It’s a minute before midnight, and you’re wandering through the front hall of a seemingly ordinary American suburban home. The place is a bit messy, but for a house that might house a young family, there’s nothing unusual at first glance. The lights flicker on and off, but that’s probably just because you hear a storm outside.
A voice comes over the radio, soothingly narrating about a man (maybe you?) who has murdered his wife and child. You take a closer look at the pile of garbage on the floor and realize that it’s all a little more sinister than you initially thought. The lights dim again, and a hoarse-voiced baby begins to cry somewhere in the house. Yes, something bad is definitely going on here.
Even though few people have actually played with this setup, many of us are very familiar with it.
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PT, Hideo Kojima’s playable trailer for the Silent Hill game he never made, was one of four installments in the horror renaissance that was to come in the summer and fall of 2014. PT and Five Nights at Freddy’s were released within days of each other in August, launching a spate of horror-inspired releases, with Alien: Isolation and The Evil Within following in October. This season of horror games left an indelible mark on the horror landscape: it marked the start of a rapid shift away from the hesitant action-shooters, cartoonish family-friendly ghost hunting games, and harrowing depictions of failed parenting in the context of a zombie apocalypse (this game is so good, they made it twice!) of the early 2010s to a more cohesive view: to truly deserve to be categorized, horror games should be about Terrible.
It’s no wonder that a decade later, you can still see the influence of PT in many, if not most, new horror games. This is despite the fact that PT itself had a very short lifespan.
When PT was released, the PlayStation 4 was barely a year old, so despite being a free-to-play game (all part of a brief ruse to portray PT as an indie title from the fictional 7780s Studio), there were still a lot of people who didn’t have access to the only platform it was once available on. Fortunately for those of us whose budgets didn’t stretch far enough to buy a brand new console at the time, 2014 was also the year Twitch truly became the premier trendsetter in the gaming world, so within hours PT was live streaming everywhere.
Normally, it would be a bit disheartening to see a trailer for a AAA horror movie with ARG elements spoiled all over the internet within a day of its release, but on the bright side, it means we have a ton of valuable information about a game that basically no longer exists. The hype surrounding Silent Hill had barely died down when, in April 2015, Konami made two of the most controversial moves in game development history: on the 15th, they canceled the full release of Silent Hill, and on the 26th, they removed Silent Hill from the PlayStation Store.
It’s still a sore spot for horror fans that we never got to play the Silent Hill game directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, starring Norman Reedus and produced by horror comic legend Junji Ito. This sentence reads like an obviously fake game leak, making it hard to believe it was ever supposed to happen. It’s only been made worse by the fact that only a million people have actually played Silent Hill, and ten years later, you still have to pay a high price for a well-used PS4, even if it can theoretically play Silent Hill.
But like its gangly ghost leader Lisa, PT left a lasting shadow despite its early demise. While Five Nights at Freddy’s was a runaway success and inevitably spawned imitators, PT’s popularity helped set the trend for realistic one-button walking sims with environmental puzzles in the indie horror genre.
Games like Layers of Fear, Visage, and the woefully unfinished Allison Road are household names in their own right, but in 2016, you can’t go far in the horror genre without encountering another game that aims to remake, deconstruct, spiritually succeed, or pay homage to the original. While its popularity has waned somewhat now, games like Haunted Bloodlines (which was hailed as a standout at the recent Steam Next Fest) still proudly acknowledge the influence of The Protagonist on its design and development choices.
But it would be an oversimplification to attribute Silent Hill’s legacy to the popularity of indie horror walking sims in the mid-2010s, as its influence on triple-A horror game development is equally evident. Hideo Kojima’s first standalone game, Death Stranding, took many inspirations from Silent Hill, and a convincing conspiracy theory posits that Silent Hill was never actually expected to enter development, and that building hype for the upcoming Kojima Productions was the real purpose of the demo all along.
Even without the tinfoil hat, it’s easy to recognize that Resident Evil – Silent Hill’s main rival for the title of the most recognisable horror franchise – has emerged from its long slump following Resident Evil 7’s PT-inspired demo, which shifted its focus from third-person action with heavily armed military personnel to a first-person story about a terrified everyman groping his way through a spooky mansion in search of his missing wife.
That’s not all. Despite its short initial lifespan, PT itself is a ghost that keeps rising from the grave: like in 2019, YouTuber Lance MacDonald dug deep into the game’s files and revealed that PT’s main enemy, Lisa, would attach to your back and hide in your blind spots for much of the game.
Did you notice that in PT, when your character takes a step forward, you hear three footsteps? That’s Lisa shuffling behind you. As a long-time horror fan, I thought I was pretty tired of the scare tactics in these horror movies, but I swear, my amygdala shrank when I realized how many times I’ve unknowingly witnessed this over the past five years.
Furthermore, Layers of Fear is one of the most notable successors to PT, and it clearly impressed Konami enough that, after completing the PT-inspired trilogy, developer Bloober Team began work on the long-awaited remake of Silent Hill 2. This has been controversial among those who feel that there is a poor fit between the expertise required to make a walking sim and remaking one of the most popular survival horror games of all time; but personally, I find it oddly gratifying to see an aspect of PT’s legacy come full circle in this way a decade later.
Likewise, Silent Hill film director Christophe Gans said PT had a notable impact on the resurrected film series, which is expected to end its long hiatus later this year with a third installment based on Silent Hill 2.
In the end, there’s still so much to say about PT a full decade after its release, and this is probably all that really needs to be said. I personally consider it one of the best and most important games of the 2010s, and I know I’m not the only one to say that. Not bad for a 90-minute walk-in-a-hallway game that almost no one has ever played.
