Hideo Kojima announced his upcoming horror title OD or Overdose at the recently concluded The Game Awards 2023 with a teaser trailer, promising a fresh experience for horror fans. Kojima is creating the game in partnership with Academy Award-winning Get Out and Us director Jordan Peele and is under development at Kojima Productions and Xbox Game Studios.
There wasn’t much information revealed about the game at the event other than the actor’s close-up shots but that hasn’t stopped the fans from connecting the dots. They have found several references to the Silent Hill series, and they are quite clever even for the gaming auteur.
Kojima Hid Silent Hill References in His Upcoming Horror Game OD
The teaser trailer for Overdose featured close-up shots of actors Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier. The actors were reciting a strange phrase which is a phonetic pangram for English and the trailer ended with a door opening reflected in the eyes of the actor, causing her to scream. It then abruptly ended with a tagline “For All Players And Screamers.”
The fans were delighted to finally see a horror game from Kojima that they had been waiting for after Konami canceled the Silent Hill game. They soon got to work finding more about Overdose and they have managed to spot several references to the popular Silent Hill series. Players have found that there was a message hidden in the mouth of Udo Kier’s character.
A Reddit user going by the username GlazicBlr shared this finding on the Silent Hill subreddit and studying the trailer frame by frame led them to find the hidden easter egg. As Udo Kier’s character recites the phrase, the letters A, T, A, M, and I appear at 37 seconds, 40 seconds, 42 seconds, 44 seconds, and 50 seconds respectively. The user also shared an image of the appearing letters. The Reddit post read:
A Silent Hill reference was found in the trailer for OD, Hideo Kojima’s next game. As it turns out, in the OD trailer, there was a message hidden in the mouth of the character played by Udo Kier all along. If you study the trailer frame by frame, you can see barely visible letters appearing in some frames.
The letters hidden in the teaser trailer, Atami is a seaside city in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture and the word Shizuoka in Japanese is written as 静岡. These Japanese words separately translate as “quiet, “calm,” “silent”, and “hill” respectively. Fans would need to watch the teaser trailer in 4K at 0.25 speed to spot these letters themselves. It certainly means that Kojima made that reference.
However, this isn’t the only Silent Hill reference. Kojima’s entrance on The Game Awards 2023 to announce the game and reveal the trailer saw him come on the stage through a wooden door with an LED light which is similar to the door that appeared in the playable teaser. Players believe that Kojima is trolling Konami or using the ideas that he had for the SH game.
Kojima was working on a game in 2012 with some of the popular names in the horror genre such as Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito and the game was to be published by Konami. However, the game was later canceled by Konami only after releasing a PT or playable teaser, which ended up revealing that it was a SH game featuring actor Norman Reedus.
It is speculated that Kojima snuck the reference to hint that it is a Silent Hill game which is unlikely or just to take a jab at Konami that he is making his horror title. The reason is unclear but fans are loving it so far. Kojima revealed that the game will be both a game as well a film with a fresh, never-like-before horror experience.
Kojima has also revealed that Jordan Peele isn’t the only creative that he is working on the horror project and there are several other “creative storytellers” that are involved in the project. He has not taken any names but it can be expected that the game will involve some of the greatest people known in the horror genre.
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