Japanese School Uses Hideo Kojima's Unfinished Silent Hill PT to Teach English
High school is already a gauntlet — this week, it got even scarier.
Only in 2025 do you walk into English class and the assignment is: survive P.T. Honestly? Inspired.
Context for the uninitiated
P.T. is that infamous playable teaser Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro cooked up for a Silent Hills game that never happened. Konami yanked it from the PlayStation Store back in 2015, and it never grew past that short, nasty slice of first-person horror. Because of that, it sits in this weird, legendary space: a 20-ish minute loop that might be the scariest thing to ever live in a hallway.
The school that turned P.T. into homework
Tsunan Secondary School in Niigata, Japan wrote on its blog — a post spotted and translated by Automaton — that one of its assistant language teachers had tweenage students play P.T. in English as part of a lesson. Yes, the same P.T. where the most talkative character is a haunted radio.
- Vocabulary highlights pulled straight from the game: "meat cleaver" and "murder his entire family."
- The teacher paused the game periodically to ask for next steps, like "walk around the room" or "answer the phone."
- Most of P.T. is pure sound design — groaning doors, disembodied moans, muffled footsteps — but the radio does occasionally bark "look behind you."
- The school noted some students were "startled by the sudden ringing of the in-game telephone."
Is that strictly educational? Debatable. Is it efficient? Absolutely. P.T. does have enough voiced lines that fans have archived its script over on Silent Hill Memories, but let’s be real: this teacher also wanted an excuse to boot up P.T. during class. I respect the hustle.
Why it weirdly works
Short runtime, clear action prompts, and sparse but memorable language make P.T. an oddly perfect listening-and-reacting exercise. It is also, minor detail, terrifying — which tends to keep attention focused better than a worksheet ever could.
Elsewhere in Silent Hill news
Separately, a Konami developer pushed back on Hideo Kojima’s recent comments about AI, name-checking the new project in the series:
"Silent Hill f contains the kind of bold choices AI would never be able to make."