The Outside World Of P.T. Finally Revealed

P.T. hacker Lance McDonald has become famous for showing us things about Hideo Kojima's horror masterpiece we were never meant to see. After a string of McDonald's mind-blowing discoveries completely changed the way we understand P.T., you'd think he would have run out of new surprises to share. But that's far from the truth, as his latest video clearly illustrates.

As you may know by now, P.T. mostly takes place in what appears to be a family home. You spend much of the game wandering the hallways, with occasional trips into the bathroom to lay eyes on whatever strange sights await there. You don't spend much time outside the home; you're only outdoors at the very beginning of the playable teaser, and you only catch a glimpse of Norman Reedus — who plays the main character in P.T. — as he walks the streets at the very end of the game.

McDonald thought there might be more to that endgame cutscene than met the eye, however. And he was right.

It turns out that the game's ending — the one that reveals Reedus as the star — was actually not a pre-recorded scene but was, instead, rendered in-engine. With a little tinkering, McDonald was able to load this portion of the world and explore it. Rather hilariously, he discovered that the game would send Lisa after players if they left the bounds of the play space in a certain way (a move that McDonald admitted gave him quite a few scares). So he figured out he had to make the player character float slightly above the ground.

From there, he took a stroll, exploring what we assume was supposed to be the town of Silent Hills.

We speculated before about why Kojima Productions might have modeled Norman Reedus in full, even though players couldn't see him while playing P.T. It seems that riddle has been solved, as McDonald's hack shows us there was far more to P.T. than what we encountered during the demo.

There exists a fully rendered, highly detailed area of the town that we only saw in the final cutscene, but that McDonald was able to walk around in. And the amount of work that went into this space is staggering; there are potted plants on fire escapes, parking lots full of cars, overturned trash cans, and more.

Keep in mind: these are areas the player was never meant to see. But even if some of the area was shown in that last cutscene, Kojima Productions didn't have to model all of it — just what was visible through the lens of the camera.

This leads us to believe that the area we're looking at would've played a much larger role in Silent Hills. In fact, it's possible the initial playable teaser would have led us straight out into the street to begin the rest of our journey, and that what we're seeing are actually the earliest bits of Silent Hills in all their unsettling glory.

Of course, we'll never get the opportunity to explore further in the way Kojima and his crew intended. Silent Hills was killed off in the midst of the Kojima/Konami fallout, catapulting P.T. toward a legendary status we've not seen many — or any — game demos achieve. Kojima has since moved on, reforming his namesake studio in order to develop this year's Death Stranding. So what we're seeing here today will remain trapped in time. The world of Silent Hills will never be expanded on, and the story of the now-canceled horror title will remain a mystery.

If you were somehow missing in action during Lance McDonald's other P.T. reveals, well — lucky you. He's uncovered plenty of secrets about the game, and some of them are downright terrifying.

There was the revelation, for instance, that Lisa — the woman you encounter during P.T. — is actually trailing the player character throughout the entire experience. That one finally explained the eerie feeling of being followed. There was also a mysterious instance of the bathroom in the teaser that contained a decapitated corpse. We presume the corpse belonged to Lisa, but for reasons unknown, we never saw it ourselves in the game.

We can't help but shake the feeling that McDonald is going to keep on finding new things inside P.T. that we've never seen before. So we'll be watching his YouTube channel with bated breath. As soon as something else comes along, we'll let you know.