Highlights
- Hideo Kojima’s new game OD is the culmination of his affinity for the horror genre, and the collaboration with filmmaker Jordan Peele is sure to generate hype.
- The OD trailer and Kojima’s flamboyant entrance at The Game Awards reveal clear parallels to P.T., the playable trailer for Silent Hills.
- While OD and the canceled project Silent Hills are explicitly labeled as horror games, elements of horror can be found in almost all of Kojima’s work, showcasing his versatile storytelling abilities and showing that a game like this was always possible.
Hideo Kojima is a game creator that has always dabbled in the realm of horror, and it looks like OD could be the culmination of his years of affinity for the genre. Revealed at this year’s Game Awards, the star-studded OD, which is being developed in collaboration with horror-comedy filmmaker Jordan Peele, is sure to set the internet ablaze with rumors and speculation ahead of its eventual launch. This may seem like a bold new direction for Kojima, but in truth, it was only a matter of time before Kojima made a game like OD.
OD was revealed in typical Kojima fashion. The trailer centers on the three lead actors, Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier, as they recite the phrase “the hungry purple dinosaur ate the kind, zingy fox, the jabbering crab, and the mad whale and started vending and quacking.” At the end, Lillis’s character screams fearfully, then the title card drops. After the trailer was shown at The Game Awards, Kojima emerged from a door on-stage and began his interview with Keighley before being interrupted by Peele, revealing his involvement in the project. Virtually no other information about the game was revealed at TGA, although a leak about OD from last year contains additional information; naturally, this leak should be taken with a grain of salt.
The phrase spoken by the actors in the OD trailer is a pangram, a sentence that contains all the letters of the alphabet. Pangrams are most commonly used to display typefaces.
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Kojima’s History with the Horror Genre
OD Is Extremely Reminiscent of P.T. & Silent Hills
Released back in 2014, P.T. was a playable trailer for Silent Hills, a soft reboot of the famous Konami franchise that was set to be developed by both Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, starring Norman Reedus. P.T. succeeded in generating massive amounts of hype for Silent Hills, and it is generally considered to be not only a brilliant marketing tactic, but a disturbing, thought-provoking game in its own right. Sadly, Silent Hills would be canceled when Konami cut ties with Kojima, leaving players to wonder what might have been. Still, P.T. lives on in gaming culture, inspiring new horror games like Supernormal.
There seem to be a number of clear parallels between P.T. and OD. Aside from similarities of tone and style, OD is a collaboration between Kojima and auteur filmmaker Jordan Peele, echoing the would-be collaboration between Kojima and del Toro. Additionally, the motif of an opening door, which can be heard in the trailer and seen in Kojima’s flamboyant entrance to the TGA stage, could be considered a callback to the door that players would open dozens of times in P.T. Less consequential details, like the fact that OD is releasing as an Xbox exclusive while Silent Hills was set to be a PlayStation exclusive, may also be viewed as similarities.
Hideo Kojima and Horror: Beyond Just Silent Hills
Although Silent Hills and OD are the only Kojima projects explicitly labeled as horror games, elements of horror can be found in nearly all of Kojima’s work. When Kojima Productions split from Konami and began working on Death Stranding, it seemed to adapt several ideas from the canceled Silent Hills, with certain sections of the game, like those where the player has to sneak past BTs, alongside many of its cutscenes, feeling closely connected to the horror genre. Even before Death Stranding, Kojima mixed horror with suspense, comedy, and melodrama in the Metal Gear Solid games, with early examples being found in the Psycho Mantis fight in MG1 and the famous ending twist of MG2.
It may not be Death Stranding 2, but OD is sure to excite any fans of Hideo Kojima, especially those who feel burned by the cancelation of Silent Hills. With his vast experience in the gaming industry, alongside help from star filmmaker Jordan Peele, OD has a solid chance of being the horror game that Kojima Productions was meant to make all along.
