This is important for you to understand: I love horror games. I love VR horror games in particular. I played and reviewed Resident Evil 7 from start to finish in VR, I’ve reviewed Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, A Chair in a Room: Greenwater, Killing Floor: Incursion, The Exorcist: Legion VR, The Brookhaven Experiment, and countless others. I played P.T. back when it first came out and despite all of the time I’ve spent in VR I can say without a doubt that P.T. is still the most terrifying, unsettling, and downright scariest gaming experience of my entire life and it’s not even close.
All that being said, I don’t know if I could handle re-experiencing that again in VR, but I’m going to give it a shot as soon as I can. Today announced via Reddit and posted on itch.io, developer Radius Gordello released an Unreal-powered remake of P.T. for PC, for free, with VR support and my heart skipped a beat when I found out this morning.
For those unaware, P.T. is an extremely curious experiment from a few years ago. Hideo Kojima created the teaser when he was still at Konami as a demo and prequel to an upcoming new Silent Hill game simply dubbed Silent Hills. The game would be played from the first-person perspective, unlike all previous Silent Hill games, and it’s focus on slow-paced, tension-filled environmental storytelling and pitch-perfect jump scares inspired an entire generation of horror game creators. Most modern horror games undoubtedly owe their pacing and atmospheric focus to P.T.
However, Kojima’s estranged relationship with Konami reached a breaking point and he left the company before ever completing the project. Silent Hills was canceled and P.T. was mysteriously removed from the PSN Store on PS4.
Worth noting however is that even though this remake of the game is technically playable in VR according to the developer, comments are highlighting a litany of issues. Not only is it purely experimental and likely to cause motion sickness in those that are susceptible, but the roomscale support is also unfinished and can result in clipping through the environment.
Comments on the itch.io page state:
“VR support on Oculus is broken. There’s a fisheye distortion, resulting in a view that feels wildly out of scale, shallow, and wrong. It appears everyone is having this issue. My guess is that the distortion that is applied to the image in the headset display to correct for the lenses is off or set to the wrong value. I do not experience VR motion sickness in general, nor do I here, but this isn’t about sickness, it’s displaying incorrectly. I imagine for those susceptible to sickness it would be hell, but it isn’t for the usual reasons.” – Frogacuda
“Unplayable in VR (Oculus). Massive fisheye effect (FOV is very wrong and strangely zoomed). After a few minutes, I got sick.The avatar would also have to be turned off for VR, I was very terrified when he suddenly stood next to me. Absolute no go in VR! Otherwise in 2d wonderfully converted, good work!” – Vince Trust
So if you do give it a try (like I plan on doing soon) just be aware that VR support isn’t great from what it sounds like. If you don’t vomit from the VR frights, you might get sick from the experimental support. For more details and updates make sure and follow the developer on Twitter and let us know what you think down in the comments below!
h/t: IGN
