PT was initially released back in 2014, and for me and many, was a major highlight of
the year.
It was effectively a demo for what was, at the time, an unannounced Silent Hills game
that Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro were working on.
PT actually stands for "Playable Teaser" because in Kojima's eyes, the best way to
sell a horror game is to give the fans a piece of it.
However, despite the teaser having been downloaded over a million times within its first month
of release, the game was eventually cancelled, and PT was removed from the PlayStation Network.
This meant that if you ever wanted to play PT but didn't download it during this initial
narrow timeframe, you were out of luck.
At least, until recently.
You see, an incredibly talented freelance game developer recently undertook the unbelievably
ambitious job of remaking the game from scratch, and he just finished.
I'll link it down below (https://radiusgordello.itch.io/unreal-pt) so that you can play and if you haven't
played PT yet, do it.
This remake is free and can be downloaded in minutes.
Play it before you watch this video.
You won't be sorry.
My one word of advice, no matter how much you want to, do not google or search online
for how to progress through the game, take your time and solve it on your own.
That's the way it's meant to be played, according to the designer at least.
Trust me, you'll be glad you did.
So, I guess that serves as my spoiler warning, because I'm going to be spoiling EVERYTHING.
Seriously, even somethings you never knew about this game.
Soooo, yeah, let's get into it.
With that having been said, PT still, to this day, blows my mind.
You see, the game is designed in a way unlike almost any other horror experience that I've
had.
Usually, in video game horror, the designers rely on things such as gore, or jump scares
to keep you engaged and to fulfil the needed "horror" obligation.
In essence, if the player doesn't scream out in terror at least 3 times per hour, then
you must be doing something wrong.
However, PT does things differently.
You see, when PT was initially released, it launched on the PlayStation Store as a free
game developed by 7780's Studio, which people had obviously never heard of before.
And so, people would download it, not knowing that it had anything to do with Hideo Kojima
or Silent Hills, and upon launching the game, it would immediately begin.
No loading title screen with a bunch of logos, nothing.
Right into the game.
Kojima actually discussed this in an interview he gave in September of 2014 with the Japan
Times: "It's scary because there's no information.
Nowadays, when people don't know something, they Google it.
They ask on Twitter or Facebook and they get the answer right away.
We live in an age of information.
When that suddenly disappears, that's the scariest thing.
That's why there was no information about who made 'P.T.'
When people began to download it on PlayStation 4, they weren't sure about the game design,
and there wasn't even an action button.
There was no purpose or background and no explanation about the story, and that's
frightening.
I did this on purpose.
That's why I hid my name and title and just let them play."
It's in cases like these where games can take their players' experiences to a whole new
level.
When the designer is willing to forgo vanity and self-promotion for the sake of the end
user's experience.
Kojima didn't want any prompts or HUD elements because even those could be comforting to
the player, where they feel as though the game is helping them.
Because of this, and in addition to the game's vague puzzles, Kojima expected PT to take
most people a week to finish.
However, most people end up finishing the game in one sitting.
I'm assuming this is because most people play the game in groups and that lessens the
terror factor while also providing players a built-in brain storming team to brute force
their way through puzzles.
I wouldn't know anything about that…
Speaking of, let's discuss the puzzles in this game for a moment.
The puzzles are unbelievably vague and leave the player walking back and forth questioning
whether or not they've discovered some glitch.
Hell, there's even a moment in the game where it seems to crash and then reboot, all
while the player is sitting in their oversized chair hugging themselves for comfort.
Again, I would know nothing about that…
Take the last "puzzle" for example.
You've been walking through the hallway for quite a while at this point.
You're conditioned to keep moving forward no matter what.
And so, naturally, Kojima uses this to his advantage.
You must walk into the hallway, wait for the bell to finish its 12th strike for midnight.
You walk exactly ten paces, wait for a baby laugh, freeze, then return to the foyer, see
the mom doing the Harlem shake, wait for her to disappear, hear another baby laugh at some
point, stay frozen, wait for a phone call, and then pick it up without knowing what button
to press in order to do so, and then you hear a voice say "you are chosen," at which
point he hangs up and you continue through the basement door one last time.
That's the puzzle, all of that.
You're supposed to figure out that it's ten paces, and that you have to freeze on
the second baby laugh and that you have to be close enough to the mother to see her but
not too close where she could grab you.
And this is perhaps where the game's only real flaw lies, in that it requires so much
trial and error in order to complete organically.
It makes you feel as though you're helpless.
You start to feel as though you're trapped in an endless loop where you're doing the
same thing over and over again without anything changing but you keep expecting things to
change which is after all Albert Einstein's definition of insanity and oh wait he totally
did that on purpose.
Kojima structured the game's puzzles in this helpless way because it was going to
leave players feeling the same way the character is.
It's groundhog day on steroids and it's great for all the wrong and right reasons.
It doesn't hold your hand because that would be comforting.
If you're playing a horror game, why expect for there to be things that are helpful?
This is the same reason why the inventory system in Resident Evil 7 is so hard to navigate.
Because they want it to be clunky and feel awkward.
It uses something as mundane as the menu to further its quest to reinforce the gameplay
narrative.
With that being said, it should come as no surprise that Hideo Kojima is known for being
very thoughtful when he designs a game.
He takes many things into consideration and uses much of it as direct inspiration.
When designing PT, he said that he didn't want a normal horror experience.
He wanted something that everyone could find terrifying, regardless of social status, or
cultural origin.
This quotation actually comes from an interview that he gave to Kotaku when he was discussing
why he chose to use an L shaped corridor within a fancy house as the game's location.
And this question is fair.
I mean, why not use something like the kitchen area of the house from Resident Evil 7?
Something dilapidated, gross, and more generally scary, at least according to the common definition.
Just imagine being caught up in an infinite loop where you have to continue going through
this dark, gross environment ad infinitum with things constantly changing around you.
It would be horrifying.
Or would it be?
In the medical literature on the topic, the idea of desensitization to phobia inducing
stimuli is still hotly debated.
For instance, many people in the medical community still disagree as to whether or not extensive
exposure to video games leads to an increased level of desensitization towards violence
or physical abuse.
In this instance, the question is whether or not extended exposure to phobic stimuli
could lead to desensitization towards it.
In Kojima's mind, the answer is simple: Yes.
In these interviews, he discusses the need for a broader range of tactics to be employed
in order to receive the best possible experience.
"There are a lot of scary forms of entertainment in the world.
There are horror action games with zombies and grotesque things and so forth.
The real fear isn't from those things.
It's from standing in an empty place, where just to step forward or to turn around is
scary.
What people see depends on their experience or trauma.
Even in the same scenery, some people may see a human shadow, while some people may
see a rock as a human face."
Basically, if you want something truly terrifying, you must attack the mind and not the senses.
Quite often, an assault on the senses happens as a symptom of the true terror but it is
just that: a symptom.
If you just go for the jump scares and the knee jerk reactions, you will end up with
a shallow and uninspired horror game experience that leaves a lot to be desired.
Look at A Quiet Place, the critically acclaimed film directed by John Krasinski.
The first time I watched this film it was in my dark basement with a bunch of friends.
We cued it up in our living room and began to watch it.
Everyone else in the room, probably 4 or 5 people, had seen the movie before but it was
my first time.
The only warning I received was "Pam would be proud," something which you will only
get if you watched the American Office.
Anyway, the film is centered around one key gimmick.
Don't worry I'm not going to spoil anything that you wouldn't already know by watching
the trailer.
In fact, I'll only use footage from the trailer.
Also, let me just say that "gimmick" is not always a bad or negative term.
Rather, it is simply a mechanism by which the artist can convey their message in a novel
or creative way.
Sure, it can, at times, be overused, when you play Five Nights at Freddy's and the
jump scare novelty wears off quickly.
But here, A Quiet Place's gimmick is masterfully integrated into the story, characters, and
the acting.
The gimmick is that the creatures who have dismantled society are blind to the human-visible-spectrum
of light, but are hyper sensitive to sound.
They communicated and navigate the environment by way of loud clicking noises that they use
for echo-location, much like the clickers from the Last of Us.
They can hear a children's toy from presumably a mile away or farther, and so it is of the
utmost importance that everyone stays silent in everything that they do.
They walk around barefoot on sand to reduce the chance of branches snapping or of shoes
scuffing; they communicate through sign language; and they spend the first 40 minutes of the
film in silence without a word being spoken.
The writers even made one of the characters deaf so that you can see what this apocalypse
would be like for someone who fundamentally doesn't understand sound itself, because
after all, she has never experienced it.
It's a fantastically creative idea that is developed thoroughly to the point where
it stands as my favorite horror film of all time and my favorite film of 2018.
But I don't want to get too sidetracked by that, if you'd like to see a break down
of that film and why every part of it is so masterfully crafted, let me know in the comment
section below and maybe I'll make a video on it.
Anyways, the reason that I brought that up to begin with is that this willingness to
forgo the tropes of your industry and genre is what is necessary for horror and art itself
to be successful and effective.
Where A Quiet Place shed the constraints of loud sound and mopey dialogue, PT shed the
necessity of excessive gore and instead focused on ambiance and slowly built anticipation
of dreadful events.
It sounds simple, I know, but it is something that is incredibly difficult to achieve.
To create a world, however small, that has those who inhabit it dreading the very thought
of turning around is nothing short of incredible.
However, despite all of this, Konami shut down production on Kojima's Silent Hills
game and with it went the playable teaser that Kojima created to woo players.
Thankfully, we now have a way of experiencing this small yet thrilling masterpiece again.
But all of this leaves us with one question: what is PT's legacy.
Well, to be honest, I believe its legacy is still being written and determined.
Kojima hasn't had the chance to show off what he had planned for the full game, but
rather moved on to new projects.
The most famous of which, Death Stranding, has many of us keenly interested.
In fact, while I was writing this script, it was announced that Kojima recently showed
the team over at Guerilla Games (who gave him the source code for their engine to be
used in the production of Death Stranding), the first two hours of the game and it left
them all in awe and stunned.
You can even see this yourself, just go look at the Guerrila Games' developers' Twitter
feeds.
It's nothing but gushing and praise about the game.
All of this to say, PT was a small, unannounced preview of a game we never got, and yet we
are still talking about it (or, at least I am), and we are still playing it despite Konami's
best attempts to prevent it.
That is something that can't be said of many games that are 4, going on five years
old, and certainly not of playable teasers which are almost non-existent themselves.
This much is clear, PT did something incredible.
Thank you for watching.
Honestly and truly, it means the world to me that anyone would watch my videos and ramblings
and so the fact that people, like you, from all around the world do just that, continues
to blow my mind on a daily basis.
Honestly, thank you.
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