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The infamous playable trailer for Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro's scrapped Silent Hills game – known forevermore as just P.T. – has been an outlier in horror gaming since it was removed from the PlayStation Store in 2015. Never allowed to grow past its infancy, P.T. exists only informally as one of the most frightening games ever made, so I'm glad one Japanese secondary school imbued it with the new purpose of teaching kids English.
The Tsunan Secondary School in Niigata wrote in a blog – found and translated by Automaton – that one of its assistant language teachers recently decided to have their tweenage students play the approximately 20-minute Silent Hills trailer in English, helping them pick up important phrases like "meat cleaver" and "murder his entire family."
The blog explained that, during their lesson, the teacher would periodically pause P.T. to ask students what they should do next, like "walk around the room" or "answer the phone." Though, I'll note that most of P.T. is soundtracked by ambient noises – groaning doors, disembodied moaning, muffled footsteps. Sometimes the radio crackles and urges you to "look behind you," and there are at least enough words to warrant archiving the script on the Silent Hill Memories archive, but I think Tsunan's assistant language teacher just wanted to play P.T. in class.
I can't blame them. I remember watching P.T. no commentary playthroughs as soon as I came home from school in 2015 – Tsunan's method here is simply two birds, one stone. The school even goes out of its way to note in its blog that some students were "startled by the sudden ringing of the in-game telephone" which, again, doesn't sound purely educational, but it is awesome.
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