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This week marks ten years since the arrival of PT, Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro’s playable teaser for the canceled Silent Hills. Its age seems hard to believe. For one, it’s still a visually stunning and terrifying game that has doubled as an endless well of inspiration for horror developers. Its influence is undeniable across indies and big-budget releases alike. However, it’s not the above-repute masterpiece it’s often hailed as, and its legacy is complicated by how eagerly developers have twisted or dully rehashed its ideas.
The game’s success came about in mid-2014 when mainstream horror games were struggling, despite the enormity of Resident Evil and Silent Hill in years past. The former had become a self-parody of itself, with Resi 6 being more ridiculous than terrifying, while the latter was forever stuck in the shadow of Silent Hill 2, with the Western-made sequels ditching scares for action. Indie games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent earned huge success, but the genre’s broader mainstream appeal was still MIA, even with The Evil Within and Alien: Isolation just on the horizon. Then PT suddenly launched onto the PlayStation Store, and within a day it felt like horror was back via a vision of its future.
Survival horror is all about vulnerability, whether it’s the cupboard-hiding of The Dark Descent or your ineffectiveness against the shambling forms of Silent Hill. PT trims that idea to its most taught, putting you into an L-shaped corridor that you then revisit again and again and again, with minor and major changes spurring you onwards and cultivating a growing unease.
While it functions well as a mini horror game in its own right, its primary purpose was to set up the doomed Silent Hills, which results in an odd ending. The bulk of PT is interesting, slowly and effectively drawing you into the story with mounting, ever-varied scares. Yet all of this effective build-up is undermined by the arbitrary task of collecting scraps of photographs in the hopes of getting a phone to ring. It’s inconclusive and unsatisfying.
Sadly, once you’ve pieced it all together, PT’s narrative is neither especially meaningful nor fresh. The story is an unpleasant one, with the radio, environment, and wounded ghost Lisa slowly revealing that this home is haunted because it once housed a husband and father who murdered his family. It’s thin, lacking in human insight, and offers no resolution for Lisa beyond the grave. The house’s horrific backstory is simply there to disturb you, and it leaves an unpleasant taste given the realities of domestic violence.
There also seems to be a collective memory of the game as pure terror, which works given PT’s brief runtime but is hard to imagine extended out into a full-length experience. Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent, for instance, might have seemed like the savior of survival horror back in 2010 with its rave reviews and stunning sales, but its relentlessness and indie origins meant the series never quite blossomed into the next Resi. Its sequel, The Chinese Room’s A Machine for Pigs, struggled to recapture that same lighting-in-a-bottle moment in 2013. But then Frictional returned to the Amnesia series in 2020 for Rebirth, which took all the right lessons from PT and, in the process, showed a way forward for deepening horror.
Set in the arid Algerian desert, Rebirth boasts plenty of pulse-pounding moments, with monsters chasing you down hallways and leaving you quivering in corners. However, it also curates its best setpieces similarly to PT, stopping the narrative from disappearing behind endless mazes and pursuits. The tale’s masterstroke is that it truly cares about its lead, a pregnant woman named Tasi searching for her companions following a horrific plane crash.
Tasi’s pregnancy also factors into the gameplay, as you can interact with her belly to reduce her fear level. This desperate scenario gives you even more reason to avoid a nasty death at the hands of the game’s many monsters. Such a human approach expands Rebirth’s tale beyond the slasher fare underpinning games like Alien: Isolation, and it becomes a philosophical tale about what people do to survive and whether one person outweighs many.
There’s certainly still merit to PT’s uniquely concise approach a full decade later. It’s also easy to see its influence across the countless pretenders that flood Steam to this day. While Konami infamously delisted PT in 2015, you can still find and enjoy a range of faithful fan recreations on PC. But rather than playing Kojima and del Toro’s bite-sized nightmare yet again, or any of its less interesting derivatives, I’d instead pitch you on Amnesia: Rebirth’s must-play evolution of PT.
It presents an experience that is not just unsettling but also meaningful, and it highlights horror gaming’s potential to reach more people by not just going for the jugular. This isn’t to say all horror games would benefit from ditching the single-minded pursuit of terrifying you. A look at Amnesia: Rebirth’s complex and uniquely engaging approach, however, suggests a way to break free of PT’s loop while doing proper justice to its best ideas and tight, authored scares.
