YMMV / Silent Hills

• Better as a Let's Play: Considered one of the scariest games ever made, but now also almost impossible to get your hands on, since it was removed from all stores by its developer shortly after release. It's now only available on PS4s that had installed the game previously, making this a game that people mostly experience through LPs.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • This video questioned whether the game really was cancelled, and wasn't just everyone involved messing with the fanbase and giving the game heavy hype. It gained traction when Kojima and Del Toro were confirmed to still be working together, but that project turned out to be Death Stranding, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
  • This video, meanwhile, posits that P.T. was not actually a Silent Hills teaser, but a coded Writer Revolt from Kojima, who used the demo to leak out the details of his split from Konami.
• Fan Nickname: Some refer to the unnamed protagonist of P.T. as "Norman", since he's directly modeled on Norman Reedus.
• Funny Moments:
  • In an earlier part of P.T., before the hallway was starting to collapse, you would hear a baby's crying and someone's aggressively knocking the bathroom door, prompting you to peek in. Although this one was a particularly creepy moment, there's something unintentionally hilarious when the ghost lady suddenly appeared from the other side of the door and angrily closed it, and she somewhat looked annoyed at you more than anything else.
  • After completing the "gouge it out!" part of the puzzle, not only is Lisa missing her eye in the framed wedding portrait, but her husband is also shown giving you a thumbs up after doing it.
• Harsher in Hindsight: It seems Silent Hill isn't going to come back and it isn't bringing new toys with it... that is, until October of 2022, where Konami announced three new games: a remake of Silent Hill 2, made by Bloober Team, and two original games, one being written by Ryukishi07.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Kojima was asked if he would be interested in developing a Silent Hill game. He stated that he might not do a horror game justice. After seeing The Phantom Pain trailer, fans think he might be able to pull one off. He didn't say "no" or that he wouldn't at least contribute something. It was later revealed that Kojima was one of the directors of Silent Hills.
• I Knew It!: There had been rumors for years that Kojima was looking into developing a game in the Silent Hill series.
• It Was His Sled: Kojima stated he expected it would take a week to solve the ending of the game, and that the clues were designed to encourage international co-operation. A few hours after release, however, Twitch user Soapywarpig discovered the reveal in under 80 minutes through blind luck, and the press spoiled her discovery en masse. Many players had since gotten to the ending without knowing the exact routine that unlocks it.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • The Fetus Terrible in the sink was nice and creepy, up until it started talking to you like your drunk, affable neighbor trying to relate to you.
  • The infant's ending monologue. He explained how his father was boring, always being the same, and one day killing his entire family. And he said his complaint was that he wasn't original (or it would be a complaint because he was "dying of boredom” anyway). It's hard not to sort of chuckle at how well he's taking it.
    • Your brain in a bag also counts, given you never see it and it talked to you in a muffled voice.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The P.T. demo will forever be associated with the falling-out between Hideo Kojima and Konami, which severely damaged Konami's once-stellar reputation and led to the full game's cancellation.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The Radio. All the way from mentioning the murder of the pregnant woman to the number sequence the father rambled about. What tops it off, though, was probably: "Look behind you. I said, look behind you."
  • The demo practically fed off this. The sheer chaos and randomness that occurred throughout the game would have you constantly questioning your safety, even when in a perfectly lit hallway.
• Sacred Cow: As a result of Konami canning the whole thing and delisting P.T., the demo itself has become this in general, with nary a shred of criticism to be heard about it since it was delisted.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The Pater Familicide plot of the demo is very reminiscent of the notorious Suicide song "Frankie Teardrop". Considering that Kojima is a known fan of alternative and experimental music, the game might actually be inspired by the song to some extent.
  • Allison Road, except that it's an indie game set in England. However like its inspiration, it was cancelled.
  • Resident Evil 7's Beginning Hour demo can be seen as one to P.T. Both are extended, first-person demos to sequels for long-running survival horror franchises. The main difference is that the actual RE7 is also in first-person while we never got to know if Silent Hills would have been first person as well.
    • Resident Evil Village's House Beneviento is more in line with P.T., with it stripping you of your weapons and taking place in an ordinary house that has cramped hallways.
  • Layers of Fear was one of the few P.T.-likes to actually launch in full, and to some critical and commercial success; and has now spun out into a moderately successful horror franchise in its own right. Incidentally, the developers would go on to remake Silent Hill 2.
  • There's an argument to be made that Alan Wake II is the closest we'll ever get to a realized version of this game. We have several Unnaturally Looping Locations, a highly meta story, otherwise mundane locations being made terrifying, and elements of Time Travel all wrapped up in a package of insane graphical fidelity. Sam Lake and Kojima have collaborated in the past, with Lake making a cameo in Death Stranding and Kojima doing the same in Control. Kojima himself retweeted an IGN article that made this claim, so he seems to agree somewhat.
• Squick: In droves:
  • The demo started off with a story being relayed through a radio about a father who savagely killed his entire family, and then hung himself with a garden hose (although occasionally, a muffled voice can be heard saying "umbilical cord", presumably of his wife's dead fetus).
  • If you're caught by the ghost, she would pluck you off the ground and violently snap your neck, all with the nauseating crunch noises to accompany your brutal demise. What's worse? As you fade away, you could hear what sounds like the ghost unzipping your pants and feasting on your genitals.
  • In one of the loops, you'd find an aborted fetus in the bathroom sink.
  • One of the puzzles required that you gouge out the eye of a woman in a picture. Upon doing this, a gooey substance spurted from where the woman's eye once was.
  • The ghost herself. The gown she's in is covered in blood and vomit, and her face is mangled and rotting, with one eye missing.
  • One of the loops had the sounds of a woman presumably having an abortion in a bathtub. The entire experience is almost nauseating.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • When P.T. was revealed to be a Silent Hill game, some fans were angered that the teaser was done in first person instead of third person view. Although this was merely a teaser, so the first-person perspective may not have been a permanent element in the final product.
  • There were gamers who have wrote off Silent Hills solely because it was not being developed by the original Team Silent, but a good portion of Team Silent was actually part of Kojima's development team.
• Ugly Cute: The fetus.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The demo boasts some incredibly realistic graphics, and the first thing that almost every Youtuber that plays the game does once they first see the corridor is comment on how lifelike the graphics are. The funny thing is that they were actually dumbed down to look more like an indie game. That's right, these lifelike graphics were the cheap version of what the game would have looked like.
• Win Back the Crowd: The P.T. demo wasn't indicative of the final version, but the high level of graphical quality, extreme scariness and generally solid design have won over a lot of fans who were jaded with the franchise. Sadly, this goodwill was lost in late April 2015 when Konami cancelled the full game.

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