GOTY 2014 | Number 1 — P.T.

You might be won­der­ing, at this point, why my num­ber 1 game of the year is tech­ni­cal­ly a demo for a full game that has­n’t arrived yet. Decid­ing on this was not an easy task, but I firm­ly stand behind my deci­sion. Was P.T. the most pol­ished and well-designed game to come out this year? I would actu­al­ly answer “no” to that ques­tion. It was, how­ev­er, the most vis­cer­al and immer­sive expe­ri­ence in gam­ing I had this year if not in sev­er­al years. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve been as effec­tive­ly scared by any­thing in a very long time.

As I walked down that hall­way time and again, my body was phys­i­cal­ly telling me it was extreme­ly against con­tin­u­ing. A com­mon phys­i­cal response to fear is your blood leav­ing your extrem­i­ties leav­ing you with a feel­ing of cold feet. While play­ing this game, my feet felt like ice cubes. At the point where the ten­sion P.T. so suc­cess­ful­ly builds comes to a cli­max, I screamed and my spouse turned to me and said she had nev­er heard me make that noise before. This response comes from the beyond amaz­ing visu­als this game puts out as well as the spooky sound design. Even if it was a fluke, which I hope it was­n’t, every­thing comes togeth­er in this game so per­fect­ly that it draws you into it in a way that all games try and some­times fail.

The fact that this is tech­ni­cal­ly a demo for the upcom­ing Silent Hills game does not mat­ter to me, this free 2 hour expe­ri­ence was price­less for me. Any­one close to me can tell you that I was obsessed for sev­er­al weeks. I played it a num­ber of times myself and even watched sev­er­al oth­ers play through for them­selves. The enig­mat­ic nature of the game even became a phe­nom­e­non in and of itself as play­ers sought out answers to the many mys­ter­ies it had. While most feel they have a fair­ly good idea, it has nev­er been con­firmed that we even have a sol­id answer for how to trig­ger the end of the demo. While I will admit that this obtuse nature of the game can be con­fus­ing and even frus­trat­ing, the col­lab­o­ra­tion it cre­at­ed onwards fig­ur­ing it out was worth the trouble.

If you have a PS4, there is absolute­ly no rea­son you should not down­load this game. Even if you don’t like scary stuff, I still rec­om­mend you boot it up and just see how far you’re able to get before chick­en­ing out. This tru­ly does excite me for what is to come with the full Silent Hills and deserves my num­ber 1 spot for game of the year 2014. Now all you have to do is turn around. Turn around…