It’s just missed out on Halloween but this new survival horror from the maker of Forbidden Siren and Gravity Rush has some very unique ideas.
There’s been an unusually bountiful crop of horror video games this year, especially in the last couple of months, but there is an obvious problem with them all: they’re not scary. This has been a common complaint for most modern horror games (the last time we remember being genuinely spooked was by last year’s Amnesia: The Bunker) and we can only assume it’s a purposeful attempt to appeal to more people.
This, of course, makes no sense because it means horror fans are not getting what they signed up for and non-fans are still going to assume it’s scary anyway. The remake of Silent Hill 2 was disturbing and upsetting, just like the original, but the recent Until Dawn remake, A Quiet Place: The Road Ahead, and Fear The Spotlight were spooky but never actively frightening.
We had hoped that this new game by Keiichiro Toyama, creator of Forbidden Siren and the original Silent Hill, might be different, but unfortunately not being scary is the least of Slitterhead’s problems.
You play the game as a disembodied spirit who doesn’t know who or what it is, only that it wants to exterminate all the Slitterheads that have infested 90s Hong Kong. Slitterheads are portrayed as creatures not dissimilar to the monster in The Thing, and so look like ordinary humans from the outside but transform into giant monsters when feeding (on people’s brains) or if discovered.
What exactly they or you are is kept mysterious, as the tutorial has you floating around possessing people at will in order to use their bodies. As you’re taught to jump off a building and quickly possess someone else before hitting the floor, you’re shown to have no regard for human lives, just a burning desire to slit Slitterhead throats.
The spirit’s attitude changes once you find the first of several people who are designated ‘rarities’, as they prove unusually good hosts and have the ability to use a much wider range of, blood-based, special abilities. The first is an ordinary young woman whose morality begins to influence the increasingly chatty spirit into being more altruistic.
At the same time as this is going on it becomes clear that the Slitterheads are not just the evil caricatures they’re initially implied to be, as you meet some seemingly willing to live at peace amongst humans – with the whole set-up beginning to resemble modern takes on vampire folklore.
All of that probably sounds fairly interesting, with increasing intrigue added as you realise that a government agency is aware of both the Slitterheads and you. It doesn’t come across as interesting in practice though, with no spoken dialogue – just subtitles and talking head style cut scenes between missions.
The missions are always quite short, making the pacing feel fragmented and insubstantial. It’s also highly repetitive, with the small number of city locations being constantly reused. The game tries to mix things up, but the majority of missions involve wandering around looking for a Slitterhead (often you’re given a rough direction and the chance to ‘sightjack’ their view of the world – an obvious steal from Forbidden Siren), then getting into a chase with them or just starting straight away with a fight.
The combat seems like it’s trying to riff on Devil May Cry and other third person fighters but although it has some interesting systems, including a fairly involved dodge and parry, it’s far too clumsy and repetitive to work as the core appeal of the game.
Usually, the best parts of the game are the chases and other times when the game begins to lean into stealth and puzzle-solving. Because you can posses anyone else at any time, sometimes you end up zipping from one person to another in an attempt to get past a physical obstacle or climb the heights of the very vertical city. Although this is undermined by your rarity (you can take up to two into each mission) magically ending up there as well, but only after you’ve done it the hard way.
The possession element is definitely the most interesting mechanic in the game, but it’s used inconsistently and ruins any lingering chance the game had of being scary. After all, it’s hard to be concerned for your virtual self when you’re an intangible spirit and the people you possess are mostly unnamed cannon fodder.
Effort has clearly gone into Slitterhead, with each rarity utilising different attacks and weapons, as well as having upgradeable skills. And while they’re small and reused far too often, the city environments are nicely detailed – much more so than the PlayStation 2-looking human characters.
In order to work, Slitterhead needed to be a lot more focused and refined. Instead, it just sits there spitting out ideas at random (time travel quickly becomes part of the story, just in case you felt you hadn’t seen the same few locations enough times already) and having absolutely no coherence in terms of gameplay or story.
It’s a dud, we’re afraid, or as Toyama himself has admitted ‘a bit rough around the edges.’ That is an understatement and while the game could clearly have done with several more months, if not years, of work we’re not convinced the core concept has merit. A survival horror game that’s not scary, melded with an action game where the action is poor, is not a very good idea for a video game and in the end it’s not just Halloween which Slitterhead has missed.
Slitterhead review summary
In Short: A deeply flawed attempt to combine survival horror with Devil May Cry style action, that tries to do a dozen things at once and succeeds at none of them.
Pros: The possession mechanic has potential and there are some decent monster designs. Hong Kong is portrayed well.
Cons: Nothing works as well as it should, with an overbearing sense of clumsiness to the whole experience, especially in terms of the combat. Extremely repetitive scenarios even before you start revisiting them.
Score: 3/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £47.99
Publisher: Bokeh Game Studio
Developer: Bokeh Game Studio
Release Date: 8th November 2024
Age Rating: 18
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