Hideo Kojima has slyly dropped a single, brand new screenshot for his upcoming horror game OD, and even though it’s just a single screenshot, there’s something weirdly familiar about this creepy hallway!
This image comes from a much larger, Xbox-themed piece reported by Entertainment Weekly, for which Kojima and others were interviewed. We have very little information thus far on even what OD is: we know it’s a horror game, seemingly some sort of anthology with different directors. Kojima keeps saying he’s doing something that’s “totally different” and “avant-garde,” which is to say we don’t really know what the gameplay looks like, just that it will explore different types of fear with the aim of the player “overdosing” on horror. So far, we’ve seen two trailers: one with actors Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and the late Udo Kier reciting (with increasing levels of panic) what sounds like an odd variation on “The quick brown fox…”, and one with Lillis doing some ritual with candles before a creepy figure comes up behind her and attacks.
So given the very little info we have, Kojima saying anything new about OD is pretty fascinating. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Kojima said that he pitched OD to “many people, to the big companies, and also to the up-and-coming companies,” but all of them told him that’s he was “crazy” and that they didn’t understand the concept. It was Phil Spencer who ultimately greenlit it.
“I wanted to go beyond the limit of the ‘scariness’ that other games had reached,” Kojima said. “It’s a single-player game, and I wanted to make it as scary as possible. But for those that might stop playing when it gets too scary, I have thought of a system that will allow them to keep going. I can’t say much more, because it’ll give too much of a hint on the system, and I could get in trouble for saying too much!”
That’s all he really said, but Kojima also provided the above screenshot of a creepy, almost Backrooms-yellow hallway with an old-fashioned TV and an unsettling figure in the darkness of an open door at the end. And look, plenty of games have spooky hallways in them with creepy figures waiting at the other end. But the combination of a creepy hallway with a looming figure, the ugly paint choices, and the retro piece of media equipment sure makes this image reminiscent of PT! (In PT‘s case, the old-timey tech was a radio.)
PT, if you recall, stands for Playable Teaser, and was a 2014 demo of sorts for the since-canceled Kojima game Silent Hills. Kojima removed PT from the PlayStation store after Silent Hills was canceled, rendering it unplayable now unless you still have a PS4 with it already installed. If nothing else, the similarities here suggest that hallways and creepy women at the ends of them have been on Kojima’s mind in the decade since all this happened. Maybe we’ll see another glimpse of what PT could have been in OD…whenever it comes out.