Back in August 2014, a game simply known as ‘Playable Teaser’ or P.T. was released on the PlayStation Store as a demo for the upcoming ‘Silent Hills’. It had some big names attached to it, with Hideo Kojima, Guillermo Del Toro and Junji Ito being onboard. It took off like a rocket. Just a month after going live, it had hit one million downloads. Unfortunately, Konami then entered into a monogamous relationship with a pachinko machine and Silent Hills faded away, to the despair of many - myself included. This left P.T. in a rather odd position. An extremely well received teaser for a game that would never come out.

This opened the floodgates to other developers. P.T. did a lot of things in a relatively short space of time and it’s being thoroughly mined. For good reason too. It was a fantastic little package. To my mind, it had three key aspects that made it work as well as it does. First is the impossible geometry. The looping, in other words. Second is the blending of the familiar and unfamiliar. Lastly is the setting. A normal suburban setting that houses a dark secret. These three things combined to cement P.T. into gaming history and have inspired the rising tide of games that have come after. I’m going to examine this legacy through the lens of a few of the more popular imitators.

The first thing I want to talk about is that impossible geometry. If you’ve not played P.T. then the main thing about it is that it’s essentially one long hallway. Once you walk past your front door and down a few short steps, you’ll come to a door. Open it and you’ll be right back where you started. If you’re not prepared for it, it’s disconcerting. Even if you are prepared for it, the knowledge that there are going to be slight changes keeps that tension up. It’s an odd kind of feeling; like my mind isn’t quite synching right with what’s happening in front of me. The immediate feeling is that something is toying with you, which will line up neatly with my third point.

This first aspect is the one that provides the most straightforward inspiration. Let’s look at Layers of Fear as our Exhibit A. Our tortured artist must explore his mansion, which shifts and warps around him. Doors don’t lead back to where they should and as he slips further into his own madness, the mansion responds in kind. It was an effective piece of gameplay and storytelling and, for the first run at least, kept me on the edge of my nerves. It was rather like my object permanence was being taken away from me. As a result, the first act of Layers of Fear was wonderfully creepy.

Though it does highlight a problem, which the short length of P.T. didn’t really show. See, the enemy of this impossible geometry is predictability, which Layers of Fear showcases better than anyone. By the end of it, you’re pretty much expecting things to change every time you close a door so it kind of loses the fear factor. As a result, Layers of Fear was forced to fall back on a handful of tired tropes to close out its final acts. This left me feeling somewhat cold towards it. The actual core mechanic is great, in both P.T. and Layers of Fear, but it cannot carry a game by itself. It needs to be appropriately built upon.

Which leads to the second point. P.T.s looping mechanic worked well because it created a clash between the familiar and the unfamiliar. It only takes a couple of loops to get the general layout of the house. There’s that front door, the radio, the clock, the bathroom with that certain thing in sink - you get it. But as you loop, things began to change and get more and more aggressive. Before long you have a funky looking lady doing the Jacob’s Ladder dance in your reception area. To my mind, this looping effect works so well because it makes you used to a reality and then slowly changes it on you until you’re uncomfortable in your own house.

I will reveal here that I’ve not played P.T. (as I don’t own a PlayStation), so my experience is going to be built upon watching playthroughs and playing imitators. There are a few parts early on in P.T. that emphasize my point, however. The first is simply when the door that leads to the loop is initially closed. You explore the hallway and turn around to find it open. After getting you acquainted with the house, it quietly reminds you who is in charge here. From there it only escalates. This dwindling sense of familiarity is such that even the cheaper imitators, Error#54 for example, achieve the same effect on a much lower budget. It essentially sets the player up for a fall.

Both the gameplay aspect, and this creeping dread, filter down to the central point of P.T. The entire experience is designed as a punishment. The player assumes the sin of the protagonist and is, essentially, being punished for it in every way. This is perfectly in keeping with Silent Hill but it’s a unique way of utilising gameplay to tell a story. The looping aspect keeps the protagonist sealed inside the location of his sin and it quickly morphs and changes, reflecting his own guilt while simultaneously becoming overtly hostile. They are essentially being toyed with like an insignificant object. The only real lingering is question is what by?

This final key point - the story governing the gameplay - has to act as the central foundation to any ‘P.T. inspired game’ in order to make it work. Recent release Visage seems to be handling itself well in this aspect. We are trapped in a classic suburban house with the memories of our deceased family. Deceased, presumably, by our hand and the appropriate torture begins. Even Layers of Fear, for all of its other faults, handled this aspect rather well. The tortured artist protagonist is haunted by his own manic desire to paint as well as the taunting eyes of other artists. The paintings judge him as he wanders in tighter circles.

The most tragic thing about all of this though is that we will never experience what P.T. was supposed to be. Silent Hill pretty much wrote the book on torturing guilty souls and P.T. was very close to the zenith for that. It’s short but tight, littered with classic horror tropes while reinventing them at will. It has had an undeniable effect on modern horror, with even companies like Capcom bringing in aspects of it. We just need to look at the Resident Evil 7 demo to see that. It’s legacy is deserved, in my mind. There’s more to be mined here, I think. If Konami won’t do it, I’m glad that more developers are giving it a shot.