PT is the gift that keeps on giving and what it gives is nightmares. The short tech demo that acted as a promotion for the unfortunately-canceled Silent Hills is absolutely terrifying in its own right, but by picking apart the demo, one modder, in particular, continues to unearth more terrifying secrets.
Lance McDonald, YouTuber and hacker extraordinaire, was the one who originally confirmed that Lisa, the demo’s antagonist, was stalking you the entire time you wandered through the halls. Everybody already assumed this, thanks to the constant creepy noises coming from right behind the player, or the weird shadows that would flicker on the walls, making it look as if someone is following you.
Lisa was behind the player the entire time, but turning around triggered something in the code that essentially made her invisible, so it would appear as if there was nobody there. By hacking the camera so the player could look behind themselves without actually turning around, McDonald confirmed that Lisa is indeed stalking the player the entire time.
Then there’s the whole bathtub thing. By again going into the game’s code and tweaking things, McDonald gained entrance to a bathroom that’s usually inaccessible, only to find Lisa’s beheaded corpse in the bathtub. That’s right. PT gets even scarier.
Fortunately, this latest reveal isn’t scary at all. If anything, it’s a little comforting. By tweaking the camera to allow the player to see into a bathroom mirror, McDonald was able to reveal that the protagonist roaming the halls was Norman Reedus all along. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering that Reedus appears at the end of the cutscene that plays at the completion of the demo.
So yes, McDonald’s latest revelation is that the character you’re playing in PT is the main character in Silent Hills, which sounds like it should be obvious, but it just goes to show how much care and love was put into what is ostensibly a dinky little tech demo.
It’s an absolute shame that we’ll never get Silent Hills, as PT is honestly scarier than most full-length horror games on the market. Kojima is still working on a horror game, and considering that every Silent Hill game boasts a wildly different story with just a handful of connecting elements, there’s no reason why Kojima can’t incorporate most of his Silent Hills ideas into whatever his new horror project is.