Image Captured By Hatmonster
Well Halloween is over with our Spooky Poetry Contest. It was fun while it lasted but, alas all good things must come to and end. Still, it’s still Halloween weekend, so how about one more spooky poem inspired by one of the year’s biggest surprises?
P.T. caught us all off-guard; first as a game made solely to tease another, bigger game. and then again with its layers upon layers of cryptic clues and means of progression. Even though it’s only considered an “interactive trailer” P.T. has earned it’s reputation as a successful horror game in its own right! Hats of to you Mr. Kojima!
So, I present to you: “Torment in Perpetuity“!
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“…trapped in a never-ending loop.”
The phrase skitters across my mind
Feels important, but can’t say why
Try to think, but it’s gone already
As if a ghost of an epiphany
What was I doing before?
What am I doing here?
Where is here?
Perhaps answers lie beyond that door
Just a hallway, nothing to see here
Trashed floor and dusty knickknacks
Faces I feel I should recognize
Only one door open, only one way to go
A similar hallway, just as dirty
The knickknacks look similar too,
Only one door open here also…
What was that noise?
It’s the same hallway, it’s always the same!
How many times has it been now? Five? …Fifty?!
What is making that sound?!
What is crying?
…What is it?
No more crying, something else follows
Don’t dare look back! Don’t stop moving or-
A flash of a face, a sickly-dead face
Pain at the back of my head,
Darkness…
Vision of a dark empty room
Just walls, a bug, and a door
Pain returns, sight fades again…
But have I been here before…too?
It all feels familiar, as if I were…
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Strange how P.T. was able to come in under the radar and catch us all by surprise the way it did isn’t it? In this age of leaks and access, it’s just plain incredible that anything like this could ever be released quietly! If you’re a fan of horror games and haven’t played it yet, download it for free now!
If you have played it, what did you think of it? Has it managed to get you thinking about the next Silent Hill game like it was supposed to?
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Well that’s that, that’s the last of spooky poetry month. See you all next week with a return to usual form here at UWG!
Nice piece. P.T. – and the recent resurgence in horror games more generally – has got me immensely excited for the next entry in the Silent Hill franchise. I’ve been replaying Silent Hill 2 recently and I think that P.T. (while being a completely different game in some respects) really hits on a lot of the things that made the best Silent Hill games terrifying. The psycho-sexual imagery, the sound design, the otherworldliness/uncanny valley feeling of it all. Plus, Kojima does a lot of pretty esoteric stuff (and a lot of fourth wall breaking of stuff like the Psycho Mantis fight in MGS1) which doesn’t hurt. I also think that horror games in particular can benefit from an individual, auteur-driven creative process rather than design by committee and I reckon Kojima’s got the star power to do that. Bring on Halloween 2016!
Kojima is definitely the wild card in this whole mix. The success of the next game is going to be entirely dependent on what his vision of Silent Hill is. But as you pointed out, PT hit a lot of the important notes, so it’s very likely he knows what the series was about in it’s prime.
This is probably the best thing that could have happened to the series in terms of getting it back on track!
Very spooky. This poem was quite chilling. That part “What is crying?” freaked me out. Such noises are always so much scarier than growling or screaming. They should have had that as background noise in Slender: The 9 Pages….
But, I got distracted. Again, another good poem. I have so many horror games I need to check out now.
Thanks, I’m glad the crying bit made an impact. That noise was chilling in the game. Even more so once you find what’s causing it.. *shivers*