But once I stopped to think about it, the game that I identified as my singular Game of the Decade was none of these. In fact, it's a game I've not actually played - for the very good reason that, by the time I owned the only platform it was ever released on, it was no longer available. And if you've made it this far into a video game ramble, the odds are that you know I'm talking about P.T.
P.T. (short for "playable teaser") was a short demo for a now-cancelled game, released on August 12th 2014 as a PlayStation 4 exclusive. In what was an unusual and original move at the time, P.T. was released as a free faux-indie game which didn't reveal its connection to the famous Silent Hill franchise or its all-star creative team (including Hideo Kojima, Norman Reedus, Gillermo del Toro, and Junji Ito) until after the player beat the game and found its secret ending. The secret ending revealed that the full game would be entitled Silent Hills, and would be the ninth main-series instalment in the Silent Hill franchise, which had lain dormant for over two years at that point.
The hype was incredible, but short-lived: Silent Hills was officially cancelled on April 27th 2015, and two days later, P.T. was removed from the PlayStation Store, just eight months after it was released. Originally available for re-download by users who had already installed it, the game became unavailable even to those individuals in May 2015 (unintentionally resulting in PS4 units with the game still installed selling on eBay for double the price of a new console). In the past couple of years, it's been rumoured that even those who preserved their installation of the game are now unable to play it.
But what was it about P.T. that captured our collective imagination? To the point where - over five years post-release, and with the game itself unavailable for the vast majority of that time - it's still considered sacrilege if it doesn't top every list of "scariest games of the decade"? The answer is contained within that last question: it was scary! Hideo Kojima wanted Silent Hills to be a game that made you shit your pants, but for most people, P.T. already did the job. For years beforehand, fans of the horror genre had complained that horror games were increasingly action-oriented zombie-shooters and no longer really scary... and Kojima was there to remind them to be careful what they wished for.
I'm not going to recap P.T. in its entirety here, but here are the key attractions as I see them:
- P.T. casts you in the role of an unknown first-person protagonist, forcing you to identify yourself with the character; and then, crucially, renders you completely defenceless, your actions limited to "walk" and "look".
- Because of its incredibly simple game mechanics, P.T. has an extremely low technical thresh-hold for enjoyment. In theory, if you're able to manipulate a PS4 controller, you can play P.T. to its conclusion, and even get the secret ending. It's been said that the human mind is the greatest game engine ever created, and P.T. proved that it's true: if you can't continue, it's entirely your own fears that are preventing you.
- P.T. features photo-realistic graphics, creating an environment that really feels like an ordinary suburban American home that just happens to be slowly turning into hell. But it combines this ultra-realism with fourth-wall-breaking meta-scares: the game fakes you out with "glitches", "crashes", subtitles that suddenly switch languages, and mission-critical items hidden in options menus. Add to this the fact that the solution to P.T.'s central puzzle is practically an ARG, and the lines between the game and reality become increasingly blurred.
- Crucially, P.T. introduced the concept of the recursive loop to horror gaming: the same environment re-used dozens of times with unsettling and sometimes downright horrifying variations. On a practical level, this keeps production costs down, which probably explains why it was embraced so enthusiastically by indie developers soon after. On a psychological level, it turns out that the thought of being trapped (even in a familiar environment), with all exits replaced with entrances that lead you back to the same nightmare and no control or hope of escape, will fuck most people right up.
If all of this sounds pretty familiar now, it's worth remembering that most horror games made post-P.T. have drawn inspiration from at least one of these tropes. Almost as soon as the news broke that Silent Hills had been cancelled, indie remakes of and homages to P.T. were going into development: starting with the (itself unfinished) Allison Road, you can now number Infliction, Visage, Madison, Suite 776, and countless others among the imitators that see a first-person protagonist investigate a seemingly ordinary home under increasingly bizarre circumstances. Resident Evil 7's first demo was self-consciously taking its cues from P.T., and even though the final game diverged significantly, the original Silent Hill-esque demo was still incorporated into the rival franchise's successful reboot. The Layers of Fear franchise, which took a lot of inspiration from P.T. while also differing enough to eventually stand on its own, is now joining its antecedent on most lists of the best horror games of the decade. Even though Silent Hills was cancelled, many aspects of the P.T. legacy live on in Kojima's first independent production, Death Stranding (I've fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole that suggests P.T. may in fact have been intended as a demo for Death Stranding all along: GamesRadar have a fascinating video that sets out the theory quite convincingly). P.T. itself was still bringing new scares with a surprising regularity towards the end of 2019, thanks to Lance McDonald's videos uncovering cut content and behind-the-scenes scares from within the game's code - most of which is still creepier than almost any horror film I've seen in the past five years.
In short, it's not an overstatement to say that P.T. tapped into what horror fans really wanted, and in doing so single-handedly changed the face of horror gaming almost overnight. Not bad for a two-hour demo for a game that never got made, and that most people never got the chance to play for themselves. You only have to compare the horror games released in 2010 with those from 2019 to see how quickly and completely the landscape changed, with P.T. as the turning point midway through the decade. It was surely one of the most influential games of the 2010s (especially considering its length and its brief lifespan), and the fact that it still stands up as a great game in itself too is why it's my game of the decade.
