For anyone who doesn’t know. P.T. was the playable teaser for Silent Hills. This game was set to reinvigorate the Silent Hill series, directed by Hideo Kojima. However, after something unfortunate happening between Kojima and Konami, the partnership ended. P.T. was then removed from the PlayStation Store, the only place that it was made available for PlayStation 4. If you didn’t have it downloaded on your PlayStation 4 before this occurred, you can now no longer download it. Some press had been testing P.T. with the PlayStation 5 in the lead up to the console’s release, but it seems like Konami hasn’t forgotten about it.
It was discovered pretty quickly that you can’t download P.T. from the PlayStation Store onto PlayStation 5. I think this was pretty obvious, but everyone definitely needed to give it a try. It’s also not available through backwards compatibility, which is a slightly different system.
Here’s the thing, the tester at Polygon did get P.T. working on their PlayStation 5 through backwards compatibility in late October. This was when press units were being sent out early, to give critics a chance to get a head start on press coverage.
The listing for the game changed in the back-end at some point, which only Sony or Konami could do. It went from being ‘backwards compatible’ to ‘Playable on PlayStation 4’. The distinction is important because it means that P.T. registers as one of the few games on PlayStation 5 that aren’t backwards compatible.
Here’s the thing. At the time, Sony reps had told press that some game demos, which P.T. technically is, wouldn’t be backwards compatible. It looks like as time has gone one, more publishers have stepped in to make their PlayStation 4 demos restricted to PlayStation 4. This is probably just because there’s no point in them being played on PlayStation 5. After all, there are various upgrades with the new console, so surely you’d want a new demo with those upgrades in place.
Sony told Polygon that the decision to make P.T. only playable on PlayStation 4 was a publisher decision. I think this action speaks louder than any words Konami could speak. It shows that they’re still aware of the Silent Hill series. But they just don’t want to do anything about it. They can’t even bring themselves to let everyone have P.T.
