Why You Should Play P.T.

During this year's annual Gamescom event held in Germany, a teaser was shown for a 'game' known cryptically as P.T. The game was apparently under development by the unknown 7788s studios, and appeared to be a terrifying horror experience. Well, now that it has been released publicly for some time, everybody has learnt that only part of this information is true. 

P.T is indeed a terrifying horror experience that was released on the Playstation 4 almost as soon as the trailer was shown. But that's where the assumptions end. The 'game' is in fact a demo (or Playable Teaser, hence "P.T"), and is actually a reveal for an upcoming game known as Silent Hills, which is a part of the popular horror franchise by the same name. It was developed by the iconic Hideo Kojima whom is responsible for the Metal Gear Solid line of games, along with director Guillermo Del Toro, and is by far one of the scariest games I have ever played. 

In terms of how you actually go about playing P.T, things are fairly simple. You wake up in a concrete chamber, and go through the only wooden door in front of you. From here, you slowly walk down a corridor in a typical house until you come across yet another door. Going through this will cause you to appear at the first door you came out of, which is instantly disorientating, and quickly makes you feel uneasy about where you are. This required no jump-scares or gore. By simply messing with your expectations, the game already surpasses many recent horror games within the first few minutes. 

As far as a plot is concerned,  P.T's is fairly vague. By listening to a radio broadcast that plays on repeat and finding subtle clues, you can gather that you are in the house of a family whom are all now dead. The father of the house murdered his wife and son, then finally his daughter whom he lured out of hiding. He then went on to kill himself, although it's unclear how much of that is actually true. One of the key things that stands out on the broadcast however, is that the announcer states that the daughter "had the sense to hide herself in the bathroom". Imagine how scary it is then, when you pass a door in the hall and hear crying from the inside. There's plenty of subtle yet terrifying features such as this which keep you on edge throughout your whole experience of P.T. 

By far the one factor that keeps this experience terrifying without being obnoxious or gratuitous however, is the repeating nature of it all. Every single time you go down the corridor and into the other door, you are placed instantly back at the beginning. This allows you to get incredibly familiar with your surroundings, which makes it all the more eerie when things do begin to change. It happens slightly enough at first, such as the bathroom door being slightly ajar, but soon escalates into frantic running down a seemingly empty walkway in an attempt to escape things which may or may not even exist. P.T is effective not because of what you see, but because of what you don't. It causes intense paranoia which other games could only hope to achieve, and yet has the production values of a modest indie-game. 

So why should you play P.T? Because it's one of the most refreshing, well-executed and terrifying experiences I have ever played. It looks almost photo-realistic which is always a nice feature, but this yet again just adds to the intensely scary atmosphere. It's a game in which subtlety is key, and although you can beat it through a sequence of incredibly precise and convoluted puzzles, I found it much more entertaining just to become immersed in its downright creepy feel.