Another week, another discovery in 2014’s P.T., the free, playable teaser experience for Hideo Kojima’s dear-departed Silent Hills. This time, a modder found a way to step outside the demo and explore the surrounding town.
Noticing that the exterior in the game’s concluding cutscene was not pre-recorded, Lance McDonald simply patched the game to connect P.T.’s starting room to the map file used in the ending sequence. Good thinking!
However, McDonald immediately falls through the floor of the map, as it has no collision data — and that summons Lisa, the ghoul who follows the player throughout the demo, to attack the player and reset the game. It seems this was some kind of a safeguard mechanism that Kojima Productions used to keep players inside the game’s boundaries.
Alright, then, McDonald fixes this by modifying the player avatar to float just a bit above the ground instead of walking. From there, he’s able to explore Silent Hill, and over the next nine or so minutes he finds a game-ready streetscape full of detail. “As is common in Silent Hill, there’s a perpetual feeling of the entire world being both under construction and long-since abandoned,” McDonald notes. So it is with the exterior of P.T.
McDonald is the YouTube researcher who, back in September, found out that Lisa is always behind the player, following them the whole way as they navigate the hallway. That accounts for her ability to jump scare the holy bejabbers out of you — even an experienced paranormal investigator like McDonald.
She does the jumpscare any time you mess with the player location without applying a special fix to make the game think you’re still on the ground, it’s hard to predict and I screamed multiple times while getting a few of the overhead camera shots for the video
— Lance McDonald (@manfightdragon) December 20, 2019
McDonald’s other discoveries include confirming that the player character is, in fact, Norman Reedus. Here, from September, is a seven-minute video of other things he’s learned in his time with P.T.