Revisiting 2014's games as part of the GOTY event.

P.T. has become so firmly enshrined in the horror game canon so as to become more myth than game nowadays. In the decade since it's release, the entire game has been datamined, talked at-length, and imitated ad nauseum. While it broke all the rules of horror game design when it came out, its long corridors and dark hallways have, over the coming years, become the standard-issue structures it once subverted. The legacy of P.T., as such, is all around us, in so many of the successive horror games that have come out, from last year's Room 8 to Resident Evill Village to the new Garten of Banban.

That being said, it's still a good game.

The two things that seperated P.T. from every other horror game at the time was structuring and the story. From cut dialogue, we know that the player character is the father that murdered Lisa and the kids, something already heavily implied by dialogue and events in the game (particularly when the player states "Forgive me Lisa. There's a monster inside of me.") This opens up a can of worms. After all, there was a father on the radio, so are there multiple yous, as the paper bag alluded to? Is this all a hallucination or a nightmare by the father over his guilt? That's not even getting into the feminist interpretation of the game that would naturally arise from such a scenario.

(review in progress)