Though some might say we pretty much got a finished version of P.T in the form of Resident Evil 7, it certainly feels like Capcom merely did what Konami refused to do. Played more like a short, horrific 'walking simulator', Hideo Kojima's Silent Hill prototype still feels like its shrouded in mystery, but PC players may get to experience it yet.
No longer available for new users to try out, the only way we can get a taste of what was to be a grand reimagining of the Silent Hill franchise is to hope fans can use readily-available tech to rebuild it. In the case of YouTuber 'SmoggyChips', that's exactly what they're doing.
Likely to be a 'WIP' project for a long time yet, SmoggyChips is already showing off these early prototypes on YouTube. And they're not just simple gameplay shots, either. In what could possibly act as some real inspiration for would-be game developers are tinkerers, SmoggyChips records all of the footage from within the Unreal Engine suite itself, messing around with values, dials and props to show exactly how building something like might look.
A similar project was in the works back in 2015 but was left up to others to build upon
We're grouped together some of the best Horror titles available on the PC platform
You even get to see how each of P.T's spooky events are triggered as SmoggyChips goes back to the start of the house level to individually activate each scene. Anything from flashes of lightning visible through the hallway window, to the radio broadcast hinting at what little plot we were treated to with Kojima's original work.
As reported by DSOGaming, we don't know how long it'll take for SmoggyChips to complete this massive project or whether they'll even release it to the public when it's done. Either way, it's an interesting dive into the development process of something like this. With this kind of experience, perhaps we can look forward to an original project in the same vein further down the line. Or is single-player horror dead (again)?
Looking at this again, it seems to have been livestreamed. Let's hope they do it again.
