The Lost Legend of P.T.
A mystery that, even years later, remains elusive
For avid horror gamers, you’ll have at least heard of Hideo Kojima’s P.T., but whether or not you’ve had the privilege to play it is a different question. Its removal from the PlayStation Store was seemingly an unfortunate result of the disagreements between Kojima and Konami, which is a real shame because it’s considered one of the scariest masterpieces of all time.
P.T. stands for “playable teaser” and as such, it was an excellent preview of what fans could expect for the then-upcoming (and now-canceled) Silent Hills project. But it operated almost as its own standalone game, taking approximately a few hours to beat, assuming you could solve the insane final puzzle. It features a unique cast of characters and a mysterious playable protagonist whose story can be deciphered via in-game clues such as the radio and the talking baby in the sink.
Though it’s sad to see its removal from the PlayStation Store after such a long reign as a cult classic horror title, P.T.’s limbo on the online storefront as an abandoned project with no real closure to its many plot points is what brought it to such a legacy. Without this, P.T. wouldn’t be the lost legend that it is today.
P.T.’s final puzzle
The entire game is set in a single corridor within a family home (though the player will continually return to the beginning of said corridor, with each “lap” acting almost like a different level). Rather than being unveiled to the audience on a silver platter, the narrative is delivered through a series of puzzles, and the player is tasked with piecing together the breadcrumbs in order to solve the game. Most of the straightforward context is given through the radio, where we learn that the father of the family brutally murdered his wife.
You, the player, are experiencing a nightmarish version of the brutal scene of that murder, but whether you are the father or son in that story has been hotly debated. But this isn’t fully realized until the player can take a step back and look at the whole picture. Doing so is also inherently important to solving the final puzzle.
The final puzzle stumped players everywhere and made it the iconic Kojima game that it’s known as today. While every other puzzle forces the player to look into the tiniest details of the infinite hallway, such as peering through a hole in the bathroom or examining strange writing on the walls, this one makes sure the player has been adamantly comprehending the story’s hidden messages.
P.T. goes so far as to hide some of these messages in other languages. Specifically, the answer to the final puzzle was deduced by the folks over at The Grate Debate on YouTube, who figured that the messages that are revealed when players collect torn photos of Lisa directly correlate with the answer to the final puzzle and even put it in the proper order to consistently trigger the game’s ending over and over.
What’s even more insane is figuring out the “man’s name,” a solution to one step in triggering the final cutscene. Somehow, they were able to figure out— through both deep P.T. lore and fables not related to the game at all — the name of Lisa’s son is most likely “Jarith.” Never before had the horror community seen a puzzle solution that involved whispering a ghosts’ name into the controller microphone, making P.T. puzzles the revolutionary icon that gamers still compare to other games in 2020.
Although this solution has been known to consistently trigger the ending of P.T., what’s undoubtedly tragic is that the solvers will never know if “Jarith” is the true name of Lisa’s son or what that means for the story itself.
Unanswered questions
Again, the radio is a major mode of delivery for much of the symbolism, solutions, and context that the game has to offer, making players think that it’s some sort of helpful (yet disturbing) omniscient entity in Lisa and Jack’s story, but it could be quite the opposite.
Listening to the original broadcasted report of domestic homicide, the radio says, “Police arriving on-scene after neighbors called 911 found the father in his car, listening to the radio.” And interestingly, it would seem the radio and Lisa’s baby found in the sink are voiced by the same actor, but does this mean they are intended to be the same character? This voice both tricks the player into a jumpscare by commanding them to “look behind you” and also tells you — speaking to you as if you are the murderer — that his father shot and killed his wife in a jealous, drunken rage. It’s who we hear humming the now-nostalgic numbers “204863” that are essential to solving the final puzzle.
If we take it to mean that these two are completely separate characters, the baby in the sink would most likely be Lisa’s son who was murdered at 10 years old. Though not proven, a major theory in the P.T. community is that Norman Reedus plays a reincarnation of the son. This can be concluded based on the words that precede the “epilogue” of P.T. after the final puzzle is solved: “But guess what? I will be coming back.” Which is what makes the game such an incredible standalone: it comes full-circle without needing to be followed up by a full-length title.
And rather than being a protagonist presence in this story, it would seem that this radio announcer voice may actually have been egging these men into murdering their wives in an “unrelated” string of crimes. Back to that strange peephole puzzle solution (on one of the hallway “levels”) where the audience must pleasantly listen to a woman being axed, the audio clip is accompanied by a radio yelling “do it,” as the victim is being torn apart. This could mean that the actual antagonist of the canceled Silent Hills game isn’t the father, but rather, the being that possessed him.
But again, whether or not the radio’s voices are all intended to be the same person is debated among avid fans. Whatever the case, fans of the cult classic will unfortunately never find closure to these types of questions. But this is precisely what makes it the horrifying legend that it stands as today and still sees whirring discussion online. We’ll never get our answers.
