P.T. gets a fan remake in Unity
"I can make it live on in some fashion by doing this."
Video game developer Farhan Qureshi has recreated much of Kojima Productions' now defunct horror game P.T., the playable teaser for the since cancelled Silent Hills game.
Developed in Unity over the course of 104 hours, Qureshi's one-man recreation of P.T., dubbed PuniTy, certainly doesn't look as good as its source material, but it's still an impressive effort for a single developer. And since P.T. has been removed from the PlayStation Store forever, it's the closest thing one can get to the vanished horror game should they have missed out on it.
PuniTy isn't a full remake, though. Many of the puzzles have been removed, there's no narrative arch framing it, and some of the interactions are just different. You start out with a flashlight in this one, for example.
That's because Qureshi initially created PuniTy as a learning experience to prep for a 3D modelling workshop he's planning to teach in September. "Originally I wanted to create an apartment scene for its simplicity, variety, and familiarity, but I wanted something more game-focused as the workshop is being targeted at the Calgary Game Developers," Qureshi explained on his blog. "I ended up choosing the P.T. hallway as it's an interior scene fairly close to an apartment, and the simplicity, variety, and familiarity still exist.
"Plus it's no longer available to download, but I can make it live on in some fashion by doing this."
Even once Qureshi decided to recreate this famous locale, he still didn't expect to turn it into a functional game in its own right. But then he got kind of carried away and felt the urge to spice up the recreated model with some nods to the original P.T.'s best moments.
"At first it wasn't my intention to add actual gameplay from P.T.," he explained. "I started with simply a hallway to walk through allowing players to look at all the models, as that's all I needed for the workshop. But the hallway felt too quiet to walk through, so I thought of adding some sound as well. And so the obsession began, since as soon as I added sound I figured it would be easy to add a flashlight and zoom feature. And a quick door-banging animation. And hey, I bet it wouldn't be so hard to model some cockroaches.... So the project quickly morphed from showing off a 3D modelling scene into a mini game experience."
If some of the Qureshi's texture work looks overly familiar that's because he ripped them straight out of P.T. Amusingly, since his USB wasn't the right format to snag screenshots from his PS4, he decided to upload all the textures he needed to a dummy Twitter account then he retrieved them that way.
You can give PuniTy a go for free on PC, Mac and Linux here.
