Slitterhead immediately grabbed headlines when it was first announced, in part thanks to the pedigree of the team at Bokeh Games. Headed up by Keiichiro Toyama, a legit legend of Japanese gaming having created not only Silent Hill but also the Siren and Gravity Rush series, and with Silent Hill stalwart Akira Yamaoka alongside for composition, you jad a survival horror dream team scenario. Details have been relatively sparse over the years, so I started my time with the game with a mixture of excitement and uncertainty. What even is Slitterhead? After finishing the game I’m still left with that question.
The first thing that stands out is the game’s presentation. Slitterhead looks fantastic at times and offers up a neon-drenched and grubby analogue for Hong Kong that gave me flashbacks to the underrated Sleeping Dogs. However, it’s clear that this isn’t a big budget AAA game, and there’s some noticeable shortcuts. The most obvious is the vast number of doppelgangers running around Kow Long, making it feel like there’s only a handful of different NPCs. It gives the game an uncanny feeling that actually sort of works. Cutscenes are of a much higher standard, which leads to the kind of jarring transitions back to gameplay that characterised the Xbox 360 era. The game is accompanied by an interesting and varied soundtrack, with some unsettling drone and jazzy moments that stand out but do not overshadow the game itself.
The storyline is obscure and confusing in a deliberate way that perhaps speaks to the title’s ambition, but is left behind by its execution. You play as a mysterious spirit – the Hyoki – stranded in the game world with no memories (so far so generic). To survive you have to possess the bodies of those around you, controlling them through their blood. Such control is limited, and you are fragile and cumbersome. As you work through the early parts of the game you move from body to body before finding a Rarity – a human who can fully bond with you and unleash their full potential – with eight different
By the end of the game you’ll find up to eight different Rarities with unique skill sets and personalities. You find your first Rarity bleeding out after being attacked by the titular Slitterheads – grotesque monstrosities that also possess human bodies but burst out of their heads in varied horrific forms.
As the narrative develops you may find yourself asking a lot of questions about what is happening and why – I certainly was – but Slitterhead is not a game that offers easy answers. Much of the backstory is hidden behind collectable memory fragments and it later develops into a time hopping mechanic that makes following events even more confusing. This aspect is fine as it really feeds into the unsettling nature of the world and I enjoyed trying to piece things together. The ending of the game, however, proves to be perhaps the most headscratching part of all, but I’ll leave that for you to ponder on, if you give the game a try.
Equally puzzling is how the game plays. Slitterhead is much more like a fusion of visual novel and mission based action combat game than the survival horror title many were anticipating. Each of the Rarities has unique weapons and skills based on their personality and powered by their own blood. The end result of this is actually a more traditional set of character archetypes, but one that feels more original given the striking presentation and setting.
The first of your Rarities, Julee, is a healer, whilst the second, Alex, is more of a DPS warrior type. Once you have multiple Rarities available, you can take two into each mission, a move that opens up a range of choices and strategies to customise to your preferences. As well as the Rarities, you can still possess regular citizens in combat and juggling between the characters and maintaining their blood levels can lead to enjoyably frantic fights, at least for a while.
Between the static text conversation parts (for which there is a very disappointing lack of voice acting for 90% of the game) and arena fight set pieces you’ll be ‘exploring’ the city. This exploration is incredibly limited though and you’ll find yourself frustrated by the invisible walls and boundaries. Given that each mission has hidden collectables to find it is very counter-intuitive that the world is so restrictive with your character often refusing to leave the main path. These collectables are also only revealed after you complete the mission, so you don’t know whether you have found everything until you go back to the mission select screen. These decisions are echoes of gaming mechanics that I had hoped were left in the past.
Most annoying of all is the fact that several of the game’s Rarities are hidden throughout the missions and progress is locked until you find them. As you don’t know this is the case until you finish a mission in most cases, and the levels themselves are often linear paths that don’t really facilitate backtracking, you’re forced to replay missions until you find the Rarity and then unlock more boring, obtuse conversation trees.
The end result is one of frustration rather than excitement and I often rushed through missions the first time in the knowledge that I’d have to replay them again anyway knowing what I was looking for. Replaying missions doesn’t reward you with skill points to upgrade your character, which are only awarded the first time you finish a level, so you can’t even use these replays to grind. Even the creature design falls flat once you realise that there are only a handful of grotesque types endlessly repeated. Once you’ve fought off a few hundred anthropomorphic penises you start to lose interest…
Keiichiro Toyama has been open about the challenges of developing this game through engine choice to the effects of the Covid pandemic and I’m sensitive to the difficulties facing new studios, even when made up of superstar figures, but Slitterhead is a difficult game to fully recommend in its current form. It feels too much like the spirit of a game forced to possess a range of different types whilst trying to find itself.