Hideo Kojima has unveiled the first in-engine trailer for OD: Knock, a three-minute fragment that marks his most direct return to horror since P.T. vanished a decade ago. The ingredients are minimal: a candlelit room, Sophia Lillis in close-up, and the steady thud of unseen knocks. The atmosphere is immediate and suffocating.
Premiered during Kojima Productions’ tenth-anniversary showcase, the teaser can be viewed below:
This trailer reveals little about mechanics or release timing. What it does make clear is the emphasis on presence. Unreal Engine 5 and MetaHuman technology deliver a near-photographic rendering of Lillis’ face, while the sound design treats silence as pressure. Lillis’s stillness carries the scene, each breath registering until the knocks feel fatal.
A lost object
The shadow of P.T. hives over OD: Knock. Released in 2014 as a playable teaser for Silent Hills, it confined players to a looping corridor where sound and repetition created terror. Its removal from the PlayStation Store after the project’s cancellation gave it an afterlife as a digital ghost, accessible only through second-hand consoles. Some puzzles relied on hardware quirks that are now obsolete. The paradox was stark: the most influential horror game of its era became the least accessible.
Reclaiming the form
In the years since, smaller developers have borrowed heavily from P.T.’s vocabulary. OD: Knock reads as reclamation rather than imitation. Kojima reasserts a language of fear he first shaped, this time on a larger stage. Jordan Peele is thought to be contributing a separate project ‘module’ built around a different fear, while Kojima’s own focuses on the menace of knocking. But the details remain obscure.
From Overdose to OD
The project’s path has been circuitous. In June 2022, leaked footage under the title Overdose showed Margaret Qualley exploring flashlight-lit interiors before the screen cut to “Game Over / Overdose.” That early build now reads as the prototype for OD. Momentum was interrupted between September 2024 and June 2025 during the SAG-AFTRA video game strike, which froze performance capture across the industry and forced Kojima Productions to pause work. Development resumed in July 2025 once the strike ended, and in September 2025 the studio presented the “Knock” teaser at its anniversary event, positioning it as both a symbolic restart and the beginning of a new phase of production.
What is known
Alongside Lillis, the confirmed cast includes Hunter Schafer and Udo Kier. Kojima has described OD as a suite of discrete fear pieces that may blur the boundary between cinema and game more explicitly than his past work. No release window has been announced. With Xbox Game Studios publishing, console and PC releases are expected – probably even a Playstation version (although by the time it comes out maybe it’ll be PS6 rather than 5!)
Cinematic echoes
Kojima’s work stands apart from its imitators through cinephile instincts as much as atmosphere. The looping corridor of P.T. extended the logic of repetition found in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse and Cure, where routines and compulsions steadily erode identity and lead to derealisation. The locked-in close-up of Lillis recalls Lynch’s use of the human face as a site of dread in Inland Empire and Twin Peaks: The Return. The ritualised staging of OD: Knock – with a woman alone and silence stretched until sound becomes unbearable – and the strange positioning of chairs in an under-furnished room continue the J-horror tradition of making the everyday uncanny. The fixed point of view, claustrophobic and unblinking, also draws on found-footage grammar, where the frame itself becomes a trap.
First reactions
The response online has been broadly enthusiastic. Many viewers hail the teaser as the most convincing successor yet to P.T., praising the intensity of the close-ups and the weight of the sound mix. Some remain cautious about the absence of visible mechanics, yet anticipation outweighs doubt. Communities are already dissecting freeze-frames for hidden text, and Kojima’s remark about recording “ghost” sounds with Microsoft engineers has added to speculation about an ARG layer.
This time, hopefully, it stays
If P.T. was an underground tape that altered the direction of horror, OD reads as a deliberate return. Kojima is once again working in the space he defined: where unease builds through repetition, where sound outweighs spectacle, and where fear resonates through detail. This time, hopefully, it stays.
OD: Knock is rumoured to be released in 2027.
Whitlock&Pope 