There was such a furore surrounding the release and subsequent un-release of PT that it was
inevitable it would become the cult hit it has.
When Silent Hills was cancelled, many lamented the fact they would never be able to download
PT again as Konami purged it from the PlayStation store, whilst others felt that something was
incomplete – that even though the end of the demo states clearly that PT bears no relation
to the game it sneak-announced, something remains unfinished, unsaid.
I would argue, however, that this is perhaps the game’s biggest strength – PT is a
game about not knowing.
It’s about distorting your ideas regarding games and your role within them.
It’s about the uncanny, about turning the familiar into the unfamiliar.
In this Halloween special of Writing on Games then, I want to try and exemplify just how
PT so effectively gets under your skin.
For context, I find it somewhat fitting to compare PT to one of those five-word horror
stories you sometimes see online.
There’s a reason those are so effective at unsettling you.
They, perhaps unwittingly, evoke the Imagist tradition – clarity of expression through
economy of language.
Something like “you awoke suddenly, buried alive” works perfectly because all the fat
is removed.
How did you get there?
What happens next?
It doesn’t matter – your own experiences and fears will affect the outcome, making
the experience even more terrifying.
Think about PT in the same context – you could sum up that game, initially at least,
as “you’re at home – she’s watching.”
Again, you are left largely to fill in the blanks – where PT differs, however, is in
the economy of its visual and mechanical languages.
In most horror games, you start off in a place of little understanding, but with a sense
of purpose – there’s been a viral outbreak, there are zombies everywhere, you’ve got
to escape.
You know the drill.
As you proceed, the priority shifts from one of sheer panic to “let’s figure out what’s
going on here.”
PT, on the other hand, starts you in a place of greater understanding – it’s just you
and the hallway of a house.
On the surface, there’s nothing unusual about this hallway – you’ve probably seen
a million like it.
It’s immensely unsettling precisely because it is so uncanny – a smaller environment
means a more focused attention to detail, and it’s how this detail subtly changes
that makes PT so frightening.
As you loop through the same hallway repeatedly, it begins to feel more and more claustrophobic,
turning the home into a prison.
Even just by playing the sound of a locked door as you try to exit, PT hammers home the
feeling of entrapment.
In typical Silent Hill fashion, it’s a purgatory – it shares enough qualities with the reality
that we know that the unreality of it all feels especially unsettling.
This unreality manifests itself in details such as the radio – perhaps the most obvious
way in which the game lessens your understanding of the situation, simultaneously heightening
the terror.
As you approach the muffled voice, you find a newscaster describing a particularly tragic
familicide.
What’s odd in this case is that every so often there will be a piece of information
revealed that feels just a little out of place, like he’s going into a little too much detail.
Why would a newscaster tell us that the wife was cleaning the kitchen after making lunch
as she was shot?
Why does he describe the girl’s “good sense” as she hid in the bathroom?
Also, why does he say that the neighbours called “nine-eleven” as opposed to just
“nine-one-one”?
These elements highlight to the player that something is not quite right – there’s
too much detail that it seems out of place, but not enough that the reason for it is clear
to the player.
The seed has been planted, you must find out more.
Go around again, however, and you hear the same broadcast - expecting perhaps to hear
more revealing information, but instead your understanding becomes warped, just as the
broadcast itself becomes distorted.
Talk of the father retrieving the rifle is interrupted with phrases such as “don’t
touch that dial, we’re just getting started!” and “you can’t trust the tap water”
along with one of the more cryptic elements, the sequence of numbers repeated throughout
the game.
As the game progresses, the radio broadcasts become more and more distorted to the point
that they’re near useless in terms of information.
It’s just one way in which the game lures the player into a false sense of security
– the radio is seemingly the most reliable means of understanding the situation, but
also the human voice acts as a connective tissue of sorts to the real world.
You, perhaps subconsciously, rely on it to feel less alone in the game’s purgatory.
It’s telling you that “you know what to do” as you listen to gruesome sounds of
a woman being brutally murdered.
It gets you to visualise the action (heightened due to the fact you look through a peephole
to trigger it), then implies responsibility, possibly for an event that hasn’t even occurred
yet.
It’s heavily implied you’re the killer – maybe you’re the voice on the radio
too?
Maybe this voice you initially found comfort in is in your head?
Eventually you realise it has turned on you just like everything else in the environment.
It’s minimalist in its approach – like an early Steve Reich piece that starts out
as one thing, but changes little details every so often that by the time it reaches its conclusion,
it’s a different beast entirely and, importantly, you didn’t even realise.
Eventually, you don’t even care about finding out more regarding your situation– you just
want to survive it.
The game wears down your resolve bit by bit by subtly drawing your attention to little
details, then subverting their reliability at every turn.
You cannot grasp anything fully within the world of PT and, as the presence of Lisa confirms
(that is, the ghastly apparition in the game), there’s always the niggling feeling that
you’re being watched, that your strings are being pulled.
What is perhaps most unsettling, however, is how your strings are getting pulled from
outside the game.
The game’s final puzzle is largely criticised for being overly cryptic – indeed, when
my friend and I played it late one night, we found it was the only part of the game
we needed to use a guide for, and even then, the solution proved unreliable.
As we sat watching the Silent Hills teaser play out after beating it, we didn’t feel
satisfied having resolved the terror the game had been building up.
Instead we felt confused, like the game had immersed us in this world, then suddenly become
a game again.
There had to be more than this – after I got home I couldn’t help but look into everything
further.
Nothing sat right with me – no one seemed to have concrete proof.
I looked through multiple forums filled with other people as confused and as desperate
for answers as I was, all discussing their weird theories.
I did stumble across a video by TheGrateDebate (which I will link to and you should totally
watch because it’s AMAZING) breaking down how the numbers worked, how the cryptic loading
screen played into it, how it involved flipping the numbers around and codifying them and
I realised – PT had encroached upon all our lives.
The reason the game gets under our collective skin isn’t simply because of the uncanny
nature of the environment or the terrifying appearances of Lisa – it’s because it
takes the game out of the game and makes us carry it around with us.
I only played the game once but I can’t stop thinking about it.
Hideo Kojima is the father – we are the daughter having the good sense to hide in
the bathroom, trying not to let ourselves be taken in but then he lures us out only
to shoot us point blank in the goddamn chest – “it’s just a game.”
All this from just a hallway.
Through the economy of its visual and mechanical languages, PT says far more with far less
than most games.
As such, it will rightly be considered
a classic of the horror genre.