Trivia / Silent Hills

• Abandonware: Because of the cancellation of the game, P.T. was delisted from the PlayStation Store. One week after that, it was no longer available for download.
• Creator Breakdown: The cancellation of this along with his earlier title, Insane getting cancelled because of THQ's bankruptcy, led to Guillermo del Toro to quit directing video games for the foreseeable future.
• Dueling Games: P.T. appeared to be this with Five Nights at Freddy's, due to the demo being released in the same week. Made even stranger by the fact that Silent Hills' cancellation was announced the same day as the announcement of Five Nights at Freddy's 4.
• Executive Meddling: Konami's restructuring to focus on elevating the Konami brand over the studios that make their games led to a falling out between the company and Hideo Kojima, resulting in the game's cancellation.
• Follow the Leader: P.T. has proven really influential for a cancelled game: it inspired several imitators set in small, deceptively mundane Eldritch and Unnaturally Looping Locations, that play up Ominous Mundanity with a hyperrealist aesthetic. If there is a story, it's typically revolving around a Big, Screwed-Up Family.
  • Allison Road: Developed by British studio Lilith LTD, this unreleased game backed on Kickstarter was hailed by many as the Spiritual Successor to P.T. It kept the domestic setting, but expanded it to include the entire house, instead of just a few corridors. From the brief amount of gameplay shown in the trailer, it lived up to the reputation: hyper-realistic graphics, lots of walking around the house, creepy writing that appears in places you've already explored, and a specter-like monster to contend with. Sadly, the game was cancelled in 2016.
  • The Black Rose: Trading in the house for a unnaturally looping diner, this game about meeting a woman you're interested in at a different location features a spooky jukebox, dim red-lighting, and a malevolent female spirit.
  • Devotion: Takes place in a small apartment in Taiwan and though it has only a singular hallway, it does have the classic looping mechanic. Also features photo-realistic graphics in first-person, which is a huge departure from the storybook cut out graphics and third person perspective of the dev team's previous work Detention. The main antagonist the player has to deal with is also a female ghost.
  • Evil Inside: One of the more blatant copies, since it keeps the hallway location and looping mechanic virtually unchanged. The plot revolves around Mark trying to contact his mother through a Ouija board as she was allegedly murdered by his father before the game starts. Cue the hallway loops, psychological horror, and Red Filter of Doom.
  • FM: Sticks to the PT formula very closely (even its name pays homage), but also introduces a new mechanic: instead of looping through just a set of hallways, the door that would typically restart the loop opens up to a new location related to the story, in which the player must solve a puzzle that drops Story Breadcrumbs. Once the puzzle is solved, you can leave the room, which sends you back to the main corridor.
  • Cover Corporation (of hololive fame) released a game called hololive ERROR, which shares some similarities with P.T.. Although it trades the Body Horror for Ominous Visual Glitches, both games take place in an infinitely-looping Eldritch Location (a Japanese school's hallway, in ERROR's case) with increasingly unsettling imagery after every loop.
  • Infliction: Developed by the one man dev team Caustic Reality, the game takes place in a photo-realistic suburban home and centers on piecing together the family tragedy the player character seems to be a part of through finding letters, diaries, and unlocking memories tied to certain objects. The looping mechanism has been done away with and replaced by the player character consistently passing out or being knocked out, only to awake to find the house altered in some way. The late game even includes the Red Filter of Doom, a demonic voice over talking to you over staticky air waves, and a vengeful female spirit.
  • Layers of Fear: Goes even further in limiting the already limited game play by being an Environmental Narrative Game, but compensates by greatly expanding the setting to an elaborate, ever shifting house. You play as an already mad painter struggling to finish your latest piece and learning about what has become of your suspiciously not present wife and children. The game also takes a lot of inspiration for its visuals from Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
  • Love, Sam: One of the few to downsize the already minimal location to a small studio apartment. The player character uncovers the story of the game through reading journal entries about a Stalker with a Crush while someone (or something) stalks them, with a Humans Are the Real Monsters twist.
  • Mannequin House: Visually, one of the more blatant examples, taking place in a looping corridor system that is very similar to the one from the playable teaser. However, instead of spirits, you face mannequins that move and change position while you try to escape the house.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard's shift to a house setting, hallways, and switch to a first-person camera when the series had become known for its third-person Always Over the Shoulder camera, action-horror, globe-trotting adventures can be attributed to the influence of P.T..
    • A notorious segment of Resident Evil Village takes even more inspiration from P.T., featuring a creepy, photorealistic house filled with dolls, an eerie radio that comes on and off in spurts, a redshift part way through and a giant fetus-like monster that chases you towards the end.
  • Silent Descent: Combines the P.T. like aesthetic and gameplay with some of the more iconic aspects of older Silent Hill games. Specifically, halfway through a siren sounds and the mundane home you've been exploring up until this point transforms into the hellscape otherworld from the main franchise.
  • The Survey: Is missing the tell-tale looping mechanic, but maintains the Ominous Mundanity based horror and features a Big, Screwed-Up Family main story.
  • Visage: Created by Sad Square Studio and funded through Kickstarter, this game was made explicitly to be a Spiritual Successor of P.T. and as such takes a lot of inspiration from the game. Haunted House, Eldritch Location, malevolent spirits,Humans Are the Real Monsters twist, etc.
  • Watch Dogs: Legion: It's relegated to a Nightmare Sequence in the Bloodlines DLC, but the game lifts the layout of the main corridor from P.T. in its entirety. It may be hard to notice at first since this game is in third-person, but it's a near 1:1 copy complete with looping mechanics, a spirit haunting you, a Red Filter of Doom, and plenty of psychological trauma unpacking.
• Franchise Killer: While the series had been on shaky ground for years, this game's acrimonious production and eventual cancellation was The Last Straw that killed it for nearly a decade. Until the announcement in 2022 of a pair of new Silent Hill games, the only thing connected to the franchise to see the light of day was a highly controversial pachinko machine only available in Japan, and the crossover DLC for Dead by Daylight in 2020.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: If you have a PS4 with a copy of P.T., you might want to hold onto it. The demo was delisted from the PlayStation Store in the spring of 2015, and was also made no longer re-downloadable by those who downloaded it previously. On top of that, by Konami's request, the game is absent from the PlayStation 5's backwards compatibility list, meaning you wouldn't be able to transfer your copy of the game to that console's storage either.
  • The firmware updates on PS4 has also removed P.T. from the consoles that had the game installed (under the pretext of "freeing up space"), again at Konami's request, which naturally led to even more tape-circulating.
  • A developer by the name of Artur Łączkowski faithfully recreated the game for PC in the Unreal Engine software, originally publishing it for free before later making the emulation Patreon-only. The original .rar file can still be downloaded and played with ease due to fans republishing it on various file-sharing websites, making Łączkowski's emulation the only available copy of the game currently.
• Lying Creator:
  • The game was originally announced as P.T., by an unknown developer called "7780s Studio". However, similar to The Phantom Pain and "Moby Dick Studio" in 2012, the game turned out to be another Kojima Productions project.
  • Konami said that development of Silent Hills would continue "with or without Kojima". With the game's cancellation, it's safe to say that wasn't the case, as Del Toro and Reedus were only in on the project because Kojima had invited them in the first place.
• Screwed by the Network: Thanks to Kojima and Konami's fallout, the game was cancelled and Konami quickly went about removing the P.T. demo from the Playstation Store soon after.
• Spiritual Successor: Kojima Productions' next project Death Stranding is essentially an official one. Both deal with surreal horror and fatherhood, Guillermo del Toro is involved, and Norman Reedus plays the main character.
  • OD also appears to be one, as another surreal horror experience with Jordan Peele involved instead.
• Streisand Effect: Konami's attempt to wipe both Silent Hills and P.T. out have failed epically. Now, fans are trying to circulate and preserve "the coolest game you'll never get to play" by any means necessary. Sales of consoles that had the game pre-downloaded have reached prices in the thousands of dollars, and dozens of developer teams have diligently worked on finding ways to copy the game from saved consoles, remaking it from the ground up, or making games to keep the spirit of the project alive.
• Un-Canceled: The game was going to be the first Silent Hill title developed by an internal Konami studio since 2004, before being Un-Un-Cancelled.
• What Could Have Been:
  • At this point, the entire game. How it would've turned out is a mystery, as the teaser was stated to not be representative of how the final version would look/play like.
  • Del Toro confirmed on his Twitter account that Junji Ito was going to be the main artist for the game. Ito later confirmed in an interview he became attached to the project for only a brief period before it was cancelled, unfortunately meaning there exists no early pre-production art as he technically hadn't even begun working on it.

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