Unreal P.T. review: anxiety and frustration in VR (+ how to download it)

Do you remember the game P.T. for PlayStation 4? Well, I have played it in VRand I really got scared…

If you don’t remember what P.T. is, don’t worry, Tony is here to help you. P.T. was the playable teaser (P.T. stands exactly for those two words) for the game “Silent Hills” that should have been the sequel of the popular horror game “Silent Hill”. This little demo was directed by the two geniuses Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro and was designed to be an original psychological horror game that could make people more excited about the upcoming game than just sharing photos and trailer videos.

The idea worked very well and this little demo, released for free on PlayStation Network, got over one million downloads. People were hyped by it: the atmosphere was really scary, the setting was original and the puzzles were very difficult to be solved, and this made sure that people started debating around how to solve them, creating even more hype.

But unluckily, the Silent Hills project has been canceled and this teaser never became a game. Even more, P.T was removed from the PlayStation Store and re-installation was not allowed anymore. This created a lot of complaining by the fandom, that found the decision really unfair. Because of this, people started selling on Ebay Playstation devices with P.T. already installed on even for $1000.

Also because of this, as all the stars that die young, P.T. has entered the legend of games. And this why an indie game developer, Radius Gordello, has decided to re-create completely it in Unreal Engine. And guess what? It also added a VR mode. And all for free. Just follow this link and explore the project.

The dev stated that he needed nine months to complete the project recreating all the original P.T. atmosphere and all the original enigmas. He has just slightly changed the final sequence to make it more consistent. This is a massive work for just one single person.

And playing it, I really could notice all the amazing job he has made. The game is made in a fantastic way and is very close to what the original P.T. was.

The atmosphere is damn scary. But this is not a jumpscares-based game like for instance Face Your Fears, but something more perverted, more psychological. The game is a continuous loop that revolves around the same room where you enter again and again: you exit from it through a door and that door takes you to the same room again. But this new version of the room is slightly different from the one you were before. Everything becomes creepier and creepier and this continuous looping deep down into your fears is really powerful. You can appreciate that in the gameplay footage of the VR version that I have recorded.

From one of the first iterations, you can hear from a radio that there has been a man that got crazy and killed all his family, included his little daughter and his pregnant wife. Going on with the game, you understand that all the scary things that happen are all related to that slaughter: for instance at a certain point, you see a fetus in the sink of the bathroom, and this is clearly the unborn child of the mad man.

I really loved the anxiety that the game is able to foster: the continuous presentation of the same room is really disturbing and all the elements that are presented to you (voices, sounds, visuals) are creepy. Actually, there are no splatter moments or something like that: it is that you really don’t know what to expect, you really can’t imagine what will happen in the next iteration of the room you are in. You only know that things are going to get worse, but don’t know in which way. This continuous loop is really something that makes your mind go crazy: you are afraid but you don’t even exactly know why. As I have said, it is a psychological horror game.

The difficulty of enigmas makes everything even worse, because all you want to do is escaping from the room you are in because you are afraid of what can happen to you (even if you don’t know if something can really happen to you), but you really have no idea of what you have to do to escape. The game is not interactive in the classical terms, you can only stare at objects to interact with them. There’s almost no use of your hand controllers. But in every room, you don’t get what you have to stare and in what order you have to perform the various actions. This frustration is another emotion that makes you feel uncomfortable and so increases all the horror sensation. It’s something genius.

On the other hand, since some enigmas are a bit a nonsense, you may be frustrated too much in trying to solve them. And while a bit of frustration makes you more in love with the game, too much frustration can make you lose the connection with it. Anyway, if you get too much in trouble, there is a file with the solution of all the enigmas in the directory of the game. This is a life safer.

Furthermore, in Gordello’s implementation, the VR version is a bit buggy and so sometimes the game doesn’t detect when you are looking at objects to interact with them. I’ve spent some minutes looking at a photo fragment inside the game trying to get it, before the system understood what I wanted to do. This adds frustration to the frustration of the enigmas and can make various people lose interest in the game.

Regarding the VR bugs, the problem is that Gordello doesn’t have a VR headset, so he has added the VR mode blindly. And when the community has notified him about various bugs with the VR mode, he has solved many of them, especially the nasty fisheye distortion of the visuals. The last version, the 1.0.7, is much better than the first one. I can only praise a developer that has created a VR mode without even having a VR headset, but I have also to say that the VR version of the game is a bit problematic. I have warned you: you may find yourself looking at one objects for some minutes like an idiot before obtaining what you want to obtain!

In the end, I found the game frustrating, but incredibly interesting. It features a really disturbing atmosphere and even 10 days after I have finished it, I really have memories of that anxiety that I had while playing it. In this sense, the psychology of the game has worked really well. And I think that virtual reality, that is a technology that empowers the emotions perceived by the user, is perfect for this game. P.T. in VR is even scarier and disturbing than the version for flat screen, and this makes me even more sad about the cancelation of the Silent Hills game. I imagine what kind of masterpiece of horror videogaming, it could have been in virtual reality. It could have been like living in a nightmare. But this is something that we will never know.

Do you want to know where to download P.T.? Well, the news is that… you can not. Some days ago, the author of the demo has published this announcement on the itch.io page linked above:

I’ve got school starting up again soon. With the work-load that’ll give me, as well as another project I’d like to start working on, I’ll have a lot of other stuff to keep me occupied. With that said, I’ll be officially taking down Unreal PT next week. This has blown up far more than I expected, but now that it’s finished, I would like to move on and start work on something original.

Thank you all for playing!

Radius Gordello

The reasoning of “school starting up again soon” sounds very strange: someone spends nine months of his life to creating an amazing videogame and then removes it from the web because it has to go to school? He could have just left it buggy as it is and make people happy anyway. My idea is that he didn’t expect so many downloads of his demo and then got scared about a possible legal action and so removed it. But I have no official confirmation about it. As everything that concerns the P.T. universe, it is wrapped in a blanket of mystery.

I want to compliment Radius for what he has done anyway because he really made a great job. And if you want to play with Unreal P.T., well, a bird told me that you can find a link to the latest version uploaded on Mediafire looking at the comments of this post. And if that one gets removed, well, contact me and… maybe some magic will happen 😉 (but please subscribe to my newsletter to foster even more magic…)

To play the game P.T. in VR, you don’t need any particular procedure: you just launch the game and you select that you want to play it in VR with VR controllers at the start. This way, you can play it with Vive and Rift. The recommended specs for the game are inferior to the one of a VR-ready PC, so if you already have a powerful PC, you should be ok in playing with it. My advice is to give it a try… obtaining it in one way or another 😉

(Header image by Radius Gordello)