Lisa From P.T. Is At It Again

For a ghost who only appears briefly in a demo for a game that was never fully released, Lisa sure stays pretty busy, doesn't she? At least, that's what has been uncovered by a fan of P.T., Hideo Kojima's playable teaser for the unmade Silent Hills. In a video posted to YouTube, Lance McDonald shows us more of Lisa, the unpredictable and terrifying specter from P.T.

Though P.T. didn't become the full game that everyone hoped for (thanks to a public split between Kojima and Konami), that hasn't stopped curious players from working tirelessly to discover all of its hidden secrets. In fact, this latest hack seems to expand on something that McDonald discovered in the demo just last year. By hacking the in-game camera, it was revealed that Lisa is, in fact, always following the player character. Even when it feels like you're all alone in the hallway or in one of the rooms off to the side, she's never far behind. It makes sense that Lance McDonald would want keep pressing to find out what Lisa is up to when you're not looking. 

As Lance McDonald explains in the description for his video, "So it turns out Lisa is doing quite a few things in P.T. even when we're not able to see her, not really cut content or anything like that, just surprising amounts of detail and work that went into the teaser for Silent Hills that never actually got to be seen by players."

To accomplish this, McDonald managed to access the second floor of the apartment (which isn't accessible in the demo proper) and follow Lisa throughout all of her scripted encounters with the player. As seen in the video, Lisa has plenty to keep herself occupied, though most of her movements revolve around her scaring the ever-loving crud out of you. For example, for the moment when you can hear footsteps outside of the bathroom door, it's not just a clever sound effect. In fact, the developers actually went through the trouble of animating Lisa walking by the door, even though players would never see it through normal means. This is especially interesting when you can see her in other moments only appearing quickly enough for a jump scare and then promptly vanishing. 

McDonald's hacks have also enabled him to explore a bit of the outside world in P.T. The exterior of the apartment building is really only seen in cutscenes in the original playable demo, so it's interesting to see how much detail was put into set dressing that is only viewed by the player for mere moments. In an interesting move, the game actually dispatched Lisa to attack the player when it realized they'd set foot outside of the normal play area. McDonald had to program his character to float slightly off the ground so that the game wouldn't detect its movements and send the banshee his way. Basically, you can't get away from Lisa unless you literally break the game.

It makes you wonder just how intricately designed the full game would have been. Then again, considering how detailed and dense the world building is in Kojima's Death Stranding, we probably have a good idea of how wild he could have gone in a Silent Hill reboot. He likely would have thrown out the rule book and given us something truly bizarre and terrifying, something that P.T. seems to fully promise in such a brief time.

Actually, this would be a good time to remember that there is a possibility that there's yet another Silent Hill game on the horizon. In fact, a leak from earlier this year intimated that Konami was pursuing not one, but two new Silent Hill entries. One is supposedly meant to be a more traditional survival horror title that would reboot the franchise, while the other is more of an interactive story game, similar to Telltale's Batman and Walking Dead games.

What's more, there is reason to believe that Kojima and his team are involved in at least one of these mysterious new Silent Hill projects. Kojima has been talking about how he's already hard at work on his next game. Along with rumblings of a possible reconciliation between Kojima and Konami, this seems to hint that we could be looking at the possibility of a resurrection of some sorts for Silent Hills. As reported previously, this speculation was strengthened even further by a cryptic tweet from Kojima Productions staff that seemed to make a few passing references to the dormant horror franchise.

Maybe we'll finally get to learn what Lisa wants in the near future. In the meantime, it's great to have someone like Lance McDonald around to (mostly) fearlessly document her unsettling movements.