WMG / Silent Hills

About PT

The player character is one of the fathers that went crazy and killed his family.

And the endless loop is part of his punishment. The only ways out are to talk to his wife or to comfort/accept the crying fetus.

Obvious, I know, but putting it here anyway.

The murders happened in only that section of the house

Which is why you can't go anywhere else.

The player character isn't the father.

It's the son who got murdered. He's the one who figured out how to escape, and the narration after is him talking.

• But the radio says the son was 10. If we're playing as him in the teaser, he's awfully tall and old sounding for a 10 year old.
  • Maybe he's been stuck in some kind of alternate reality instead of being dead and in the afterlife?
  • He could be a son in a reality who managed to survive, while the rest of his family didn't. Silent hill is mounting an assault on his survivor's guilt, and PT represents him caught in the crossfire.
  • If you look closely at the walls in the room you start in, you can see quite a few tally marks on the walls. Whether those are counts of loops or years is unclear.
• It's the boss of the wife/Lisa that had an affair with her
• It's the character seen at the end of the trailer who is experiencing other people's stories
  • Who represents you, the player
• But the baby in the bathroom speaks to you as you've lost your job and how your wife had to get a low paying job.

A possible interpretation of the storyline

Dad loses his job, mom gets a job, begins having an affair with her boss. Mom becomes pregnant with boss' baby, dad goes berserk and kills family. I don't really see a lot of discussions of why the dad goes off and kills the family. It seems more plausible that the dad would go off the deep end for that reason.

• That doesn't explain why there were other dads killing their families, unless they all had that happen to them or it's the fault of some malevolent entity targeting dads under stress and not entirely the dad going crazy on his own.
  • I've seen the mention of "other dads" in other places on this page but I'm confused as to where people get the "multiple dads" thing from. I've always understood the teaser to the story of one man who went off the deep end.
    • The radio broadcast mentions two other cases similar to this where a father killed his entire family.
    • Nevermind, listened to the broadcast in full just now.

Monster inside me

Is referring to Lisa, not the dad. Perhaps the monster is the inhuman fetus thing in the sink.

• Then why does it say "forgive me Lisa" before that? Unless it's "forgive me, Lisa," or it was written by two different people.

The brown paper bag represents the alcoholic father.

From this reddit thread:

• "I just realized that here you can't carry and drink alcohol in the open, and if you do buy booze in liquor stores you are given brown paper bags to carry your booze. So the paper bag might be the alcoholic/killer dad, and he is at peace with who/what he is ("the only me is me") The blood stain in the bottom of the bag and the way the paper bag moved might mean that inside of it is the head of the dad, lying sideways flat on the table, facing the other way towards the wall (as you can't see the contour of the face). With this in mind, the theory that the player character is the killer dad might be thwarted."

Kojima inserted the Swedish radio message into the game just to freak out PewDiePie.

• Kojima must've known about PewDiePie's Youtube popularity and the likelihood that he would play the trailer. And so Kojima, being a notorious troll, tossed the Gratuitous Swedish into the game to mess with the boy's head. It worked.

P.T. takes place in Silent Hill

Yeah really obvious one but what if the murders are the result of the dads going through their own "Silent Hill" and killing their families because they were mistaking them as monsters? Vincent hints at it in the third game.

You're playing as an entirely different father/husband than the ones mentioned...

... And the game is you going through what drove them to kill their own families.

the entire trailer is in fact a fictional world created by the silent hill franchise to show itself off

You know how the popular theory is that the end narration is the franchise itself speaking to you? Through the voice of the radio? Let's dial this back a bit — the radio voice was speaking to you throughout the entire trailer. What if it was in fact silent hill the franchise the whole time, and this trailer is in fact just silent hill showing itself off to the player about what its new toys are and what to expect now that it's back and better than ever, so that the personified series itself basically created this fictional world of PT just to toss the player into and terrify them so that they'll know what it means when it tells them that it's back with better toys than ever? From meta to SUPER meta

The Cockroaches are your Allies

• Obviously, cockroaches are pretty important in PT. One of the first things we see while playing are a pair of copulating cockroaches. But did you know that they appear again in the second loop? Indeed, not only that, but by following them, they lead you to the photograph of Lisa on the floor of the first hallway. Several times when Lisa appears but does not attack, there are cockroaches forming a barrier between the two of you, such as when she shuts the bathroom door or when she has finally left the bathroom but disappears. The paper bag appears to be surrounded by cockroaches. Cockroaches often gather around whatever object you need to proceed. What does all of this mean? That the cockroaches are helping you out.
  • So it's basically an evil version of Joes Apartment. The bugs are probably just tired of all those ghosts and want you to solve the case so they can relax in the disintegrating house in peace. I mean, you try living with Lisa and see how you like it.

At least a baby represents a good thing and wants to help you (or at least, keep your sanity intact in this twisted world), while the ghost (Lisa or other ghosts, if there were others) represents a bad thing and wants to kill you.

• In the last puzzle, you have a task to trigger three baby laughs. The baby sounds happy. It's a good thing. On the other hand, at the same time, you can still hear the ghost's scary moan sometimes. It's less likely it doesn't symbolize anything.

The Talking Fetus isn't entirely honest.

One of lines from radio is "You can't trust the tap water." The "fetus" is in the sink, and I've read somewhere that sinks are often called the tap... so that means you can't trust the fetus.

Silent Hills will end up being cancelled.

....At E3. The fanbase is eagerly awaiting for direct confirmation if it is cancelled or not due to the drama that appears to be happening with Kojima and Konami. Alternatively, if it is NOT cancelled the fanbase has been worrying over nothing.

• Sadly, confirmed. But it didn't happen at E3. Del Toro himself revealed it at the San Francisco Film Festival.
  • OP here! It's officially official...
    • Isn't it funny how Silent Hills is cancelled on the same day as Five Nights at Freddy's 4 is announced?

About the teaser after you beat the game/Silent Hills

Norman Reedus' character is...

• One of the dads who killed his family
  • One of the dads who killed his family but has amnesia and doesn't remember doing it
• The person who got killed by his dad doing the narration before the cutscene who said he was "coming back"
  • (Because Hannah and Kim said the voice sounded like Norman)
• A relative of the person doing the narration (older brother? uncle?)
• An alternate reality version of one of these? (Are you sure the only you is you?)
• An unrelated person in Silent Hill who is experiencing other people's versions of the town
• The protagonist of the new game that has nothing to do with any of the characters in the demo.
• The store owner who had the affair with the man's wife and fathered her child.

The voice doing the narration at the beginning of the trailer is...

• The son who got killed, except he's been trapped in another dimension which is why he's aged and sounds older.
• A meta fourth-wall breaking thing, first describing gamers/the player/the franchise getting stale - "every day he'd...play the same kind of games" and then being from the perspective of the creators/the game franchise/Kojima himself - "I will be coming back. And this time I'm bringing my new toys with me." (the "toys" are Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro and Norman Reedus)

The demo's plot will not factor into the main game.

The demo's plot will factor into the main game.

And they're trying to throw us off.

• And you won't find out until the end.

The demo's plot will be referenced in-game, but will not be the main plot.

Aliens or some kind of otherworldly beings will be involved.

Since there was a War of the Worlds reference.

• Makes sense considering how inhuman the fetus looks. Maybe the "there's a monster inside of me" line refers to Lisa being pregnant with an alien baby? It's debatable but one interpretation of the teaser storyline is that Lisa had an affair with her boss. Maybe the boss was an alien?
  • The boss was an alien having affairs with a bunch of married women with families and getting them pregnant and then the alien fetus would transmit psychic messages to the husband/father and drive them insane and convince them to kill their families. For some reason.

Aliens will not be involved.

The War of the Worlds reference was lampshading the joke endings of the old Silent Hill games and may be foreshadowing that one of the endings in this game will involve aliens as a joke too.

It's called Silent Hills because...

• Silent Hills = Silent Hill S = Silent Hill 5 (because this is a Kojima thing apparently)
• The player character will be traveling through multiple versions of Silent Hill based off other people's perceptions of the town
• Similar to the above, there will be multiple player characters who all see the town differently

You're playing as the same man, reincarnated through time.

Maybe that's why it states that the demo states it has nothing to do with the main game, it's only one of the lives the player character lives.

The game will be a deconstruction of Silent Hill.

It's a Hideo Kojima game. What did you expect?

Silent Hills will not be realized as a video game

Though the game has been cancelled, Kojima, Del Toro, and Reedus will collaborate on a prose story or maybe even a graphic novel to share the story even if it's not totally interactive. They may even try to screw around with people by releasing multiple virtually identical versions of the same story with significant differences to get the kind of trippy feeling you can get from plating the game but having a totally different experience by noticing different things or triggering different events.

• Bonus points if it ends up being a Junji Ito manga.

Even if Konami had all their shit together and wasn't going into pachinko machines, the development of the game was destined to be a massive Troubled Production that would've been stuck in Development Hell.

You've definitely got the formula for a mess. All of the creators involved seem to be big on the whole "auteur" thing and Kojima in particular has been in dire need of an editor since at least as far back as Metal Gear Solid 2. The project would've ballooned into an incoherent mess as they tried to reconcile their various visions for what the game is and where it is going.

• Incoherence might have inadvertently improved the weirdness factor that has been lacking in many of the recent games.

Death Stranding is a Divorced Installment version of the main ideas of Silent Hills (or at least a form of Refitted for Sequel)

Despite Death Stranding's "Walking Simulator" reputation as the result of a Slow-Paced Beginning and the main gameplay loop revolving around delivering packages, there's more in common between the games than just the famous Kojima-del Toro-Reedus collaboration. Death Stranding is still extremely heavy on horror elements and shares many themes with both Silent Hill in general and PT in particular.

• Death Stranding has Otherworld elements in the ominous, spreading Tar that conjures Bizarrchitecture, the decay-inducing timefalls, and in the realms that the chiral storms draw you into. The first is introduced with an air raid siren and it highly resembles a Silent Hill location, including bodies and dolls inexplicably strung up by barbed wire. These are also revealed to be connected to the psychological baggage and regrets of the spirits who reside in these realms.
• A late reveal in Death Stranding is how relevant fatherhood had been in both positive and violent ways for the protagonist and a major antagonist, a theme that PT famously teased.
• The way Higgs is able to somewhat weaponize the strange elements of the apocalypse isn't entirely dissimilar to a more active Alessa or some of the Silent Hill comic characters.
• Also, while other elements had not been in Silent Hill games before, they easily could have been intended to be worked into it in a way that might have been seen to revitalize the series had they been implemented there. For instance, the BTs of Death Stranding being ghosts that you can only see under certain conditions, forcing you to move slowly past with unique elements like breathing mechanics, could have been a new way to address monsters in Silent Hill that compromised between the controversially more combat heavy later Silent Hill games and the combat-less Shattered Memories while being appropriately suspenseful (and the BB detecting ghosts even fills the same role as the radios traditionally work in Silent Hill).

To put another way, if you take the idea of Sam Porter creeping past invisible monsters given away only by their hand prints or baby-detected silhouettes, all the while exploring Clifford Unger's tragic history, with the weirdness being weaponized against you at climactic moments, but have it take place in and around Silent Hill instead of the entire US, I think you have something very close to what Silent Hills was going to be.