P.T. Can't Get Any Scarier Than This
P.T. was just a playable teaser for Silent Hills, but the collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, starring Norman Reedus, was considered a masterpiece of psychological horror.
Unfortunately, Silent Hills is long since dead and buried — collateral damage of the split between Kojima and Konami. Konami cancelled Silent Hills and pulled P.T. from the Playstation Store back in 2015. Not only that, it ensured that even people who had already played P.T. and deleted it could never reinstall the game. The only way to play this classic today is on a Playstation that already has it.
Fans, though, aren't willing to let it go. They've spent the years since picking over and obsessing about every last detail of P.T. From hacking into the game files to discover its secrets to remaking it in every conceivable game engine, gamers have spent years trying to recapture the thrill of their first time playing P.T. Now Steam user AmbientDruth has thrown their VR headset into the ring. AmbientDruth is working on a project, simply called PT, which aims to fully recreate the horrific experience as a Half-Life: Alyx mod.
P.T. was a first-person game containing only a single hallway and two rooms: the starting room and a bathroom. Every time players got to the far end of the hallway they found themselves back in the starting room, beginning a new loop of the gameplay. Players were only able to progress by finding and solving puzzles, all while being pursued by an angry spirit named Lisa who would send you back to the start of your current loop if she caught you.
However, while P.T. did have Lisa jump scare you sometimes, it didn't lean too heavily on monsters jumping out to say "boo." Most of the fear was atmospheric. It came from the constantly looping yet constantly changing hallway, the ambient sounds of torture and murder, and the feeling that at any moment Lisa could jump out and get you without knowing when she would. P.T. was less Five Nights at Freddy's and more Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
P.T. featured multiple endings, the last of which involved the protagonist finally escaping the house and reaching the outside world. The end credits would then reveal that the entire game had, in fact, only been a teaser. Reaching the last ending required players to piece together (literally and figuratively) what happened in that house, but still left a lot of questions that players had hoped Silent Hills would answer. That dream is now as dead as Lisa and her family.
It's no wonder, then, that players have been picking over P.T.'s carcass to glean every last detail about what could have been. More than that, though, they're trying to recreate the experience that Konami seems determined to deny them.
While it's still a work in progress, PT already has a lot of key features including the looping corridor, one of the endings, and the terrifying sounds of Lisa standing right behind you. According to AmbientDruth, planned updates for PT include the flashlight, more of the endings, additional triggers, more accurate set pieces, some Easter eggs, and general improvements to the graphics and audio.
With all of that said, there are already fan remakes of P.T. What's so special about this one? As you may already know, Source 2 is the engine that powers Half Life: Alyx; which is to say, it's a powerful VR engine. P.T. was already designed to make you feel as though the danger was constantly following you (which, in fact, it was), so one can imagine that playing in VR will drive the experience home even more.
While PT is their first Half-Life: Alyx mod, AmbientDruth's Steam Workshop features over a dozen highly-rated projects done in Garry's Mod. Garry's Mod, if you aren't familiar, is a physics sandbox that is itself a mod of Valve's original Source Engine. On top of that, many of the projects in AmbientDruth's Workshop are horror-themed. It seems that the newest remake of this cult classic is in good hands.
Fans of P.T. or horror in general won't want to miss the chance to experience the newest iteration of Hideo Kojima's foray into the world of Silent Hill. If you're still not convinced, you can watch YouTuber William McMahon play through the current version (as of writing this article) on his channel, or check out the Workshop page if you'd like to play PT for yourself.