The cancellation of Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills/P.T was a textbook example from Konami of how to treat your fans and employees like shit.
Thankfully, Resident Evil 7 has clearly gone to the doomed project for inspiration – Resi producer Masachika Kawata recently shared his opinion on the most controversial cancellation in recent memory.
Speaking to GameSpot, Kawata said:
I, of course, played PT, and I thought it was an excellent demonstration or excellent game, if you want to call it that. I think it looked really great, and it had so much promise, and I was unfortunately very disappointed that it didn’t come to fruition. That was too bad that that happened; I’d just like to share the fact that I really loved it.
Kawata then addressed an issue that I think a lot of fans have been wondering about – just how much is Resident Evil 7 going to borrow from P.T?
Probably not as much as you think, as apparently Capcom were working on Resi 7 before P.T was even announced:
We were actually creating Resident Evil 7 before PT was announced, so when they announced it, it was kind of like, ‘Oh, they’re doing first-person too?’ However, now that we’ve come this far, we can see that the content of this game is completely different from what the content or the direction that [PT] was moving in.
Kawata also recently confirmed that the seventh core game in the survival horror franchise will have traditional Resident Evil elements, such as combat and herbs. It just wouldn’t be Resi without those sweet, sweet herbs.
The demo – which is currently free to download for PS Plus subscribers – isn’t actually representative of the full game.
In that respect at least, it has something in common with P.T – Kojima has said previously that Silent Hills probably wasn’t going to be too much like its beloved teaser.
Whatever it ends up being, Resident Evil 7 will come to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on January 24.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.