P.T. hack reveals a horror game that's somehow even scarier than we previously thought
P.T., the “Playable Teaser” for a Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro-led Silent Hill that never was, is the closest video games have come to digitally recreating a nightmare. From a first-person perspective, players walk the endlessly looping hallways of a seemingly empty house to the sound of a wailing baby, crackling radio station, and gurgled moaning. From time to time, they may find a talking fetus in a bathroom sink or get screamed at by a menacing ghost woman called Lisa.
Released a little over 5 years ago, P.T. has since become infamous not just because it’s a teaser for a cancelled game that can no longer even be downloaded, but because it’s packed full of strange secrets. Even now, as it turns out, there’s more, absurdly frightening stuff to find in its code.
This is made horrifyingly clear in a Twitter thread by Lance McDonald, who went into the game’s guts to discover that whenever the player’s hearing the sounds of an invisible ghost, that ghost is literally floating right there behind them. Because P.T.’s camera emulates the player’s field of view, turning around to check out where Lisa’s noises are coming from reveals nothing. Hacking the game so it’s possible to see “behind…without actually turning around,” though, shows that she’s actually “[attached] to the player’s back” from the moment a key item is picked up in-game.