Silent Hills Hacker Finds Their Way Into The Town In The P.T. Demo

Silent Hills, despite having been cancelled back in 2015, continues to serve up new mysteries and reveals years later thanks to the work of one enterprising YouTuber. The town of Silent Hill appears briefly in the final cutscene of the game's demo, P.T. (short for playable teaser,) and game hacker Lance McDonald has found a way to walk through director Hideo Kojima's version of it.

McDonald, who previously revealed that Lisa follows you throughout the game and that you're playing as Norman Reedus the whole time, was able to connect the map for the town to a doorway from early in the demo, but there was an initial problem--because the town was not designed for the player to walk through, there's no collision, and you fall through the ground immediately.

Incredibly, Lisa pops up and grabs you if this happens, allowing the game to reset any player who manages to clip through the environment (which also gives the video below a proper jump scare.)

To counteract this, McDonald had to patch the game to make the player float slightly above the ground, which allows him to explore the town without issue.

If you've finished P.T., you'll recognize the trail of blood on the ground--McDonald follows it, but it doesn't lead anywhere too exciting. In fact, Silent Hill, quite eerily, feels like a regular town in many ways. There are a lot of low-poly assets, but also lots of attention to detail--the air conditioners and staircases have been hand-placed on each building to avoid repetition, for instance, and potted plants are placed realistically.

As McDonald notes, the town feels simultaneously under construction and abandoned, which is a hallmark of the Silent Hill series. It also stretches back quite far, and features a mysterious bridge that you can walk under right in the middle of the street at the edge of the map.

There are no major revelations or reveals here, but it's a very interesting look at how Silent Hill itself might have looked if the game was ever completed. Instead, Kojima and Norman Reedus went on to create Death Stranding.

Kojima has recently hinted at a return to horror, and while we won't be seeing him work on the Silent Hill franchise any time soon, it's possible that he'll return to some of his ideas for the game in the future.