Still hurts. It hurts when you are promised the most awesome thing ever and a while later, those same folks rip your heart out, stomp on it and throw it in the garbage can. After all these years I should have known better, from the top of my years of experience and wise facial hair.

But no. Hype appears in regular intervals and it should come with a ‘handle with caution’ warning sticker, but it doesn’t. Konami did it with Silent Hills, or P.T. which stands for playable teaser, and after getting everyone excited for a terrific and spooky mix of Kojima, Del Toro and Norman Reedus, it stabbed us, players, in the back and twisted the knife.

I don’t think I’m overstating it when I say that Silent Hills had the potential to become the greatest horror game ever devised. Kojima’s unparalleled penchant for the weird – Death Stranding says hi – could be the perfect match for Del Toro’s fantastic narrative delights, and a top performance from Norman Reedus would be the bloody cherry on top of this video game classic to be.

‘Screw this game, who needs money anyway?’

When the disgusting brown substance hit the fan, Konami and Kojima parted ways and it all went downhill. Silent Hills was canceled and Konami erased the P.T. demo from existence faster than you were at deleting the Facebook photos of your ex-girlfriend when you got into a relationship with your new, cute but slightly possessive and resentful sweetheart.

Luckily, and since not everyone was able to play this cult classic teaser, there are some fan projects around that attempt to fulfil that gap. One of them by Qimsar, specifically for PC and running on the Unreal Engine is playable from start to finish right now. Having not played the original PlayStation 4 P.T. teaser, I went ahead and tried it to see if it really was worth all the hype and the surge of ‘hear me scream’ YouTube videos.

While I knew that this isn’t the final version, it already looks the part and successfully translates the creepy atmosphere from the original. For a game with such a short duration and apparent limited scope, P.T. manages to be one of the scariest experiences that I’ve ever enjoyed. Make no mistake, this one will send chills down your spine. But what makes a game about an eternally-looping hallway so disturbing?

Escalation. The sense of vulnerability. The inevitable realization that each time you make progress and cross that basement door, you are going to stumble across something new, something creepy. Even when you don’t, the feeling alone will give you chills. P.T. plays with your mind, and your mind plays with you in ways that are hard to resist. Less is more indeed.

You’re tearing me apart, Konami!

While deeply effective at everything that makes P.T. memorable, this PC fan version is still in development – at least until Konami ceases and desists the developer’s arse – and is lacking in a few departments, mainly animation. If you’re familiar with the original, you’ll notice a disturbing lack of cockroaches, some minor details missing, or how Lisa won’t jump on you with the same ‘elegance’ as she used to. Nothing to really complain about, since you have all the meaty bits, including the eerie sound and lighting, and the odd crash – not real crashes, I didn’t get any of those, but actual, Kojima-designed fake crashes.

I must admit that I didn’t complete the final, insane puzzle of P.T.. I was clueless about what to do, and when I looked for a solution, I was glad that I didn’t spend much time inspecting the haunted house. Even for Kojima, this is a new standard in WTF!?, a puzzle so random, so illogical that up to this day, players haven’t reached a consensus on the correct solution. I can tell you that it involves waiting for baby giggles, walking an exact number of steps, hooking up a mic and talking/whispering/screaming into it at a certain time, and more. All of this under a strict timing. I can’t tell if the PC version works the same way – with the mic and all –, but please, be my guest and let me know if it does.

P.T. is everything that a new Silent Hill game should be – creepy, enigmatic, surreal, a bloody and incoherent mess of real life tragedy and supernatural elements. It doesn’t make sense, but that is part of the joy, as fans of the series know by now. It’s mostly open to interpretation – although there are many clues pointing to the big role that your character plays in this story – and there is no actual line defining what is real and what is the by-product of a demented mind.

This makes no sense at all – and I love it!

With so many movies leaving everything to interpretation – in fact, more than it should be allowed by law as it is clearly seen as lazy writing –, it’s odd that we don’t see more games going down the same path. I like a bit of closure in my games, but I’m perfectly fine when they don’t spell everything to me. I don’t need to be spoon-fed every single detail – for example, the talking fetus and what exactly is inside the fridge is left for me to interpret –, as a big part of what makes these games special is to go online and read other opinions, details that I may have missed and that make sense in the bigger picture. To discuss what I’ve experienced. It’s a game that lasts for a long time, way beyond the end credits.

But I digress. While P.T.’s story wasn’t going to be connected to the final Silent Hills game, it worked as an incredible hype machine for the greatest game that was never released. It had the talent, the tech, the writing… I dare to say that it had it all. Capcom wasn’t sleeping and quickly injected fresh blood into Resident Evil’s rotten corpse, with a seventh game that clearly took some inspiration from P.T.

Allison Road, the most shameless (or honest) P.T. copycat is going through its own horror loop, being stuck in development hell for years. Too bad, as it looks good. But no matter how good it may be, Silent Hills it is not.

No amount of Death Stranding, with its throat babies and utter madness is ever going to be an honourable replacement to Silent Hills, the greatest game never released.

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