PT Boats: Knights of the Sea

We pass through passages and hallways everyday without pause. They're boring, empty, uneventful dead-spaces unworthy of consideration - not so much architecture to stop and appreciate, as infrastructure to quickly pass through. All they do is channel things around buildings, moving us from one room to the next. But while we so often take these in-between areas for granted, rushing down them in order to reach places of real importance, they can also be incredibly evocative.

Corridors are anxious, uneasy places, and horror has a history of using them to put us on edge. They're rarely the site of explicit terror or violence, but they lead us there. Zones of anticipatory fear, the corridor is conducive to horror through its ability to heighten suspense and gesture to the unknown. What lies around the corner, or beyond that door? Every hallway is a world of undetermined possibility.

Roger Luckhurst, a professor at the University of London and expert in all things horror, recently penned a book about corridors. He's quick to mention the Resident Evil series and the various facilities of the Umbrella Corporation, where horror is sometimes confined and squeezed into a particularly pure form. On many occasions the video game corridor is a gauntlet (in the Resident Evil spinoffs for example). In these corridor shooters, the constrictive form of the horror hallway becomes a condenser for an adrenaline-fuelled onslaught where you're forced to hack or blast your way through a narrow, zombie-infested space.

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PT Boats: Knights of the Sea

Konami has flexed its legal muscles and quashed an ambitious attempt by an enthusiastic 17-year-old fan to remake Hideo Kojima's PlayStation 4 micro horror masterpiece PT for PC - but, in a surprisingly positive twist, has seemingly offered an internship in the process.

PT (AKA Playable Teaser) surprise-launched during Sony's Gamescom conference in 2014, and was, initially at least, shrouded in mystery. Supposedly a demo for a larger game of the same name, PT quickly garnered praise for its stiflingly atmospheric, genuinely unnerving take on first-person horror, all the more impressive for the fact that it unfolded in a single, tiny location - an ever-looping corridor in a largely unremarkable family home.

Although Hideo Kojima's name wasn't attached to the oddity on release (it bore the name of fictitious developer 7780s Studio), PT contained sufficient clues that fans quickly put the pieces together. And it took only slightly longer for dedicated sleuths to solve its final mystery, discovering that PT was, in fact, a teaser for a brand-new entry in Konami's long-neglected Silent Hill series - one from Hideo Kojima, The Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro, and reportedly, manga horror master Junji Ito.

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