(Don’t) Look Behind You: 10 Years Later, P.T. Is Still in the Room

By Elijah Gonzalez | August 6, 2024 | 1:29pm

Video Games Features Silent Hill

(Don’t) Look Behind You: 10 Years Later, P.T. Is Still in the Room

Content Warning: This article discusses P.T., a game that centered on a fictional murder-suicide.

After waking up in a featureless concrete room, you walk through a door that reveals a long, beige hallway. On its face, it’s a mundane sight, a nondescript corridor that feels plucked from a bog-standard suburban household. But as you move forward, worrying details accumulate. A digital clock sits stuck at 23:59, bottles and pills are strewn in corners, and the portraits on the wall are off somehow. Most pressingly, this hallway is just a bit too elongated, and instead of leading to a room, it breaks into another walkway.

However, the most upsetting part is what’s on the radio, as a newscast details a gruesome murder-suicide of a family. The subject matter is grotesque, a father killing his wife and children, but the delivery is just as important for the mood; the announcer speaks with a distancing cadence and mentions specifics that a reporter couldn’t possibly know, like how the dad coaxed certain family members out of hiding. But as you exit the hall and are warped back to the same corridor you started in, you discover that these initial off-kilter sights are only the prelude to one of the most unforgettable horror games in recent memory, an experience that continues to haunt a franchise and genre writ large despite the fact that it isn’t even a “full game” to begin with.

This is P.T. (an acronym for “playable teaser”), the outline for a project that would never come to fruition. Released for free on August 12, 2014, it’s a first-person horror game set in an interconnected looping hallway where you solve cryptic puzzles to progress. After reaching its conclusion (something most players likely won’t be able to accomplish without outside guidance), it featured a bombshell announcement: a trailer for a new Silent Hill game (titled Silent Hills) to be directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro. It seemed like a dream team was going to revitalize one of the most important series in the medium. Unfortunately, this project would never come out. Kojima was more or less forced out of Konami (taking many members of his team to found Kojima Productions), and Silent Hills was canceled, resulting in an almost decade-long hiatus for the franchise.

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But despite being created as a playable advertisement for an axed game, P.T. has taken on a life of its own in the years since its release. The main reason for this is simple: it’s really damn scary. This starts with the setting, a cyclical limbo that reveals secrets as these suburban corridors shift into a hellish reflection of a horrible deed. If the main gameplay cycle wasn’t clear, you traverse a hallway, solving puzzles that let you reach the next layer of the loop where these surroundings are slightly different. The re-use of this limited setting causes you to focus on its particulars, each small alteration taking on greater significance.

Eventually, lights flicker, and door knobs shake. Muffled cries can be heard through the walls. An overhead lantern swings back and forth, creaking incessantly, maddeningly. Given the introductory radio segment that describes a series of gruesome murders, the obvious interpretation of what’s happening is that this is some sort of haunting. This idea goes from a theory to a spine-tingling reality when you turn a corner and see her clearly for the first time: a terrifying figure staring at you, draped in shadow. As you take another step forward, they disappear in the dark. In a truly sadistic turn, the only way to progress is to step into the gloom where they just disappeared, this constrictive environment forcing you down paths you don’t want to tread.

Sure, many of the details here, the somewhat tasteless description of a brutal murder over the radio, the spectral crying baby, the vengeful female shade, are shlocky. They’re plot beats you’ve seen in countless haunted house films and stretch back much further than that in ghost tales told around campfires for as long as people have been trying to spook each other. But what makes it work here are the specifics.

For instance, a certain scare gets at one of the game’s most disquieting elements. After making progress, the radio will eventually kick on again, recounting the same gruesome murder it did in the first loop. There are some differences, though; there’s interference, and the newscaster will suddenly say strange things like, “You can’t trust the tap water,” or more chillingly, “Don’t touch that dial now, we’re just getting started.” Then comes the worst part. In an offputtingly flat voice, the announcer commands, “LOOK BEHIND YOU. I SAID, LOOK BEHIND YOU.” If you turn around, you’re jump scared into oblivion as the pallid apparition materializes out of thin air and catches you, sending you back to the beginning of the most recent loop.

However, the best part isn’t the jump scare itself but what the announcer implies, as their warning to “Look behind you” suddenly confirms what you’ve been feeling for some time: you’re being followed. As you walk through these corridors, you’ll occasionally hear an additional pair of footsteps trailing your own. Turn around, and there’s nothing there. Even worse, seemingly randomly, the thrum of ambient music will pick up as faint otherworldly cries fill your headphones, creating the visceral sense that something awful is whispering directly in your ear. While the jump scare is frightening, the worst part is how it feeds a greater anxiety.

One of the few rooms you can access in this house is the bathroom—a classic locale for rituals and ghostly conjurings. If you enter this bathroom while hearing the whisperings in your ear, you’ll see the scariest sight in the game: the ghost is behind you. It’s not a scripted scene, it’s simply true that every time you hear these murmurings, the ghost, Lisa, is physically behind you, whispering in your ear. If you try to turn and see her, she contorts with your body to remain unseen, always with you, just out of sight. It’s not that the house is haunted, it’s you who is being haunted.

The titular New England town in the Silent Hill games can reify the memories, guilt, and pain of those who go there; their fears become real and inescapable. By that logic, this purgatory of repeating hallways is potentially the home of the man who murdered his family, a hell of his own making, as he’s (rightfully) tortured by ghosts of the past. Years after release, a player found a way to hack the game to manipulate the camera. They discovered that in-game, Lisa is almost tethered to the player character, right behind your field of view. Programmatically and thematically, Lisa is another of Silent Hill’s ghosts who haunts the guilty for what they’ve done.

Beyond this clever twist, another element of P.T. that continues to resonate is how it gets at a particular kind of American rot. There is a blasé quality to the newscaster’s announcement of this mass killing over the radio, as if this kind of thing is commonplace, almost tacitly accepted. They describe the event as “regretful,” but a particular sentence will sound too familiar for many: “The father purchased the rifle used in the crime at his local gun store two days earlier.” He killed his family with a rifle he bought from down the street. While this kind of terrible family mass killing obviously isn’t unique to the United States, experts generally agree that the issue is worse in America due to ready access to firearms, with 9 out of 10 murder-suicides in the country being committed with guns. The brutal act at the center of the game, which is alluded to but never shown, represents a thinly veiled wrongness beneath the happy face of suburbia. Here, easy access to deadly weapons combines with quotidian horrors bubbling just beneath the surface: misogyny, untreated mental illness, toxic masculinity. Evil has seeped into the floorboards, and it’s one that could have been expunged.

In addition to its setting, P.T.’s atmosphere, delivery, and unanswerable questions have kept it front of mind for a decade, so much so that despite being a delisted teaser for a game that never came out, it’s still a frequent reference point for genre-heads. Honestly, this cancellation is probably part of its longevity; Silent Hills won’t ever exist, and its possibilities continue to drive discussion. This unfulfilled promise particularly stings because this prelude seemed to demonstrate that Kojima’s team had a firm grasp of what makes Silent Hill interesting. Like its parent series, P.T. used unsettling audio to needle at the player, as binaural whispers, creaking overhead lights, scratches, and cries created persistent dread.

While the game used a first-person perspective instead of fixed camera angles, it maintained the series’ focus on psychological horror over action and, in some ways, further embodied this by removing any form of combat (this was likely a budgeting decision considering this is a teaser instead of a full game, but still). In short, it seemed to be taking things in a new direction while maintaining the essential elements of what came before. But it was canned, and the series met a nearly 10-year drought.

Konami is finally attempting to reanimate the series, but these attempts haven’t been well-received so far; last year, there was an interactive streaming series, Silent Hill: Ascension, that was largely panned; this January, there was the P.T.-inspired Silent Hill: The Short Message, which met a largely negative critical response; and then there’s the upcoming remake of Silent Hill 2, which from early looks, have some wishing the franchise had stayed dead (maybe it will prove us wrong when it comes out, but I’m currently skeptical). Even though P.T. would directly inspire plenty of other first-person horror games, like Visage and MADiSON, and its influence leaked into others like Resident Evil 7 and 8, it’s hard not to imagine where its specific vision could have gone.

This beloved work isn’t some perfect object. A few of its puzzles, especially the finicky final one, are so vague that they feel designed for online collaboration instead of individual solving. If you’re stubborn, you’ll likely spend way too long trying to figure it out yourself, undermining the ambiance of this space as you investigate its every corner. And perhaps worse, this teaser is ultimately just that, a piece of promotional material. Your reward for braving these scares and reaching the end isn’t a real conclusion but a trailer for a canceled game.

Despite this, P.T. lingers. There are genuinely brilliant strokes here, from how it builds tension through a repeating, purgatorial environment, to the devilish twist of having Lisa stalk the player. However, perhaps the single biggest reason it’s so difficult to exorcise the specter of this weird little teaser is that it was a highly publicized first draft for a work we’ll never see completed. Its innovative turns invite us to imagine what Silent Hills could have been, our own mental image never replaced by the real thing. Considering how compelling this introductory experience is, it’s easy to assume the full game would have been even more innovative and interesting, even if we can’t know that for certain (after all, it’s easier to be experimental with a small project like than with a AAA release). Silent Hills is dead, and its possibilities with it. In its place, P.T. will continue to haunt horror games, a captivating but unfulfilled nightmare that will always leave us dreaming of something more.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.