What is “P.T.?”

About two weeks ago, a free game exclusively for the PS4 popped up almost instantaneously after its announcement at Gamescom, an annual video game trade fair in Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The game is called “P.T.” and nobody had any idea what it was or what to expect from it. I downloaded it from the Playstation Store as soon as I heard of its announcement, but I wasn’t one of the smart ones to crack the puzzle on day one. Since I will be revealing what “P.T.” actually is, expect to find spoilers. If you haven’t played “P.T.” and plan to play it, stop reading now.

“P.T.” turned out to be a horror game in which you were stuck in a time loop in what seemed to be a haunted house. You were confined in an L-shaped hallway and your character wasn’t necessarily able to interact with any of the objects in the hallway. But as you pass through the hallway at various times things start to change and get creepy.

Eventually you come across a bunch of puzzles, including one where you have to bring letters from one side of the hallway to the other and another where you have to find a hole in the wall and look through it. Finally, the most debated puzzle of the game, the last puzzle where the solution doesn’t always seem to match up among the players. As of now, there are 13 solutions (as if the game weren’t creepy enough) that seem to work, but not all the time.

To most of the people who watched videos of “P.T.” rather than playing it, the game did not make any sense. But that was the whole point. It turns out that “P.T.” stood for “Playable Teaser.” The main question was, “a teaser for what?”

When you beat the game a trailer starts to roll and you soon find out that the game is a beautiful masterpiece from the brilliant minds of Hideo Kojima, director and writer of the Metal Gear Solid series, and Guillermo Del Toro, director of Pacific Rim and Pan’s Labyrinth. The main character was played by none other than Norman Reedus (“The Walking Dead” TV series, “The Boondock Saints”), who was cleverly obscured during the game when you looked at a mirror. The trailer finally tells you what the game was teasing all along: “Silent Hills.”

Going back to not making any sense, this is actually expected of Kojima, and the whole Silent Hill franchise. Silent Hill is most notable for its psychological horror and not making any sense unless you actually get to experience the game. Knowing the works of Kojima and Del Toro, this upcoming Silent Hill game will be a terrifying experience.