You’re in a dimly lit apartment hallway. A storm outside is savaging the windows and walls of the building, threatening to tear it down to the studs. The walls of the tenement seem rotten—not like they’re infested with mold, but like they bear the scars of something sinister. They’re barely containing the evil of this place. As you walk forward, you make out family pictures on the cabinet and a clock shows that it’s nearly midnight. A broadcast is playing over the radio; a man has killed his wife and kids. As you proceed down to the end of the hallway, a lamp swings and creaks overhead, a room with a dingy bulb greets you, and as you pass through it, you find yourself back at the very start of the hallway. Welcome to hell.
While it seems deceptively sparse, Hideo Kojima’s P.T houses a whole range of nightmares within its precious few walls. Along the way, it also redefined horror games, even though it was ultimately a teaser for a game that’d regrettably never come to be. Though Konami would deprive the world of Silent Hills—a joint collaboration between Kojima and the filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro— before it could ever come to fruition, we were left with P.T, which has gone on to become a legend around these parts. Unceremoniously dropped in the middle of E3, the teaser, which wasn’t initially revealed as either a Silent Hill or Kojima game, puzzled players for weeks. Successive loops through its haunted halls revealed many mysteries, ghastly sounds, and repeated run-ins with Lisa, a monstrous ghoul that has influenced many horror game creatures since 2014. And that’s really the thing about P.T: everyone was so stoked on its haunting first-person presentation, production values, and themes that its eventual cancellation left a void that’d be filled by games and creators who took it upon themselves to take up the mantle. It’s almost assuredly the single-most defining horror game of the 2010s, even if it can be finished in about a half hour.
Following Silent Hills’ cancellation, P.T was removed from the PlayStation Store, magnifying the value of systems that still had the teaser by tenfold. It was already a hit, but the move turned P.T into the stuff of legends. And you now have it to thank for countless of the best horror games that have come out since, like Resident Evil 7, which took a similar tact to P.T by releasing a horrifying slow burn of a demo and reimagining the series as a first-person survival horror experience. Thank you, P.T, I’m so sorry we never got to see what could’ve been. — Moises Tavares