Okami and Bayonetta creator Hideki Kamiya recently weighed in on Hideo Kojima’s “lost” horror game demo P.T., and its lasting legacy.
A collaboration between Hideo Kojima and film director Guillermo del Toro, P.T. was released in 2014 on the PS4 as a free demo for their upcoming game Silent Hills. However, when series publisher Konami cancelled the game in 2015, they also delisted the demo from the PlayStation Store, making it impossible to redownload. This led to second-hand PS4 consoles with the critically acclaimed demo commanding high prices on auction sites like Ebay.
On X, where he regularly responds to (and blocks/unblocks) fans, Hideki Kamiya recently talked about P.T in response to a user expressing hope that either Kamiya or Kojima would try making another P.T.-style game. On September 5, Kamiya tweeted, “if it’s impossible to resurrect P.T., Kojima should make a new game in the same style,” adding: “if Kojima doesn’t do it, maybe I’ll give it a go. I hate horror though, so it wouldn’t be horror… plus, I have no ideas.”
It seems that Kojima’s upcoming experimental horror game OD might go some way to plugging the P.T.-shaped hole. First teased back in 2023 via a mysterious trailer, OD promises to “explore the concept of testing your fear threshold, and what it means to overdose on fear.”
Like P.T., OD is also a collaboration with a filmmaker, this time with Jordan Peele of Get Out fame. Hideo Kojima previously promised that OD will be something that “no one has seen before,” although details still remain scarce. Kojima will be holding a special event in Tokyo later this month to celebrate 10 years since his break with Konami, where he is likely to reveal more info about future projects (possibly including more about OD).
Although Devil May Cry and Bayonetta creator Hideki Kamiya kicked off his career at Capcom working on the original Resident Evil and its sequel, he has never made a modern, photorealistic horror game akin to P.T. In a series of tweets last October, Kamiya observed that P.T.’s delisting left a gap in the market, which Japanese indie hit The Exit 8 stepped into. “The Exit 8 went viral, but it’s basically just a watered-down P.T.,” Kamiya opined.
The Exit 8 is far less gory and objectively less scary than P.T., however it does share the delisted demo’s looping corridor mechanic, building a sense of dread in the player as they try to spot anomalies in its subway passage. Selling fast on Steam upon its release in November 2023, The Exit 8 has grown into such a phenomenon that it has even spawned a film adaptation (which recently generated some controversy in Japan).
Despite saying that he can’t play P.T. alone because it is “too scary,” Hideki Kamiya is full of praise for Kojima and del Toro’s demo. He even went so far as to say that the ‘8-like’ sub-genre (games with similar settings and mechanics to The Exit 8, which proliferated in the wake of its meteoric success) should really be called ‘P.T.-like.’ “P.T. was really that revolutionary – with an unparalleled uniqueness, and I think it has strongly influenced subsequent game creators,” said Kamiya.
Speaking of Kamiya, he’s busy working on Okami 2 for Capcom with his new development studio, Clovers. Kamiya left PlatinumGames in 2023 under something of a cloud.
Verity Townsend is a Japan-based freelance writer who previously served as editor, contributor and translator for the game news site Automaton West. She has also written about Japanese culture and movies for various publications.
