The Playstation Conferences at E3 are full to the brim with reveals and are a very exciting time for the community. This year was no different, but we did get to see a masterful use of the old switcheroo in the way of Resident Evil 7.

Today Capcom sent out a couple more shreds of Resident Evil 7 info to their rabid fanbase. Just a couple of screenshots and a promise of more to come, very standard stuff in the way of marketing a product. However I want to take you back to E3 this year back in June 2016.

The Promise of PT

To those not in the know, the story starts with PT. In 2014, a mysterious game called PT was announced and a demo was released at the same time. It turns out the PT stood for Playable Teaser and this was in fact a proof of concept for a new Silent Hill game, directed by known lad Hideo Kojima. A few months and some news floated around, until the game was cancelled with Kojimas leaving of Konami, the company responsible for PT and the Silent Hill franchise.

People were devastated, fan games and imitators popped up and got cancelled all over the place. People hung on the theory that Kojima was still making the game in secret whilst other conspiracy theories were popular heading in to E3 2016. This was fuelled by Kojima posting on Twitter that he had a new game coming, he was hanging around with some of the people involved with PT as well. The excitement was at an all time high and Kojima is no stranger to playing with his fans expectations.

PT featured a lot of running around a dirty apartment in first person, a creepy ghost lady chasing you around and some odd clues. Phones ring and photographs need to be pieced together while soft lighting can turn in to harsh red in an instant. This is what comes to mind when I think of PT.

Mystery game trailer at E3

At E3 2016, a trailer played with no developer info or titles. It opened with a phone ringing on a grubby looking table. A mans picks up and says “She’s back.” At this point this is looking like a horror game, but it could be anything. The phone ringing and the fact that the person referred to a “she” were the initial signifiers of a PT revival.

We cut straight away to first person creeping around a derelict house. This is incredibly PT, the similarities are obvious. However a lot of games feature you creeping around in first person these days so it could still be anything… Until the music cuts in.

That melancholic rock music. You know which other game trailers feature melancholic rock? Silent Hill games almost always do. You know who else uses a lot of melancholic music in his trailers, Hideo Kojima, the director of PT.

Shot Comparisons

Throughout the trailer we see a few shots that look very reminiscent of Silent Hill games. I’ve grabbed a few of them to compare. Bare in mind that some of these shots are from the PS2 era, I’ve also changed the brightness of some of them for clarity. Also, we are looking at still images here, some of these are quick cuts in the trailer so don’t get as much scrutiny.

So the opening shot of the trailer looks very familiar as you can see here. Obviously they are both in hallways and homes, but I found the light sources very similar too. A quick flash of the picture of left might remind you of a game you played 2 years prior on the right.

A pretty gross circular table covered in shit, in a greenish hue with abandoned seats around it. The picture on the right is from Silent Hill 4, apparently games were that blurry once. As well as this, both of them are using a VCR type distortion, which is obviously easier to see in video than here.

In the Resident Evil 7 trailer, the vines seen here at the bottom of the photograph climb up the picture and sort of creep all over some other objects in the house. Silent Hill 3 has long featured vines that creep and grow at speed all over the place. In the bottom right of the Silent Hill 3 picture you can see what I’m referring to, search “Silent Hill 3 Bathroom” scene for reference (and to be spooked).

This one is a little hard to see, they both feature men in wheelchairs rolling backwards in harsh moonlight. I know the one on the right is blurry as all hell, but I shit you not that is what is going on in both those frames.

In this shot we have a wolf head from the RE boys and a doll from Silent Hill: Homecoming. In both these scenes the object in the frame rapidly decomposes in front of you, I couldn’t flex my pea brain hard enough to find more relevant pictures, but this happens a few time throughout the Silent Hill games. You get the idea.

“Light shining through the trees? Bit of a stretch, mate.” So you’ve seen all the shots above, the melancholic Silent Hill-esque music is playing and the PT director is floating about amidst rumours of a revival. Now you’re having woodland references shown in the trailer, nobody knew what the game officially was at this point either. On it’s own its a bit of a stretch, but in context not so much.

When the trailer closes out, we see a big VII which becomes part of the word Resident Evil. Very clever. Everyone is shocked and can’t believe it isn’t PT, but at this point I don’t know if anyone cares that it isn’t their beloved concept from 2 years prior. It was a success, well done boys.

Check out some old Silent Hill trailers, especially SH4, and you will see what Capcom was going for. This is not to say that Capcom has ripped off PT or stolen their ideas, I just found it very interesting how deep in to the Silent Hill style they went for the trailer. Again, this may sound like a dig at Capcom, but from the other footage I’ve seen and the demo I’ve played the similarities between PT and RE7 almost sit exclusively at First Person Horror Game. In a bait and switch which probably would have had Kojima fooled, I’d say Capcom’s shocking little trailer was a success and one of my highlights of E3.