Kojima recently pointed out that Death Stranding not be a horror game , though thanks to his sharp little collaborative effort with Guillermo del Toro, P.T., we know he is more than capable of scaring us. In an interview with IGN at this year's RTX Sydney, Kojima revealed why he's not interested in going back to horror - at least right now.

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"I get scared very easily," said Kojima. "Actually, this is true of Alfred Hitchcock as well as Steven Spielberg. Because they scare easily, because I scare easily, it's actually easy for us to make something that is scary, because we understand what is scary."But while in that process, we're constantly imagining, like, terrifying situations so it ends up giving me bad dreams. That's the reason why I don't want to make a horror game."With this said, one can't help but feel the absence of the doomed Silent Hills ; Kojima's take on Konami's once eerie horror series. The terrifying P.T. showed that despite his reticence to explore the genre further, Kojima knows how to get under our skin."I think the most effective way to scare someone is to show them something that's slightly out of the ordinary," said Kojima. "Slightly off, but at first glance, they don't know what it is about it that is unusual. When you do something like this, it confuses the mind, and that becomes unnerving for the person who sees it."Also, the unknown. When there's no information available for something, it's more frightening. An example would be a bungee jump. If you've done it more than one time, it's never as scary as the first time. Something that no one has any preconceptions about is the scariest thing."A good example of that is the original Alien. Everyone knows the design now, the famous design by H.R. Giger, but in the original movie, you don't see it for most of the movie. You just see, like, quick cuts and little pieces, so you don't know the shape. You don't know the exact size. Until you see it at the end, and it's like "oh, it's shaped like a person. Somebody is wearing, like, an outfit, like a mascot." So it's not scary at that point, but until that point, because it's this unknown entity. It's very scary."Details on Kojima's latest project Death Stranding may still be vauge, but we do know it will run on Horizon: Zero Dawn's Decima Engine , it will feature actors Mads Mikkelsen and Norman Reedus and director Guillermo del Toro as characters, and that it's on course for a release before 2019

Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.