This week marks the anniversary of the arrival of PTHideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro’s playable teaser for the cancelled Silent Hills. Its age seems hard to believe. For one thing, it’s still a visually stunning and terrifying game that has served as an endless source of inspiration for horror developers. Its influence is undeniable across both indie and big-budget releases. However, it’s not the towering masterpiece it’s often celebrated as, and its legacy is complicated by how eagerly developers have twisted its ideas or rehashed them in boring ways.
The game’s success came in mid-2014, when mainstream horror games were struggling in the intervening years, despite the huge successes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. The former had become a self-parody, with Resident Evil 6 being more ridiculous than terrifying, while the latter was forever in the shadow of Silent Hill 2, with western-produced sequels replacing the scares with action. Indie games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent were hugely successful, but the genre’s wider mainstream appeal was still MIA, even as The Evil Within and Alien: Isolation were just on the horizon. Then PT suddenly launched on the PlayStation Store, and within a day it felt like horror was back in the form of a vision of its future.
Survival horror is all about vulnerability, whether it’s the hide-and-seek of The Dark Descent or being ineffective against the shambling figures of Silent Hill. PT takes this idea to its bare minimum, placing you in an L-shaped corridor that you revisit over and over again, with minor and major changes spurring you on and creating a growing sense of unease.
While it works well as a standalone mini-horror game, its main purpose was to set up the doomed Silent Hills, which leads to a strange ending. The majority of PT is interesting, slowly and effectively drawing you into the story with increasing, ever-changing horrors. Yet this effective build-up is undermined by the haphazard task of collecting scraps of photographs in the hope of making a phone ring. It’s fruitless and unsatisfying.
Unfortunately, once you put it all together, PT’s narrative is neither particularly meaningful nor refreshing. The story is uncomfortable, and the radio, the environment, and the wounded spirit slowly reveal to Lisa that this house is haunted because it once housed a husband and father who murdered his family. It’s thin, lacking in human insight, and offering no resolution for Lisa beyond the grave. The house’s horrific backstory is simply there to disturb you, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth given the reality of domestic violence.
There also seems to be a collective memory of the game as pure terror, which works given PT’s short run, but it’s hard to imagine it being expanded into a full experience. Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent, for example, might have seemed like the saviour of survival horror in 2010 with its rave reviews and eye-watering sales, but its relentlessness and indie origins meant the series never really blossomed into the next Resi. The sequel, The Chinese Room’s A Machine for Pigs, struggled to recapture the same lightning-in-a-bottle moment in 2013. But then Frictional returned to the Amnesia series in 2020 with Rebirth, which took all the right lessons from PT while showing a path for deeper horror.
Set in the arid Algerian desert, Rebirth has plenty of suspenseful moments where monsters chase you through corridors and leave you shaking in corners. However, the best scenes are arranged in a similar way to PT, so the narrative doesn’t get lost behind endless mazes and chases. The story’s twist is that it genuinely cares about its main character, a pregnant woman named Tasi, who is searching for her companions after a terrible plane crash.
Tasi’s pregnancy also plays a role in gameplay, as you can interact with her belly to lower her anxiety levels. This desperate scenario gives you even more reasons to avoid a horrific death at the hands of the game’s many monsters. Such a human approach expands Rebirth’s story beyond the slasher fare that underlies games like Alien: Isolation, and it becomes a philosophical tale about what people do to survive, and whether one person weighs more than many others.
PT’s uniquely succinct approach still holds up a decade later. What’s more, its influence on the countless imitators that continue to flood Steam to this day is easy to see. Although Konami infamously axed PT in 2015, you can still find and enjoy a number of faithful fan recreations on PC. But rather than replaying Kojima and del Toro’s bite-sized nightmare or one of its less interesting spin-offs, I’d recommend Amnesia: Rebirth’s essential evolution of PT instead.
It offers an experience that’s not just unsettling but meaningful, and it underscores the potential for horror games to reach more people by not just going all out. That’s not to say all horror games would benefit from abandoning the single-minded pursuit of scaring you. But a look at Amnesia: Rebirth’s complex and uniquely engaging approach shows a way to break out of PT’s loop while still living up to its best ideas and dense, homegrown shock moments.
