The loss of Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills project was immense, but I think we may get a very unsettling approximation of it with his new Xbox project anyway.
We got our first look at Kojima and Xbox’s OD last September with its creepy “Knock” teaser trailer, and a new image revealed from Entertainment Weekly today keeps up the horrendously creepy vibes within the backdrop of scary photorealism. Take a look:
Yeah. That’s enough to get the hairs on my neck standing up. Upon closer inspection, it appears that the mysterious figure in the doorway at the end of the hallway looks a lot like actress Hunter Schafer, who’s confirmed to be in the game’s cast alongside Sophia Lillis and Udo Kier. Will she be playing the villain or some sort of creepy cult figure? The red outfit and horns on her head may suggest that.
It’s a simple picture, but it’s enough to give me goosebumps and get me excited for whatever Kojima is cooking up. His twisted mind feels like a natural marriage with the horror genre, and I shudder to think of what he can come up with.
The short gameplay snippet of OD we got last year features Lillis’s player character lighting candles and trying to take part in some sort of ritual, with disturbing noises bouncing off the walls of the surrounding area, before she’s grabbed by someone cloaked in red with massive, white hands. This new image may further tease the culprit.
Kojima, of course, is excited about the project and said he pitched it to multiple companies before XBOX and Phil Spencer saw his vision. “They said that I’m crazy, and that they really don’t understand the concept — that they will not be able to do it,” Kojima said to EW of previous attempts to find a home for OD.
“I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do something different,” he says. “I had this OD concept since I was working on DS1 [Death Stranding], and I was working on it just by myself. I can’t reveal much detail, but it’s something that no one has ever seen before. A new game system.”
Who can forget the chilling horrors of the P.T. playable teaser all those years ago on PS3? The game was meant to be the next project in the Silent Hill franchise, with Kojima creating the title with acclaimed director Guillermo Del Toro and starring Norman Reedus. After a fallout with Konami, the project was canned, but it lives on in terrifyingly in the vibe that OD boasts, especially in the game’s realistic art style, helped along by Kojima apparently scanning a whole room to put into last year’s teaser.
“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!”
OD is currently in development at Kojima Productions and is likely the famed designer’s next game before he moves on to PHYSINT, his next foray into the stealth action genre in the vein of Metal Gear Solid.
