Surprise: Kojima Hid Silent Hill References In OD Trailer

Udo Kier talks at the camera.
Udo Kier talks at the camera.


Not blinking required to spot this one.

Hideo Kojima showed off a creepy trailer for his upcoming game, OD, at The Game Awards last week. Featuring three different actors speaking what sounds like creepy gibberish at the camera, it didn’t tell us a whole lot about what this game will even be. But since its reveal, fans have noticed a few Silent Hill references cleverly hidden within. Spooky.

Back in 2014, when Hideo Kojima was still working for game publisher Konami, he and film director Guillermo del Toro were working on a new Silent Hill game. A playable teaser appropriately titled P.T. teased Silent Hills, a game that would have starred actor Norman Reedus (who, along with Guillermo del Toro, would go on to appear in Kojima’s Death Stranding in 2019). The trailer featured first-person gameplay set in a series of looping rooms in a haunted building (or some other manifestation of horror). As Kojima would go on to leave Konami in 2015, the Silent Hills project as it was known ended, and P.T. disappeared from the PlayStation store.

Read more

An altered image increases the brightness of the OD trailer to reveal the letter A in the mouth of an actor.
An altered image increases the brightness of the OD trailer to reveal the letter A in the mouth of an actor.


Brightness added to emphasize the letter A right above Udo Kier’s tongue.

It’s very hard to see this in motion at full speed if you don’t know what to look for, and it’s made doubly hard by internet compression on YouTube.

Atami, a city in the Japanese prefecture Shizuoka (which, as some might know, itself loosely translates to “silent hill”), is suspected by some to be the source of inspiration for the town in the original 1999 PSX horror title Silent Hill.

The trailer and stage set for OD also referenced P.T.

That big door Kojima walked through on stage at The Game Awards wasn’t just a prop. As fans have pointed out, it looks like a direct reference to the start of P.T. You can see this door again in actress Sophia Lillis’ eyes at 1:14 in the OD trailer.

A collage shows images of a door from P.T., Kojima on stage at The Game Awards, and Sophia Lillis.
A collage shows images of a door from P.T., Kojima on stage at The Game Awards, and Sophia Lillis.


Left to right: The door from P.T., the door from Kojima’s reveal of OD, a door in the eyes of Sophia Lillis during the OD trailer.

Fans also suspect that a quick shot of an MRI scan of a brain in the OD trailer harkens back to the brightness slider in P.T..

So yeah, leave it to Kojima to work with those damn brightness sliders in a creative way.

Kojima’s reveal of OD, despite taking up much more time than was given to most people at The Game Awards, was light on details. Though we do know that Jordan Peele is working with him. Cool, I guess.

More from Kotaku

Sign up for Kotaku's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.