After Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills fizzled out as a project, leaving the free mood piece P.T. as the only concrete work ever to be tied to Konami’s revival project, it inspired a slew of P.T. copycats. This trend has stretched on for years, and can still be seen today. Focusing on looping residential hallways in first-person while ghosts poke their heads out at scripted moments, many creators loved P.T. but often took the wrong lessons from the legendary playable teaser. At first glance, Luto is the latest in a long line of P.T. wannabes, but it doesn’t take long for it to stand out from the pack as an especially unpredictable and unconventional horror story.
In Luto, you play a character stuck in an emotional rut and a literal loop. Waking to a smashed bathroom mirror, protagonist Sam exits into an L-shaped hallway, passes some locked doors, heads down the stairs, and out the front door. The next day, Sam wakes to a smashed bathroom mirror, exits into an L-shaped hallway, passes some locked doors, heads down the stairs, and out the front door. The next day–well, you get it. But where so many games struggle to distance themselves from Kojima’s original blueprint, Luto takes this kernel of an idea and expands on it in creative, and sometimes wondrous, ways.
I originally played a demo of Luto a few years ago, and I was surprised to hear a narrator has since been attached to this horror story. The voice of an almost gratingly upbeat British man gives the game the sense of something more like The Stanley Parable, which rings only truer when the narrator seems to comment on what I’m doing with reactivity and near-omniscience. I hated this addition to the game at first. The creaks of the floorboards in the empty house, once so eerie in the demo, were now drowned out by a narrator who seemed to spoonfeed me the story. Why did they spoil its tense atmosphere with this chatterbox?
But the inclusion of this narrator doesn’t take long to pay off, as his role serves the game’s genre-bending metanarrative in ways that are ultimately vital and interesting. As Sam’s loop begins to unravel, the narrator takes on a very different role–one which I won’t spoil here–and the game becomes much more than a looping hallway, upending many comparisons to P.T.
Whereas so many P.T. clones seem interested in resigning their ghost stories to a largely typical haunted house setting, hitting traditional haunted house story beats, Luto captures P.T.’s most essential quality best of all: its weirdness. Luto regularly experiments with genre, presentation, and mood. Sometimes it speaks directly to the player in ways that are hard to make sense of, though the story mostly comes together before the credits roll.
Exploring Sam’s non-Euclidean home eventually gives way to disruptions in the game’s visual style, aggressive winks to the camera, and–in one of my favorite moments–a full presentation of Romero’s seminal zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, which the game explains point-blank it will not be rewarding you for watching in full. Hallways become caverns in the desert, safe spaces break down like bad code in the game’s guts, putting it all on display for you, the player, to interact with in such a way that might have you wondering what’s scripted and what’s a genuine bug. Thankfully, the game doesn’t seem to be buggy, and everything I saw on PC, no matter how weird or glitchy it got, was very much on purpose. As much as I’ve likened the game to P.T., the full six or so hours of game that are here is ultimately closer to something like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, an experiment in form that is hard to describe and unforgivable to spoil. Signaling more of its Kojima appreciation, Luto features a moment so cool in a Psycho Mantis sort of way that I immediately put the controller down and texted my boss about what I was seeing. For a debut game from a small indie studio, the swings Luto takes are enormous.
While its form is impressively ever-shifting, some of its qualities are less dazzling. Obtuse puzzles, not unlike something you’d see in a classic Resident Evil, sometimes demand an astounding eye for details. My biggest gripe with the game is these puzzles, which sometimes slowed me down to the point that once-tense moments became frustrating. I recall one early puzzle in which I had to find a key while someone (or something) banged on Sam’s front door. The echoes in the high-ceilinged room were intimidating at first, but after five to 10 minutes of trying to solve its puzzle, they became merely background noise to my annoyance. They weren’t ever going to get through the door, so the audio’s effect withered away over several minutes.
Luckily, I found that Luto’s early puzzles were so difficult to parse that they helped me get into the headspace of thinking outside the box, and it felt like later puzzles were a bit easier once I could speak in the game’s language. When Luto asked me to solve for a phone number–a puzzle which, as an added layer of difficulty, actually changed shape during the review period when a pre-patch was released–I eventually understood I needed to use everything in my inventory to determine the missing digits. Because the game often constrains itself to small spaces at a time, it was at least helpful to know I’d exhausted the physical space available to me and the answer was close by, probably even in my pockets.
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Committing mainly to its themes and ultimate message over anything else, Luto isn’t often scary after some early moments. Like a lot of horror-adventure games, it’s clear that much of what you’re exposed to in terms of scares is on-rails. It’s obvious the game hasn’t built in any combat or stealth elements, so any encounter with the house’s roaming spirits are going to be what I’ve traditionally likened to haunted hayrides; they may frighten you, but once you realize they’ll never actually catch you or hurt you, it can be hard to suspend your disbelief, or at least that’s always how I’ve felt. Thankfully, its hauntings are quite creepy even knowing this, so while they don’t scare me, they do immerse me.
Luto really bets it all on its final act and for good reason: The final third of this game is unlike anything I’ve ever played, horror game or not. While some of the game gets so obsessed with metaphor that it can be dizzying to try and keep up at times, somewhat diluting its message, I still came away thinking I’d played something special and destined to be a cult classic. A game like Luto is difficult to praise in detail because so much of what it does so well shouldn’t be explained; it should be seen for yourself. I’ve tried to talk around the game’s most brilliant aspects, and I hope it’s clear the game isn’t without issues, too. I expect some could walk away from Luto scratching their heads, wondering what it all meant, and some of that is certainly the game’s fault.
As a horror obsessive, I hope others like me push through the game’s frustrating puzzles and dense plot to see Luto’s best parts, because they’re numerous and unforgettable. This being Broken Bird Games’ first project makes me incredibly excited to see where the team goes from here. I often wonder what P.T. would’ve looked like as a full game. We’ll never know for sure, but it would’ve been lucky to be something like Luto.
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