Why is P.T So Special?

If there is one thing that came out of Gamescom 2014 as a surprise it’s P.T and is still being talked about because it’s so different than anything else.  It was presented to us as an independent game and given a trailer that featured people screaming (badly) but most importantly it was free to play.  People rushed to the Playstation 4 and downloaded it, and a game was put into motion…just not the one that people expected.

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The fact is P.T is terrifying, it puts the player into a house that seems a little creepy but for the most part is normal.  The player then walks through the corridor taking in the news item on the radio about the death of a family and puts that into the back of their minds as they find out what to do next.  Moving down the stairs to the basement they walk through the door to find they are right back where they began, but things have slightly changed.

This is the beauty of P.T, it takes something that is normal to our everyday life and slowly changes things so that we start to feel uneasy about a world that at first was normal but is getting stranger each and every time we walk through that same corridor.  If you’ve played the game or watched some of the many videos you’ll see that the game uses a lot of horror tropes and concentrates on jump scares, but it also gets very confusing.

P.T is also a game that expects you to get stuck and look to other people for help, and in this day and age that means going to social media and getting people to advise you based on their own experiences.  This means that more people are talking about P.T, and more people want to play it…word of mouth is a strong thing.  Then of course comes the time when people actually complete it.

This arguably is where the game became huge, because the secret was revealed that P.T actually stands for “Playable Teaser” and the game it was teasing is Silent Hills.  The more exciting prospect though is that this is a game created by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro and will star Norman Reedus from The Walking Dead.  What I find exciting about that is it’s not just the fact that Kojima sends gamers crazy at the thought of what he could create, but also Guillermo Del Toro catches film fans and of course Reedus has his huge fan base which will rush to play a game just because it features Daryl Dixon.

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What is going to be interesting now is just what we will get from Silent Hills and can the hype created by P.T actually be matched by the game itself? The only way to answer that question is to wait for the game itself, though P.T is still making an impact and that is on how market games, and that is what is exciting people.

You can bet right now game companies are wondering if they could replicate what P.T did and how they can manipulate the model to work with their own games.  Is this a new form of game demo? I feel that in truth P.T may have been a one-off, but I’d be happy to see myself proved wrong on that.  To catch people’s interest not only in the gaming industry but beyond we need things like P.T to completely revolutionise how to publicise entertainment whether it be games, movies or more.  Trailers have impact, but actual experiences have much more impact and that is where the beauty of P.T lies.

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