P.T. is not playable on PlayStation 5

Kojima Productions’ playable teaser for its canceled Silent Hill reboot, horror game P.T., is a precious commodity to many PlayStation 4 owners. After Hideo Kojima’s departure from Konami and Silent Hills’ cancellation, P.T. was removed from Sony’s PlayStation Store. If you didn’t already have it, you were (pretty much) out of luck.

The bad news for prospective PlayStation 5 owners is that your existing download of P.T. cannot be transferred over to Sony’s new console, nor is the game playable through backward compatibility.

Here’s the strange thing, though: At one point over the past two weeks, it was both transferable and playable on PS5. I played P.T. on my PS5 in late October, the day after I received my review unit. But it appears that when the PlayStation 5 launches on Nov. 12, it won’t play P.T. through backward compatibility.

Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

P.T. was the first PS4 title I tested through backward compatibility on PS5. On Oct. 24, I transferred my copy of P.T. to and played the game on my PS5, picking up from a recent save that carried over from PS4. Then I restarted P.T. from the beginning, and played through a bit more. It seemed to work fine. In fact, the 4K screenshot at the top of this post was captured from the PS5 review unit that Sony sent me.

But in the days leading up to Sony’s PS5 review embargo, the situation changed. P.T. is now listed as a “Playable on PS4” title, meaning it can’t be played on PS5.

Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon

And after being forced to do a factory reset of my PS5 review unit this week, which deleted all game content from the system, I learned I was no longer able to transfer P.T. from PS4 to PS5. (My colleague Russ Frushtick still has his transferred copy of P.T. sitting on his PS5 SSD.)

When it was playable, P.T. appeared to perform on PS5 just as it did on PS4. I did not complete a full playthrough of the demo, but I experienced no noticeable issues during the 10 minutes in which I tested the game.

Sony had previously warned that some content (including game demos, which would encompass P.T.) might not be compatible on the new console. The playable teaser for Silent Hills does not appear on the list of unsupported titles on Sony’s PS5 backward compatibility support page.

Reached for comment, a Sony spokesperson told Polygon that the change to P.T.’s backward compatibility on PS5 “was a publisher decision.”