An incredibly successful horror experience - like the most effective virtual haunted house.
I never thought I'd get to play this, but thanks to the very impressive P.T Emulation I was finally able to...eight years after the fact.
I'd wager that this teaser, the cancellation of "Silent Hills" and the falling out of Kojima and Konami has to be the most famous and widely talked about video game "controversy" in recent times - and rightfully so. I've watched the gameplay of the teaser numerous times before, lamented the cancellation of the project as well as the removal of this teaser off of the PSN store and really never forgot about it. I figured the only way I would ever get to play this would be if I came into a windfall of disposable income and was able to buy someone's very expensive second hand PS4 off Ebay with P.T. installed. But, obviously, that's not the case.
So I went into playing this for the first time basically knowing all it had to offer and how it operated. I've seen the jump scares, the weird jelly bean baby, the way the game starts to fuck with you and everything. But playing it really is its own unique experience, something that is not captured well enough unless you do sit down and play it yourself. The atmosphere, the experimental nature of the looping hallway, the lack of action from your player character, the tiny bits of story given to you from the radio as well as supremely creepy visual clues all makes for a really effective short horror game. And at the end of it, I have to admit, I felt a bit emotional watching the teaser for the never-to-be "Silent Hills" as the Silent Hill theme played out. A lament for a future that will not be, and a horribly ironic and sad viewing with the knowledge of modern day Konami in mind.
HOWEVER, I have to stress that (while I know that this "demo" is allegedly detached from what the game was planned to be) this works best as being this short of a game, a game that has nothing to do with Silent Hill.
First person horror games where you walk around and have very little control over your character and are there simply to just walk to the next scripted "scare" moment is both horribly uninteresting to me and absolutely NOT what I would want out of a Silent Hill game. Additionally, Kojima is not, in my eyes, a good fit for Silent Hill. His method of storytelling is over-the-top, blatant, and frankly incredibly cheesy at times. And while the scares in P.T. are effective, I would fear that a Kojima Silent Hill game would fail to capture the specific detached, mysterious, deeply symbolic and psychologically taxing atmosphere of the Team Silent games. Now, I am sure that "Silent Hills" would have been a big step-up from the post-Team Silent Silent Hill games, but that is an extremely low bar. I still would have loved to see what this game could have become (especially after learning about the involvement of Junji Ito), but maybe it's better left to our collective imaginations. A part of me feels that our expectations for a game such as this and the years of wondering what could have been far exceeds what Kojima's interpretation of Silent Hill would have turned out to be. But, of course, we'll never know - and maybe we're better off for it.
Regardless, P.T. stands alone as an impressive and highly unique experiment that I think should be preserved, remembered, and discussed for a long time to come.
Unrelated but, and I don't know if this is just me, "Silent Hills" always seemed like a really dumb title.
I never thought I'd get to play this, but thanks to the very impressive P.T Emulation I was finally able to...eight years after the fact.
I'd wager that this teaser, the cancellation of "Silent Hills" and the falling out of Kojima and Konami has to be the most famous and widely talked about video game "controversy" in recent times - and rightfully so. I've watched the gameplay of the teaser numerous times before, lamented the cancellation of the project as well as the removal of this teaser off of the PSN store and really never forgot about it. I figured the only way I would ever get to play this would be if I came into a windfall of disposable income and was able to buy someone's very expensive second hand PS4 off Ebay with P.T. installed. But, obviously, that's not the case.
So I went into playing this for the first time basically knowing all it had to offer and how it operated. I've seen the jump scares, the weird jelly bean baby, the way the game starts to fuck with you and everything. But playing it really is its own unique experience, something that is not captured well enough unless you do sit down and play it yourself. The atmosphere, the experimental nature of the looping hallway, the lack of action from your player character, the tiny bits of story given to you from the radio as well as supremely creepy visual clues all makes for a really effective short horror game. And at the end of it, I have to admit, I felt a bit emotional watching the teaser for the never-to-be "Silent Hills" as the Silent Hill theme played out. A lament for a future that will not be, and a horribly ironic and sad viewing with the knowledge of modern day Konami in mind.
HOWEVER, I have to stress that (while I know that this "demo" is allegedly detached from what the game was planned to be) this works best as being this short of a game, a game that has nothing to do with Silent Hill.
First person horror games where you walk around and have very little control over your character and are there simply to just walk to the next scripted "scare" moment is both horribly uninteresting to me and absolutely NOT what I would want out of a Silent Hill game. Additionally, Kojima is not, in my eyes, a good fit for Silent Hill. His method of storytelling is over-the-top, blatant, and frankly incredibly cheesy at times. And while the scares in P.T. are effective, I would fear that a Kojima Silent Hill game would fail to capture the specific detached, mysterious, deeply symbolic and psychologically taxing atmosphere of the Team Silent games. Now, I am sure that "Silent Hills" would have been a big step-up from the post-Team Silent Silent Hill games, but that is an extremely low bar. I still would have loved to see what this game could have become (especially after learning about the involvement of Junji Ito), but maybe it's better left to our collective imaginations. A part of me feels that our expectations for a game such as this and the years of wondering what could have been far exceeds what Kojima's interpretation of Silent Hill would have turned out to be. But, of course, we'll never know - and maybe we're better off for it.
Regardless, P.T. stands alone as an impressive and highly unique experiment that I think should be preserved, remembered, and discussed for a long time to come.
Unrelated but, and I don't know if this is just me, "Silent Hills" always seemed like a really dumb title.