps because I went into it knowing that it was only a demo and that everything was very scripted moment-to-moment rather than depending on my actions or errors?

Aside from that, though, it's a shame this was cancelled. A Kojima and Junji Ito collab is something I've been talking about wanting for a long time, and I think the full version of this could have drawn me in lore/plot-wise pretty well too, judging by the hints we got of it here. I enjoy some of the "P.T.-likes" we ended up getting with other games, but I'll always wonder what P.T. itself would have been.

P.T. is the playable teaser for the cancelled Silent Hills, and is rightfully regarded as one of the scariest video games ever made. Even though it's only technically a demo, this short horror experience rewrote the book on what a horror video game could be, introduced the world to a bold new strategy for releasing games, and still persists as a cursed artifact haunting the history of gaming, refusing to be forgotten. Everyone knows the story at this point but it bears mentioning that between Hideo Kojima, a true auteur of the medium and master of misdirection, alongside director Guillermo del Toro, a creative genius responsible for some of the finest horror films ever made, this creative dream-team was, and still is, one of the most compelling team-ups ever to grace the industry. The fact that Junji Ito, a master of gruesome, macabre manga was also attached only sweetens the already stacked resume.

The fact that the game that this team was creating never came to fruition is something that breaks my heart whenever I think about it. It is undoubtedly, the most upsetting video game cancellation of all time. The only consolation that we have is that some of the fruits of their labor saw the light of day in P.T., a proof of concept that ends up working as a flawlessly executed piece of horror on its own. While it's by no means a long game, P.T. is anything but straight forward. Due to a simple premise of trying to escape an endless loop, it serves as a meditation on fear, isolation and insanity in a way that the Silent Hill series had not since the high water mark that was Silent Hill 2, back in 2001. Through disturbingly detailed audio design, pristinely eerie visuals, and a lone looming threat that relentlessly stalks the player, the hour or so it will take that player to complete the obscure puzzles found within are among the most harrowing in gaming.

Luckily for fans of horror games, the ripples of P.T. are still felt throughout the genre. Every year sees the release of many titles that play off of the legacy in some way or another. Because horror games are frequently short and cheap, you see a lot of wild ideas, particularly in the PC space, which houses a huge amount of retro-horror experiments that are too creepy and weird to live anywhere else. Visage, a terrific game that cribs its tone and visual style directly from P.T., finally saw a full release this year. Even the big daddy of the genre saw the influence of P.T. rear its head in Resident Evil VII, a game that steered the juggernaut franchise back into an explicitly horror-based first-person direction. Survival-horror games have made a huge comeback in recent years and P.T. can be held largely responsible for that shift.