melmer

P.T (Playable Teaser for Silent Hills)

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Available for download on the PS4.

First person horror/puzzle/adventure experience.

Played it last night and got relatively close to the end, but the puzzles seemed super obtuse to the point where, after I switched off, I jumped in a couple of streams and these people were similarly stuck even with 600+ people helping them in the comments section. I got the impression then that this isn't explicitly meant as a solo experience and that it would require the "internet" to group together to figure it out...???sound familiar

I've just gone on Gaf this morning and found out what lies at the end of the demo/teaser game and am a little bummed that I hadn't persevered and solved the puzzles myself last night as this thing is quite unique in gaming and is definitely worthy of your time

Everyone who's owns a PS4 needs to avoid the internet today and play this.

Seems as though its pretty difficult to find in the store so i'll add direct links to the PSN webpage

EU download link: https://store.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com/#!/en-gb/games/pt-demo/cid=EP4511-CUSA01114_00-PPPPPPPPTTTTTTTT

US download link: https://store.sonyentertainmentnetwork.com/#!/en-ca/games/pt/cid=UP4511-CUSA01127_00-PPPPPPPPTTTTTTTT

"*Avoid playing if you have a heart condition"

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okay, if you guys need some more convincing. I'd call this thing the spiritual successor to the room part in Silent Hill 4: The Room

 

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This is a really cool concept and execution, spoiled in the Internet age because the secret didn't last more than 5 minutes after it was discovered.

 

I don't have a PS4 but the footage I've seen looks nice. I can't imagine the full game will use the same mechanics/perspective as P.T but it would help make it relevant again.

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This was a really fascinating demo.  I didn't get to finish it because I got stuck and was interrupted by a baby that I didn't want to play it in front of.  But man, super great atmosphere and it's GORGEOUS.  I look forward to trying it out some more.

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I watched Klepeck play this last night.

 

It's uhhh... interesting. I think I am more jazzed out the marketing aspect of this then anything. The horror elements in the game seemed really cliche and the "puzzle" solving was seriously obtuse... then again, maybe it's because I was watching someone play it, it came off as impenetrable. :)

 

Other than that, it seems a little, I dunno, bland for a Silent Hill? I'm not an expert in the series though, but there was enough of a tone here to be curious if they can carry more interesting elements into the main final game.

 

Also, I just finished House of Leaves a couple months ago so I was immediately interesting in a couple aspects that seem to relate to it from this demo thing.

 

But man, the marketing aspect... super cool stuff, stuff like this rarely gets pulled off as well and secretively these days.

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I played it a bit more and got to the final loop then gave up and watched it in this video

I don think that really worth my time, if I spent ten minutes coping those exact instruction would I complete it... I'm not that bothered. Watching the silent hills trailer at the end of that video is good enough for me

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Shat it after about 20 minutes. I'll still buy it.

 

I love they were able to pull this off, I just wish I hadn't found out via Twitter in reverse chronological order when I got up this morning.

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Hideo Kojima has revealed a few more details about Silent Hills at the Metal Gear Solid Gamescom press conference.

Chief among these is that Kojima Productions is developing it. We knew the studio was involved due to its logo appearing at the end of P.T., but now we know this won't be a Castlevania: Lords of Shadow situation where the studio is merely overseeing another company's development.

Kojima also stated his intent to make the game as scary as possible. “We originally wanted you to pee your pants,” he said. “Now we want you to s*** your pants.”

The enigmatic director said that he expected P.T. - which simply stands for "Playable Teaser" by the way - to take a week to solve, but instead some British lady and a few of her friends cracked the case in a couple of hours.

He did slip in one incredibly obscure hint that nobody got, however. The fake developer making P.T. was called 7780 Studios. It turns out this gets its name from the square kilometer area of Shizuoka, a Japanese prefecture that's name literally translates to "Quiet Hills". In fact, many Japanese people simply refer to the horror game series as Shizuoka.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-08-12-hideo-kojima-and-guillermo-del-toro-are-making-silent-hills

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Does "P.T." just stand for "playable teaser"? I really hope that's the case.

Edit: if I actually read the previous posts I would know this

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I'm apparently on the last loop of the hallway and haven't been able to figure it out.  The puzzles in this aren't really puzzles.... maybe one of them counts.  Mostly it's just "look at this thing to trigger a thing and then you can move on" which is not at all the same thing as a puzzle.  But most of the things you experience are really neat.

 

I'm definitely interested in how they handle the full game.

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I think the game was designed intentional extremely difficult and almost random to beat. Kojima said himself that he expected it to be a week before any one person had completed it.

Doing a bit of research it seems as though there are a set of triggers in that final loop that'll make the phone ring consisting of standing in certain places at certain times and waiting for the sound of a baby laughing. The latest guide i've seen has people shouting into the microphone at a set time :/ I think the aim of it was that if 1000 people were all randomly trying stuff in that last loop, 1 person may just by coincidence preform the correct action that'll trigger the ending.

Especially considering the message you get when the phone rings is "you have been chosen". That says to me that only a select few are supposed to "finish"

What I'm really trying to say is once you get to that final loop, just give up and watch it on youtube

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Oh shit, he's wearing a hoodie under a jacket. The legacy continues

I think we can consider that representative of what the game will look like, or "in game graphics" if you will. It looks about on par with MGSV which does all of it's cinematics in engine. Look at me talking about things I haven't a clue about like engines, the only engine I'm familiar with is the little engine that could, and even that's a completely lie for the purposes of this joke, I never even read it, you can check my goodreads

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You're probably not far off Mington.

 

I have no idea what Kojima studios is at this point, but as someone who follows the job boards, they have been hiring hundreds and hundreds of people over the past year and half, so it's safe to say the studio is gigantic at this point.

 

If one half of the studio is using the FOX engine for MGS then it would be ridiculous to think they would use something else for Silent Hill... but it does happen, I just think it's way more common these days that one studio/publisher starts to share the same technology. 

 

The one thing that is going to start throwing people off is PBR (Physically Based Rendering.. though I think this has a bunch of names, photo based rendering, image based rendering, whatever) it's a lighting and material model that is going into nearly every next gen engine and has a very defined look to it. The problem is that look, looks basically the same no matter what engine you're using, so we can easily start mistaking one engine for the other. Then you will have different studios doing their own stylization on the art and that will throw everyone for a loop.

 

Every engine has quirks and a way to do things, so I'm sure someone who has spent some time in FOX engine or MGS could probably play PT and spot the quirks. Sadly I am not one of those people, but I'd say its a safe assumption its the same engine.

 

Also I am not an expert, so I may have got some of the tech mixed up, just based on what I know and what I am seeing across studios and tech.

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I'm sure it's already been confirmed this will run on FOX engine. He also said something pretty interesting about how they intended that it not be obvious what this was or who was involved until the player had seen the credits so a lot of the look of it including the fact it only runs at 30fps was a move to deceive and purposely look like the output of a smaller studio. Bearing that in mind I can't wait to see what this game is as I don't think PT is going to be especially representative of the final product in anything other than feel and tone.

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Giant Bomb put the Spookin' With Scoops/Quick Look of this up as regular content instead of premium, so I've been watching a bit of it. That is one really effective teaser.

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I feel as though I'm quite in the minority when it comes to PT.  While I thought it started with a strong atmosphere it quickly settled into it being just a string of cliches and then worse into mundane boredom as the teaser was just not a cohesive piece.  I remember early in the experience not being able to progress once the bathroom door was cracked open.  I'd looked at it with R3 plenty of times. Turned out I hadn't used R3 from quite the right angle.  This isn't scary or effective design.  It's just obtuse and there's no feedback.

Maybe it was just me but I felt the teaser did a terrible job at guiding an experience for the player.  I don't mean telling me what to do (I love discovery and players being left to their own devices) I mean even letting me know there was even things I could do.  I finished the teaser up to the silent hills trailer and my most felt emotions were boredom, frustration and annoyance (mainly due to the limited sound design).

 

Also being another tormenting the player for their sins style situation felt a bit overdone at this point. Silent Hill isn't only that option.

 

Now the game isn't Silent Hills.  There is no reason to think any design elements from PT relate to the game at all. It just didn't fill me with confidence and excitement.

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I have a hard time parsing what a Hideo Kojima Silent Hill game would be. I get why Del Toro is involved, that's a smart fit. His style of weird and scary was always very 'SH'. But Kojima? It doesn't help that I've never enjoyed any of his games, notably because of how dissonant they were tonally (the weird action thriller / goofy comedy worked as much for me as that train wreck of a 'comedy' film, True Lies, did). Since Silent Hill as a series is all about tone, that doesn't exactly instil a lot of confidence in me.

On the other hand, the series is all but played out, so who gives a fuck? After SH3 there hasn't been a single one (barring perhaps Shattered Memories which I desperately want to get my hands on!) worth the effort. Even a poor Kojima attempt would rise above mediocre stuff like Homecoming and - as I hear - Downpour.

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I love Metal Gear Solid and all of the Silent Hill games by Team Silent, but it doesn't seem like a good fit to me. I'm wondering what Hideo's role is going to be exactly, because there are very few things about the MGS series that I feel would fit in this universe. 

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Shattered Memories is dead good, I loved the sound effects from the wii remote and the surreal Twin Peaks vibe it gave off. Worth softmodding your Wii for it if you can't source a legitimate copy.

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Hideo's presence can really be felt through the radio voice over, which I enjoyed, and certain other glitches. I watched a friend's stream and loved the first half before it kind of descends into obscure puzzles. It's really weird that PT is so similar to a lot of the indie FPS horror games that have been all the rage, but with so much more polish.

The design did seem overly frustrating and obscure, apparently Hideo thought it would take people a  week to figure it out, so it was purposeful. Hopefully not a lot of that design makes it into the actual game. The idea of scrutinizing a small highly detailed space in first person sounds great if the space is more responsive.

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I liked watching and following this whole P.T. thing and it certainly was more interesting than Kojima's last game reveal stunt with Phantom Pain and Moby Dick Studios. Now that the mystery is solved, the teaser is kind of a weird thing though - hopefully people checking it out have the knowledge that it was created as a cryptic/obscure mystery, and not as a traditional demo experience. It's difficult to imagine what exactly Kojima Production's version of Silent Hill would be like but I'm pretty optimistic for a few reasons:

 

1) Normal mundane environments have always been a big part of Silent Hill and as the P.T shows, Fox Engine is capable of rendering some gorgeously boring hallways (even some of the early engine demonstrations were about office meeting rooms http://www.themarysue.com/fox-engine-compared-to-real-life/ ). 2) This is the first time since Team Silent's games (1-4) that a japanese developer is making a Silent Hill and I believe that one of the original games' main strengths was that eastern interpretation of western horror elements. 3) What little Kojima has talked about this project and horror in general is quite encouraging. He has tweeted how it is lack of information that makes us usually feel uncomfortable/scared and that fits great with the world of Silent Hill that is always shrouded with literal and metaphorical fog. (And if Hideo wants to be goofy, there is the great tradition of alternate endings...)

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It's really weird that PT is so similar to a lot of the indie FPS horror games that have been all the rage, but with so much more polish.

"We wanted this game to look like it came from an independent developer..." Hideo Kojima

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I have a hard time parsing what a Hideo Kojima Silent Hill game would be. I get why Del Toro is involved, that's a smart fit. His style of weird and scary was always very 'SH'. But Kojima? It doesn't help that I've never enjoyed any of his games, notably because of how dissonant they were tonally (the weird action thriller / goofy comedy worked as much for me as that train wreck of a 'comedy' film, True Lies, did). Since Silent Hill as a series is all about tone, that doesn't exactly instil a lot of confidence in me.

 

I feel the same, though I'd argue old, pre-MGS4 Kojima games did have a very specific tone that he'd hit constantly. The problem now is that Kojima wants to tell dark, grimy stories about genocide, civil warfare, racism, sexual assault, torture, filled to the brim with Guantanamo Bay references, and Sacco and Vanzetti allusions...while also having the game feature a Voldemort looking ass villain called SKULLFACE, poop jokes, wacky easter eggs, campy lines ("They played us like a GODDAMN FIDDLE"), and zany cardboard box shenanigans featuring naked swimsuit model sprays. Like, Kojima has always been insidiously sexist and fucking stupid, but once MGS4 and then MGS: GZ came out, it stopped being cute and playful, and became plain offensive and shameless. I find it hard to trust this kind of guy to tackle this specific series. Jack de Quidt said it best:

 

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I also cannot believe that Del Toro sees something in Kojima. They couldn't be more polar opposites in what they produce. Del Toro's thing (and why I adore the man) is to find beauty and majesty within genre tropes and classical horror/monster movie archetypes, and then humanize them and the narrative to the point that we empathize with these creatures and misfits that we've been trained to fear in other films, with no irony or cynicism involved. Kojima uses genre tropes and pulp to instill preachy (yet often important) messages and obnoxious (yet often effective) satire. He revels in camp, but isn't detached enough to honestly dissect and analyze the problems inherent in that camp, and that'd be FINE if he weren't mixing that camp shit with the aforementioned themes I just listed now. Also: NANOMACHINES.

 

Here's hoping Del Toro can smack some sense into Kojima's head while making Silent Hills. Knowing how much of a movie nerd Kojima is, he's bound to listen.\

 

As to my opinion of the actual game: It was pretty effective, it has a trite narrative context, but the photo realistic environment and effects instilled a sense of familiarity that elevated it greatly. There seemed to be more Del Toro than Kojima in how the game messed with the player (cockroaches, clocks, hanging lights, fetuses, all Del Toro staples), while all the obvious 4th wall breaking shit was obviously Kojima. Overall, really scary and very well done, and don't really agree that the game fails because of its vagueness. The clues exist, its just the game creates such an oppressive and dreadful atmosphere that you are scared to look closer at the small details and seek out ways to progress. And I love the fact that they actually systemized that aspect as well, making the only interaction in the game be to look CLOSER at things. Very ingenious and well done overall. 

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That was an effective post Cine, now I'm kind of worried, well let's hope Metal Gear keeps Kojima busy.

 

Here's hoping Del Toro can smack some sense into Kojima's head while making Silent Hills. Knowing how much of a movie nerd Kojima is, he's bound to listen.\

 

+ He should really be watching Kindergarten Cop and taking notes.

 

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