I was excited for Slitterhead, an action adventure game by Bokeh Studio, a studio founded by none other than your boy Keiichiro Toyama: the creator of Silent Hill, Gravity Rush, and the Siren series. And within that first hour, Slitterhead’s body-possessing and Hong Kong-inspired streets had me thinking, “Is this it, the sleeper hit of 2024?!”
No, sadly not. It’s no doubt built a compelling universe filled with brain-sucking aliens that masquerade as humans, and it attempts plenty else besides: bouncing between bodies as you stealth around dingy apartment blocks, fighting with blood katanas, and gorging on pools of red plasma to refuel skills, many of which require more body-flitting. Thing is, they are ultimately just attempts, attempts that fall victim to an emptiness and jitteriness that quickly reveals Slitterhead’s true, irritating form.
I really dig Slitterhead’s premise, which is sort of like The Thing vs The Thing but set in the densely packed streets of Kowlong: a slum city based on Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City. Amidst the hubbub, there are googly, slithery beings called slitterheads, who’ve been disguising themselves as humans as they skulk around slurping the brains out of unsuspecting victims. You’re Hyoki, a spirit entity that’s taken the form of an ethereal wiggly worm, and while you’ve lost your memory, a singular purpose remains: kill the slitterheads. Quickly you learn that to do so, you must use their tactics against them, whizzing into the skulls of civilians to possess them, blend in, and hunt.
Cool, eh? And initially, yes, zipping into and assuming control of people like it’s an urban fantasy Watch Dogs Legion is wonderfully freeing. It’s clever, too, in how you’re able to pass through blocked pathways (grates or large crowds, for example) by hopping from one skull to another, like you’re Casper the Friendly Ghost being pitched by Shohei Ohtani. Very early on, you’re introduced to other details that hint at a dynamic blend of noir, horror, and bonkers. You follow the scent of a slitterhead posing as a human and can “sightjack” them, letting you see through their eyes to better locate your prey. Finally hunt them down and there’s a chase sequence where you leg after an unmasked slitterhead through the streets, whipping out your newfound blood powers to Spider-Man up onto rooftops and rapidly skipping between different bodies to catch up.
A little later, you fight the slippery bastards head-on. As a regular civilian you can wield a blood mace and pelt slitterheads with basic combos, maybe chuck in the odd ability like a blood bomb to dazzle them. Blue flashes from right to left highlight a brief parry window, where you must match the direction with a thumbstick flick. Since you’re a puny civ, you’re encouraged to bounce between other nearby humans (they conveniently spawn whenever you fight), giving you a temporary boost to your defences and essentially refreshing your health pool. This frantic dash between fleshy vessels makes the slitterheads seem like terrifying apex predators, as you desperately avoid their powerful lashes.
Later, you’ll possess “Rarities”, all of which are main characters with upgradeable skills and a bit of backstory you’ll explore between missions (I’ll get onto this in a sec). Julee is the first of the bunch, and unlike a normal civvie, she’s got super powerful blood claws, better stats, and special abilities, including a powerful blast and some shuriken… things. These are all handy, considering the slitterheads begin evolving into their full forms, springing out of their human host like someone’s stamped on a Frube. They take on seriously freakish guises, all octopus or praying mantis-like, with a limby dose of absolutely fucked.
There is something of a honeymoon phase to Slitterhead’s early moments, as you admire Kowlown’s murkiness and the general grossness of the yoghurt monsters. Sadly, this haze also quickly starts to dissipate, replaced by a thick fog of jank. Like its namesake enemies bursting forth from an unfortunate meat puppet, Slitterhead eventually reveals its true nature, and reader, it isn’t good.
For starters, there’s a complete lack of excitement to venturing out into the field. Kowlong isn’t an open world sandbox, but small explorable areas you’ll head to across a series of missions, all of which you’ll unlock after the first mandated conversation with Julee (as you gather more rarities, you have more chats, and unlock more missions you can tackle in any order). All of these conversations, however, are just blurry vignettes of Julee talking to you in her head, through a series of grunts and “ahs” and “uhs”. And then you go off on your mission, taking with you a main rarity and a companion who adds no story value besides being another powerful body to switch into when the inevitable happens (like the civvies, they conveniently warp nearby whenever a fight breaks out).
What’s frustrating about this framing that Kowlong is, for the most part, a wonderfully realised space. It’s a dense network of grime and neon, with believably mundane electrical cables hanging off of balconies, where an old fella with his nips out might puff on a ciggy. I particularly like the dull hallways and typical flat furnishings, with occasional bursts of colour from corner shop soda cans or finery displayed at markets. The problem is that it all feels so lifeless at the same time.
Largely everyone being possessable means that everyone is uniform, all literally resembling expressionless porcelain mannequins. This lends the streets a awkward quietness, too, as they wander with all the energy of Roombas tending to their programmed carpet patches. All of this stiffness permeates basically everything you do, which turns a lot of scenarios that could’ve been brilliant into simplistic, jilted guff.
I’m talking a stiffness when it comes to infiltration missions, where possessing people could’ve otherwise provided Hitman-esque thrills. Yes, you might blend into hotels as employees or use rooftop vessels to bridge gaps and slip in from the rooftops. But none of it feels like you’ve cracked a seedy ecosystem yourself, instead you follow markers and occasionally chat to uninteresting people to gather information. This is subterfuge, if the subterfuge was as easy as cracking open Citymapper and getting the right tube line to your culprit.
The action sequences, too, end up eliciting little more than sighs and head-shaking. Those chases? Fall behind and you’ll realise that the slitterhead just waits for you, awkwardly stopping to let you catch up. Sometimes the pursuit won’t end until you’ve dealt enough damage to them, which is absolutely the equivalent of throwing out a spike strip made of balloons every time you body-hop close enough for a melee strike. And even when you do take a swing, it either connects and does piddling damage, or misses entirely. It’s genuinely the most agonising thing.
The battles with fully evolved slitterheads eventually become a regular fixture (some missions are basically a string of fights), with only a few additions to mix things up: phallic worms, government forces, unevolved slitterheads. Except that each fight plays out largely the same, even if your rarity’s abilities all play into each other rather wonderfully. My favourite is Alex, a shotgun toting fella who can chuck an orb that sucks everything into its centre, which makes the ensuing rabble an easy boshing with his boomstick. Each blast hits his health bar, though, so you’ve got to suck any pools left on the concrete back into your veins to recoup your lost haemoglobins.
Sadly, swapping abilities is fussy. Enemy attacks are jagged and awkward to predict. And all the slitterheads seem to have the same movesets. Very, very rarely does a fight feel like a fluid, body-hopping duel and instead more of wrestle with the controls as you fumble towards an unrewarding finish. The more you fight, the more the story begins to devolve into typical action cliché fare, too, turning the slitterheads from sinister threats into irritating pests. All that early tension, all that genuine fear of the slitterheads being powerful and conniving – poof! Pissed into the wind.
Besides slitterheads, the biggest enemy was really Bokeh Studios’ distrust in you, the player. You’re forever told how to go about each challenge because the world isn’t malleable enough to entertain your investigative spirit. That’s with all the emptiness and the irritants on top, which come together to form a deeply unlikeable game. That’s unfortunate, because I do think it has some genuinely impressive ideas and delivers, on occasion, some brief bursts of interesting combat and the occasional nice wander. They’re just too few and far between for me to recommend it.