P.T. Review

P.T. appeared on the PlayStation Store in August 2014 as a free download from a studio nobody had heard of, 7780s Studio. It was Kojima Productions under a pseudonym, and the players who solved it found it was a playable teaser for Silent Hills, a new Silent Hill from Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro starring Norman Reedus.

The whole game is one L-shaped hallway in a suburban house. You walk it, open the door at the end, and walk into the same hallway again, changed: the light is wrong, the radio talks about a man who killed his family, something is in the bathroom. Built on the Fox Engine, it looked more like film than a game in 2014, and its slow turn from domestic to unbearable is as good as horror direction gets.

The puzzles are the weak part, obscure enough that it took a community to solve them. Konami removed P.T. from the store in 2015 when Silent Hills was cancelled and made it impossible to reinstall, which only sealed its reputation. It is short, unfinished by design and impossible to buy, and it is still the game the genre measures itself against.