Purgatorial Torment
“I thought: ‘Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead.” And I also thought: “This means the beyond is not happy.”
-Invisible Cities
“Now, he is dust, dust which remembers what it was to be a man and can do nothing with that knowledge. He curses me. He damns me as a coward and a fraud.”
-The Fisherman
Don’t touch that dial now, we’re just getting started.
You can’t trust the tap water.
204863
Look behind you. I said, look behind you.
-P.T.
P.T. takes place in a single hallway. Everybody who visited that hallway — glimpsed that hallway, seen a reconstruction of that hallway, found that hallway — can turn it over in their mind. The line, the sharp corner, the other line. Neither straight nor sinuous, a corner with two lines. Drawn, it’s the lopsided half of an uneasy rectangle.
There is nothing particularly noteworthy about this shape. It does not set your teeth on edge or howl with haunted intensity. It carries no effluvium. It is not demented. It’s an L rotated by 180 degrees, set in plaster, and left to hold itself against the outside. It is a hallway.
And yet.
Surely it was just the awareness that something had to happen in this scary game, such that preemptive measures had to be taken. Hackles raised, reflexes alert, scanning for danger. At the same time, maybe some places really do just command atavisms of fear so intense that no explanation seems sufficient. Whatever the case, it started with the turn beyond the hall.
Houses are full of such stringent corners, but this one is a thing of subtle but immediate malice. It’s just too far away, just too unable to communicate anything about what might be seen when the corner is turned. It’s the closet in the dark, or what sounds like a knock on a shuttered window after midnight. The end of the hallway suggests a reality that cannot be debunked until the corner is turned. Nothing can be known until you will yourself forward. And if you don’t turn the corner first, maybe something else will. Best to keep moving.
Beyond the corner, one can theoretically reign supreme over the hallway’s shape, taking a dry comfort in the removal of its mystery. You can look down both ends of the hall, parking yourself where everything can be seen… just about. Here, the foyer — the unspoken aspect of the shape, with its little boxy vestigiality — exists to trouble you. A rare place where you can look forward and sidestep more than a few inches in either direction. In other words, a space with corners: a sliver of openness to torture an already uncertain existence.
In a space where terrible things will happen, the only comfort can come from establishing certain expectations. P.T. is about the fear in such transgressions, suggesting that no foundation can be laid until it’s far too late. A typical hallway might allow the unexpected to come from one end or the other, but never from the side; when its contours can hide something, it feels like they’ve already betrayed you. Something might jump from the left, which gets you thinking about other kinds of betrayal. In time, even the walls might hold their own surprises.
Even traditional anxiety can be felt in the presence of two locked doors. One of them will open before the end of P.T. (if “end” is really the word for it), and it’ll unsettle you as itself before it can unsettle you with the contents therein. The other, which clearly leads outside, never opens at all. Knowing this should rob some of its power, but it never does — the one door that won’t open, after all, is the only potential exit. It exists only to taunt and terrify. It might be an escape, and it might be something else. All possibilities seems primed to do more harm than good — more of the same, or something different.
At the end of the hallway, one can find the only change in elevation. It’s small, not calamitous. The stairs feel like porch steps more than anything. Below this small descent is the final door, evoking the entrance to a dreaded basement or some kind of concrete bunker. More than likely a garage, though you’ll never earn the satisfaction of knowing. We all know why.
Through it, the journey reverses: the repeating hallway. The most definable characteristic of P.T. is that scratchy, deteriorating loop. But then again, as one tends to notice, the loop isn’t level with some imagined foundation. On each turn of the screw, that little descent is maintained. A literal downward spiral.
Places become personified, and even pared to its essentials, something (or everything) about this hallway commands anxious shivers. Every further detail, contextual or otherwise, only deepens the sense that something about it is utterly wrong, primevally vile. You will have far, far too much time to analyze it from end to end, but none of your knowledge will place you at ease. To dissect (vivisect) it only throws up further warnings.
Stepping back to examine the physical architecture of the environment, for instance; its innate strangeness doesn’t scream in your face, but it does breathe something clammy and distant into it. The hallway is unquestionably domestic in appearance. It feels like it should feel like a portion of somebody’s home. Why doesn’t it? Why does it feel like what Freud called unheimlich, or uncanny, or ultimately, unhomely? A lived-in environment as suitable for human occupation as the Catacombs of Paris.
Entertain that somebody lives here. Where are the doors? The implied “middle” of the shape — the things held within these two hallways, conjoined in their graceless precision — is empty. Nothing but a tiny bathroom fills it. There are no shut doors in any of the hallways that might logically lead somewhere, anywhere that a person could inhabit. Where’s the kitchen? The living room? A bed? If you look up in the foyer, there are railings shrouding a gaping abyss that creeps beyond the ceiling: an entire second floor, but from where? Containing what?
P.T. doesn’t even open in this hallway. Your real introduction comes in the form of a tiny concrete room — more of a cell, complete with cockroaches and countless tally marks on the wall. It’s what hides behind the fulcrum of the loop: the one thing “beyond” the hallway and, for the moment, the only thing that seems to shatter the fabrication of it. There is simply no imagining a room this unfriendly in a typical abode. And yet, here it is.
It seems like the most honest aspect of the game, and one of the few to avoid much material change. What changes is our conception of it — only revisited upon death, giving new meaning to the hundreds of scratched tallies scouring the room, marking the progression of a sentence that never seems to end. The beginning of P.T. is the statement about what follows: you will exist, restrained by fear and forgery, and I will exist unfettered. The bloody paper bag, which sits near the corner on an unsuitably normal table, suggests that sterility is not an expectation to hold.
Notably, you awaken in this room splayed on the floor. The door to the hallway creaks open, compelled by whatever is on the other side. An unseen agent. A cockroach skitters out of view and you begin to feel afraid.
Even in its default configuration, the hallway seems to inspire lines of thought that trail outwards forever. There’s the alarm clock, always (almost) an eternal minute before midnight. The teddy bear left dirtied on the floor. The eternal deluge of rain against windows that mark your barrier to a perceived Outside, perhaps a neighborhood and perhaps a specimen of endless shifting night. There’s an especially curious display resting on top of the corner cabinet, with its scattered spread of opened candy and prescription medication resting atop overturned pictures. A mess both adult and childlike. Bottles of beer scatter in whatever spaces they can claim. Near the radio, an opened banana rots forever. Nobody seems to have taken a bite out of it.
The radio is playing from the beginning. It does not begin to play — it has been playing, and you hear a snatch of something larger than yourself. The newsman recounts a recent familicide, sparing no amount of lurid detail — none at all, we can’t help but notice. There’s a casualness to his manner of speaking that conveys a passing curiosity rather than a scarring tragedy. The details draw attention to the photos nearby, unmistakably marital, depicting husband and wife. The shadows cast by echoes of unseen children stretch long.
As the radio recounts how father murdered mother, son, daughter, and one unborn baby, a seed plants itself and eventually begins to germinate. Eventually, something approaching meaning finally seems to echo through the ceaseless halls: do you know this place? Maybe you do, or did. Maybe you recognize the people in those photographs, who suddenly seem so oddly forgotten. What did I do here?
Suddenly, everything leads to one inference: This is where such people go, and here we are. A murderer at the scene of his defilement of love and order. This is the beginning of the suggestion, later more of a command, that P.T. is a kind of damnation. Jean-Paul Sartre said that Hell was other people; Stephen King figured it was likelier to be repetition.
This is a fairly dull reading, at least in practice. The problem comes from a difficulty in conception: to the unreligious, Hell is typically a fairly cartoonish concept, defined by bizarre moral assertions enforced by red devils attacking you with hot pokers. Successive horror media has largely failed to capture meaningful fear in the concept of eternal punishment, turning it into more of a cheap twist than anything resembling an existential terror.
That P.T. suggests this possibility early is important, because what it capitalizes on is less an existing image of Hell and more its symbolic totality. In Hell, after all, nothing changes. It is the absence of change. Torture never ends and wounds, though they may persist, never fester and kill. It is a state you cannot extract yourself from. Moreover, it’s inextricably inane. Typical proselytization asserts that Hell is forever; it has to be, or it holds far less potential power over people.
This calls to mind the image of a man who has been tortured, kept lucid, for thousands of years. He is so far removed from whatever sentenced him to this endless conveyor of pain that one can hardly imagine what he thinks about it. A time before pain, kept however fresh, would feel like nothing more than a passing dream. Sixty years of life, and infinity years shaped balefully by the sixty you lived.
This is the strange afterimage of the Hell conveyed in church, with its vague and inchoate flourishes. P.T. calls to mind the Hell of literary works like the Divine Comedy, where the afterlife feels less like an extension of existence and more like its alien reimagining. Here, torture is symbolic rather than generic. This contrapasso, where sin is punished by a fulfillment of a destiny chosen in life, feels as unnatural as what the doctrine insists is worthy of eternal punishment in the first place; while “equal” punishment is required, all punishment is eternal. No crime is worth less than an everlasting sentence. That we’d find the lunacy of this idea horrifying is a given — being tortured by devils is like being probed by aliens.
P.T. feels shaped by contrapasso, powered by a fear of Hell as a force of stagnation. One noteworthy detail manifests in the way your character staggers. Every step amounts to a drunken gait. If you stand still, the camera sways within the unsteadiness of a boat treading rough water. This gives you the impression that you’re stumbling through a fugal haze, eternally hungover. The beer bottles that scatter the hall, and an explicit reference made later to “drowning your sorrows in booze,” imply you’re an alcoholic; its stark consequences are manifest forever. The eternal, lucid drunk.
But we can go beyond the biblical here, bringing forward the heretofore absent spirit of Silent Hill. Still leaving the obvious elephant in the room for later, but there are many tempting parallels to be drawn between P.T. and the original tetralogy of Silent Hill games. The function of the eponymous town is especially analogous to the function of the hallway, particularly in its moral uncertainty. In both places, the underpinnings of reality itself seem both cyclical and unmistakably cruel.
Silent Hill’s own bizarre specimen of cosmic horror subversion underlines a story that shifts from the Judeo-Christian to its paganized mirror image. In the town of Silent Hill, cultists worship a “God” born from the womb of a child in unending, frozen agony. While the original Silent Hill tackles the antagonism of the cult itself, they’re largely absent from the sequel. The presence of the supernatural force they worship is nonetheless felt in a continuation of its function, which is the corporealization of scars.
In Silent Hill 2, you play as James Sunderland, who rather famously did some pretty unfortunate things to his wife. In his case, like the case of P.T.’s husband, we do not feel terribly sorry for the things he’s going to endure. But our lack of sympathy for James can’t belie the reality of the situation. Has Silent Hill brought him here to teach him a lesson? To punish him? The answer is neither: it has brought him here to feed. James Sunderland cannot move on from the things he’s done, which makes him uniquely vulnerable. No intelligence has singled him out based on a moral principle — Silent Hill is a predator, and its slobbering, masticating jaws are responding to the scent of food. His personalized agony is nothing more than stomach acid.
Does Eddie Dombrowsk deserve this? What about Angela Orosco, a victim of domestic and sexual abuse, who has only murdered her abusers after a decade or more of unending torment? The town makes these people more like themselves; it teaches them only by accident, which is the only way to escape it. In Angela’s case, she is infantilized, tormented by violent manifestations of her father, and ultimately withdraws deeper into the town’s maw. They are made victims to an abstract, overhanging thing that gorges itself indiscriminately on the potential to freeze things as they are, chewing until nothing is left but bones.
Silent Hill does not facilitate change; it is not interested in your redemption. It is interested in devouring the future with visions of the past.
This brings us back to P.T. and particularly Lisa, its only physical threat. There’s no doubting that Lisa is a victim of the event spoken about on the radio: the murdered wife. She’s an apparition, as mutilated in death as she was at the end of her life. She appears at various points, scripted or otherwise. If she catches you, she kills you, restarting the current loop. But it never feels like you’re respawning, reloading, or any of the usual forms of engagement. The feeling conveyed is one of horror followed by bleary resumption. Another tally on the wall.
Has Lisa placed us here? Is P.T. her work, a supernatural architect crafting an eternal punishment for the man who violently destroyed everything she loved? Somehow, I doubt it. Even as its categorical antagonist, Lisa is enduring her own bizarre contrapasso. Her vengeance is destined to be an empty gesture, and moreover, it doesn’t seem especially gratifying. She stops you from moving forward, doing what she surely wishes she could’ve done in life, but only temporarily. Like her, you came back. You come back over, and over, and over again.
If this is our punishment, it would just as readily be hers. We are both prisoners in the hallway: victims, even when deserving, of its whim to eat.
Lisa’s own torture seems centered in the bathroom. Initially locked, its various scares define the first several loops. It bangs against its hinges, and then something on the other side begins to sob. On the next loop, it creaks open, spilling cockroaches into the hall. A baby wails, and when we try to look through the crack, Lisa slams it shut. It’s like she’s chastising us… or protecting whatever’s inside.
Next loop: The door is already cracked open and Lisa is outside, sobbing without moving, disappearing when we come near. Finally, on the following loop, the bathroom is open and we can come inside. P.T. breaks its spell for just a moment to play a canned first-person animation of our character acquiring a flashlight, but this is its own trick — the camera directs us, in typical game fashion, to the flashlight and then, in typical P.T. fashion, allows us to discover the writhing fetus in the sink for ourselves. You can almost hear it giggling as the door locks behind us.
The bathroom is one of the few distinct provinces within the hallway, and it even includes a permanent resident: the unborn child you destroyed in the process of murdering your pregnant wife. It sits mewling in the bathroom sink like the nonsensical specter of an anti-abortion campaign, and it should not be alive. Its stubby arms twist while its useless feet kick at nothing, and every beat of its malformed heart seems to wrack its entire body, threatening to blow its chest apart. There are no eyes to peer out of its egg-shaped pustule of a head — it, it, it. An it. A poor, suffering it, whose lost potentiality wails at you with hauntological scorn.
This is all Lisa has left — her other children only exist in the hallway as fragments and pained screams, as if trapped unsalvageable in the walls — and even she can’t keep you from it. Even your first act of trespass, where the door locks behind you, seems designed more for her own distress. After this, you can visit the baby at your leisure. She can snap your neck and tear at your flesh, but she can’t stop you from coming back. You will, won’t you? On every loop, whether the baby does something or not.
There’s a sense of voyeurism in it. It’s mesmerizingly terrible and uncompromisingly disturbed. Plenty of games have capitalized on filial horror, from Dead Space 2’s adolescent body horror to Silent Hill’s own recurring imagery of birthing and being born. But rarely do they contain such a simple, detailed depiction of a suffering pre-infant. If any image in P.T. engrained itself in players, it was this one: the gyrating coffin birth, kept alive to suffer so its mother can grieve.
And later, it speaks. Naturally of things it cannot know, being unable to know anything. It does so in an absurd adult voice, flapping its lips and working organs it probably doesn’t have, describing a world it never knew filled with people it never met. That voice is the voice of the newsman on the radio — at this point, it seems to be the voice of the room itself, like in Stephen King’s 1408.
It brings us back to the act that gave birth to this place, below and beyond life.
“You got fired,” the unborn thing says. “You got fired, so you drowned your sorrows in booze. She had to get a part-time job working a grocery store cash register. Only reason she could earn a wage at all is the manager liked how she looked in a skirt. You remember, right? Exactly ten months back.”
We should remember it. Like a certain incident, it’s the kind of thing you couldn’t possibly forget, but it’s also the kind of thing you couldn’t possibly remember. Exactly ten. Maybe it’s always exactly ten. Here, it’s Lisa we’re hearing about. We’re always hearing about Lisa — she had to remember while we tried our hardest to forget. Perhaps it’s another layer to her torture, the fact that we need to be reminded of what she always knows.
One of the dominant themes of P.T. is patriarchy: the self-destruction of the Man Of The House, whose weakness can only result in the suffering of those around him. He sat around drinking; his wife had to endure a shitty job and sexual harassment just to keep their children housed and fed. It’s easy to imagine that it’s always been like this, the circumstances changing but the roles never swapping. A family, defined like many, by one man’s inability to stop experiencing inertia.
A downfall is evident in P.T., where echoes of a distant maudlin yearning seem to glitter dimly among the detritus of lives. “Forgive me, Lisa. There’s a monster inside of me” reads some prominent writing scribbled above a door, which can be roughly translated to The Devil Made Me Do It. That tarnal hallway is built from the bones of what seems to be a single tragedy, and like reality, it’s our natural urge to find out what caused it. Here, and elsewhere, we consider whether or not “the monster” is an allusion to an inner darkness or something more — a supernatural catalyst, and moreover, a conspiracy.
P.T. plays into conspiracy openly. The man on radio, who seems to lie; the repetition of numbers and patterns; references to everything from chemicals in the tap water to the 1938 incident where a broadcast of War of the Worlds directed by Orson Welles caused (apocrythal) mass panic, suggesting that aliens really did land… and never left.
Perhaps the largest chunk of P.T.’s attachment to conspiracy is ultimately, both intentionally and unintentionally, P.T. itself: a game defined by its surprise appearance, overwhelming abstruse, and subsequent disappearance; a game the subject of many theories, both shallow and deep; a game whose real world existence continues to define bizarre assumptions about how it was made and how it might eventually return; a game defined by another game that never quite existed at all, one called Silent Hills. Its spirit, unmentioned, even suffused into this very piece.
It makes sense that P.T. is a distinctly political work, Hideo Kojima being one of the principal creatives behind the Metal Gear series. I’m often surprised by how many readings sidestep this context entirely, quickly turning P.T. into a deluge of oblique Silent Hill lore references bordering a fairly anodyne interpretation that tells a story about a man goaded (even hijacked) by supernatural forces into murdering his family. A story ignited by the town of Silent Hill itself, or The Order, or the ghost of Harry Mason, or that guy on the phone in Silent Hill 3 who sings the Happy Birthday song. In other words, a conspiracy.
While there are plenty of allusions to be made between P.T. and Silent Hill (and I’ve made my fair share), they feel more like influences given precedent by the trailer at the end of the game. When it comes to actually relating P.T. to Silent Hill, the most important ties are structural and thematic: a psychological horror story shaped by sociology.
Politics are immediately at the forefront. From its initial radio broadcast, P.T. is trying to get you thinking about legislative structures and gun control. Even the bizarre pronunciation of 911 by the radio man, such that it sounds like 9/11, is likely intentional. They’re invocations of Authority, Frameworks, Big Tragic Events. They are things the average citizen doesn’t fully understand, even if they claim to — they are concepts governed largely by a cultivated, collective sciolism.
“As the Congressional Debate over gun control flares up yet again, we regret to report the murder of the wife and her two children by their husband and father,” begins the very first line of spoken dialogue. What does a “Congressional Debate” mean? It calls to mind the grandest of American illusions: a bunch of wise men in robes making good, informed decisions about the ordering of civilization. What happens instead is — not unlike the fates of the dead residents of an endless hallway — petty, useless, and often evil. What a Congressional Debate really is, after all, is a bunch of kids playing pretend.
When Congress debates gun control, the results are famously idiotic and typically horrifying — Republicans vote along party lines to use mass killings as a reason to arm more people, from teachers to filling schools with gun-toting security officers. They are paid very, very handsomely for it by the NRA, whose “Political Victory Fund” rewards simpatico political campaigns with massive paychecks. The status quo is maintained by vast machinery which really isn’t much of a conspiracy at all. They do it publicly and openly, because they can.
The gun used by the husband in P.T. was bought locally and legally. With it, he killed two children and a pregnant woman. As the radio reminds listeners, this has happened before, over and over. Two other cases are even underlined for their similarity, wherein a father purchases a rifle and murders his entire family soon after. These cases have not prevented others from occurring; they’re rarely allowed to. Nor have the specific, recurring elements of them put any barriers between an alcoholic, mentally ill father and a weapon designed expressly to kill things, even when somebody in the same state has done exactly what he’s about to do, and not long ago.
Repetition, stagnation, and inertia. These elements recur in virtually every aspect of P.T., from ones we’ve discussed to ones we haven’t. Isn’t that what the whole game is ultimately about? The maddening cycle of never seeming to get anywhere? It’s the enduring state of the 21st century writ small, what Mark Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future.” The deterioration and dismissal of new forms, replaced by a continual redressing of the old; a yearning that meets a slurry of fear, hoping and dreading for something meaningfully different.
In Ghosts of My Life, Fisher outlines a concept he already built in Capitalist Realism: the malaise of life continuing when time does not. The past invariably repeated in a world where nothing seems to happen, and where no meaningful political or cultural shift seems to occur. In other words, walking down the same hallway and continuing to see things that are superficially different, perhaps even shockingly so — a screaming refrigerator hanging from the ceiling and leaking blood, for instance. This is merely the illusion of development, much like we know the fetal thing in the sink will never grow up. Little can change the nature of the endless interstice.
In P.T.’s final loop state, where the same hallway configuration repeats until its final puzzle is solved, the smoke finally dissipates. This hallway is almost identical to the one we started in because, even as we’ve spiralled down, we’ve never gone anywhere different. Lisa will always be missing an eye and the baby will always be wailing. We’ll always be stumbling around, held in stasis by a narrative contrapasso and a society that encourages, and actively enables, the inability to escape a cycle of endlessly redressed and perpetually harrowing scenery.
Conspiracies are popular because they create excitement out of the mundane. Better yet, they can threaten seismic upheavals, always “close” and always “soon,” such that they forecast a tomorrow that never comes. They make a promise that many other things can’t, and people hold on to them (for reasons however morally and ethically upsetting) because that promise becomes so valuable that its foundation of lies can’t impeach it.
For Silent Hill faithfuls, P.T. is an object of conspiracy rather than an object about them. A game whose secrets have been assumed to foreshadow reality, reemerging in the most bewildering places. From insinuations that Kojima create the game as a coded statement about his time at Konami, to claims curated from “anonymous sources” that he developed the entire game in secret, such that even his bosses didn’t know about it until we did, to ludicrous assumptions about the nature of a piece of indie horror vaporware being the work of Kojima himself under an alias.
These ideas try to create excitement out of repetitious patterns, like Konami’s dismissal of art in the face of profit. This general human impulse is an especially potent hole for Silent Hill obsessives to fall into. Their enjoyment of a series known for unanswered questions and elaborate fan theories is an unfortunate primer for unrestrained babble about real things, where the line between harmless (if annoying) video game talk and rumors about real people quickly becomes blurred. Silent Hill games and P.T. are elaborate works of art that, occasionally, gesture towards complex secrets; for some people, the reality surrounding these games reflects their contents.
Few franchises can reflect the miasma of the current day as fully as Silent Hill: a handful of past experiences forever treasured, immortalized, and chased. Some excellent games inspiring endless attempts to recreate their stark newness, only really succeeding in regurgitating the old until it’s hard to remember what Silent Hill actuallly succeeded in doing. A bunch of people are left around to feel bad, waiting for something, anything interesting to happen again.
The same goes for P.T., which reflects the original Silent Hill tetralogy in its relative unavailability. Unlike those games, it cannot even be emulated, keeping even fairly savvy people from experiencing it properly without jumping through some major hoops. Only its epigones remain commercially available, and many of them (chiefly Layers of Fear) make P.T. feel tired in a world where it barely got to be awake. The new becomes old, and the stagnation proceeds. Another loop with superficial changes.
The final repetition of P.T. is marked by a real, genuine change: the clock strikes midnight. From here, the dedicated (and the lucky) can solve the game’s final puzzle, which involves completing a vague series of steps in order to make the baby in the sink giggle. Unsurprisingly, many of them seem to involve stopping and standing in place.
Cause three giggles, and the phone rings. Answer it, and the voice on the other end says you’ve been “chosen.” The game ends when you enter the door that resets the loop — not the front door, which remains closed even as P.T. reaches its climax, suggesting that what happens next isn’t an escape so much as a deeper plunge. Silent Hills is revealed. Roll credits.
But the Silent Hills teaser often overshadows what comes before it, which is a voice. It’s a man you’ll recognize as the person behind everything from the news on the radio to the dire proclamations of a certain baby. It’s the voice P.T., and it says the following:
Dad was such a drag. Every day he’d eat the same kind of food, dress the same, sit in front of the same kind of games… Yeah, he was just that kind of guy. But then one day, he goes and kills us all! He couldn’t even be original about the way he did it. I’m not complaining… I was dying of boredom anyway,
But guess what?
I will be coming back, and I’m bringing my new toys with me.
It’s your son at the end of everything, where all of your slething has led to a single threat: a lost future coming to distress a stagnant past. But even its passage was dissolved, canned by executives who were only interested in how much money it would’ve made. The cancellation of Silent Hills, and the permanent removal of P.T. from the only place it was officially accessible, has created another lost future to haunt the present day.
And haunt it has. Start looking, and you can see the hallway everywhere: in subsequent horror games, Hideo Kojima’s upcoming work, and even Konami’s dismal licensing of new Silent Hill games, which borrow liberally from an experience that nobody can officially play anymore. The shape of that hallway has carried on like a brand, reminding us of what P.T. accomplished and, invariably, what it never was.
Instead of leading to Silent Hills, P.T. could only ever loop back towards itself.
Sometimes, for reasons that cannot satisfy us, something happens. A game we’re excited for gets unceremoniously cancelled; a story is left unfinished; a man suddenly kills his entire family, compelled by nothing but his own inertia and a world averse to change. The mystery can be solved, but the solution will be ignored. History, like a certain hallway, repeats itself.
P.T. is a game about existing on an uneasy basis with an unchanging reality. Truth becomes muddled, lies become murky, and nothing seems to provide closure. Beyond the desiccation is a place where the new grows teeth, defined by the observer as much as what lies beyond them. A curated world, but one that obfuscates its curator; it’s easy to feed on an uncertain mind.
The gap in the door is the same as it was yesterday. The only me is me, and the only you is you. Nothing about this has been known to change.
Perhaps this is the reality too singularly frightening to bear.
