Warning: Following game rated M for Mature. Spoilers for P.T. Up Ahead, prepare your spleen!
"Dad was such a drag. Every day he'd eat the same kind of food, dress the same, sit in front of the same kind of games... Yeah, he was just that kind of guy. But then one day,l he goes and kills us all! He couldn't even be original about the way he did it. I'm not complaining... I was dying of boredom anyway, But guess what? I will be coming back, and I'm bringing my new toys with me."
Horror games! You may think the only goal is to scare you but there's actually a lot more to it than that. You want to have fun, fear is an incredibly negative emotion sometimes and it's hard to get somebody to feel just the right kind of fear in a horror game. You want the player to feel the same way as the main character. I think there's one game that does this perfectly, but I mean... If you've read the title you already know what I'm going to say, of course, it's P.T. considered by some to be the best horror game of all time, that's a bit of a high bar. I'm really not at liberty to say what the best ANYTHING is, but this IS my FAVORITE horror game of all time. Half Life coming in very close at second, maybe I'll cover Half Life eventually but don't count on that. So I guess you're wondering, "what is P.T. about?" And you know what? That's actually a pretty good question. The story isn't very clear. All I know is some lady got killed and now you're trapped in a looping hallway haunted by her ghost. Yeah, looping hallway you heard me right that's this games main gimmick every time you go through the door you just find yourself back in the same hallway each loop of the hallway either includes a new scare or a new puzzle and part of the fear comes a lot from not knowing what's going to be in the next loop, this game I can't say delivers much in the video, or game department but if it's not a good video, and it's not a good game then how can be a good video game? Well because it takes advantage of the interactivity of the medium, to put you right in the character's shoes. Even though this game's story wouldn't be as good as, say, a tv show for example works here because you get to feel how the main character does, think about it like this? Would you rather watch somebody go down a waterslide or would you rather do it yourself? I guarantee for most of you the answer is the second one you want to have the actual experience. A video game lets you have the experience of doing something and if it can do that it doesn't need to provide a good game or video experience. Compared to other horror games this definitely scared me the most, and for such a short game that's quite the achievement. The looping hallway mechanic definitely provides an aura of uniqueness to the game. However, I feel the lack of a save system definitely took away from the game experience this game was intended to be hard enough that it took months to finish, but most people just use a walkthrough, aside from the tedium of the puzzles, solving them is really annoying when you have to start the game over every time you turn it on, waiting through all the scripted segments, and trying to get back to where you were as fast as possible, in a very slow-paced game. The graphics are extremely impressive for the time and while being very simple, the graphics also put in quite a lot of unnecessary detail which is a good thing. It looks on par with some of the newer games you see on the PS5. And there is even a cool Easter egg, if you were to hack the game you could find out the ghost of the game is actually secretly always behind you for the entire experience. This game has a very immersive sound design. If you open a door, for example, it sounds exactly how you expect it to in real life. And in the crying baby sound there's an Aura of inhumanness and anger in it, it sounds ever so slightly unnatural subtle details like that are very important if you want to scare your players. I know I'm just echoing in this next point but you really can't make a review without mentioning this, yeah P.T. isn't available to buy anymore, it was a demo for a then-upcoming reboot of silent hill, but unfortunately, that game got canceled leaving P.T. to be pulled off of all stores, with it being a digital-only game your only chance of ever playing it is to be somebody with the game already installed or get the fan-made PC port that being said it was up for a good amount of time, a reasonable amount of people got to play it.
I will rate this game 6/10 for the gameplay 7/10 for the story and I can't rate the music because this game actually doesn't have any...