14th Game Completed in 2024

Whew boy, Slitterhead. This game.

This game is deeply unsettling, profoundly fucked-up, and it's just wonderful. It's a modern game that clearly had budget limitations. It feels like a PS2 game in its core design. It's janky, a lot of its mechanics are half-baked, and there's nothing else like it.

So lemme start with the surface level stuff. The titular Slitterheads are some of the absolute best monster designs, both in visual design and concept. To understand what the fuck they even are is the mystery that really pushes the game forward, and everything about them is deeply unsettling, uncomfortable, and upsetting. They pose as humans, they murder people and eat their brains, they hijack bodies to predate upon others, and their true forms are these hulking monstrosities with tentacles and scythe arms and these almost fractal assemblies of slimy flesh and bone.

The game has a really weird pace though, and how the story is told is quite unusual. I concede, this one took a fewer hours to really get me invested. At first, the mission structure feels cheap and arbitrary, but as you dig into the story, you'll begin to understand why things are the way they are. Quite early on, you'll hit a point where the stakes change, and you're just like, "Oh shit, that's what's happening here?" Yes, sirree. And when you see what it's going for, strap the fuck in and get ready for a ride.

You're gonna be exploring some seriously dark territory in this game. It's set in the dirty, crowded slums of what I presume to be Hong Kong, and deals heavily in the worlds of sex work, unregistered migrant communities, and homelessness. But it's not about those things. It uses human misery as a backdrop to tell a story that's deeply psychological, and a worthy successor to stuff like the game's creators previous works, Silent Hill and Siren. Thing is though, Slitterhead has a certain layer of maturity and clear-headedness matched only by SIlent Hill 2 in my opinion. There's a lot of layers to what's going on in this world, and I found myself constantly asking moral and philosophical questions. How far is going to far? When does our purpose conflict with our place in the world? What do I think of other people - the collateral damage; do I use them for my benefit, or do I protect them? To be very vague and not get into spoiler territory, I really feel that at Slitterhead's core is an analysis and deconstruction of the cycle of anger and abuse. It uses a lot of really aggressive visual metaphor to get there, and the story taken at face value is still great on its own merit, but the best games for me always have that extra je ne sais quois operating in the background, and that's absolutely true here too.

The gameplay is kind of a similar bag too. I saw a lot of reviews before launch basically saying, "The gameplay sucks, but the game is weird as hell." I think the gameplay is a lot like the plot - there's a lot interesting happening here, but it's beneath the surface. The combat system is very unorthodox, using a very Souls-like approached with blocking and parrying, but with a lot of really interesting skills that change up gameplay a lot. Once you figure out how to use different characters and skills together and develop a play style, it really kinda comes together and feels great to play. It's not quite as "hard for the sake of hard" as Souls-like might suggest, but it does put up a stiff challenge and I had a lot of what felt like cheap deaths. But I didn't really care, either - I played probably 80% of the game on Normal before having to drop the difficulty, but I kept pressing on with a curiosity about what this game had to say or what came next in the plot.

If I do have a criticism though, I found the chase sequences to be overused and kind of annoying. Once or twice would have been cool, but when it happens the 5th, and 7th, and 12th time... It gets annoying. The boss fights are wonderful, but the path to them can be tedious sometimes. It's also a little annoying to have to revisit old levels to gather things you may have missed that are required to proceed, but this only happened a couple of times for me.

The scale of this game is... Interesting. I'm confident it had a bizarre development path. Interestingly, the title screen has a 2021 copyright date, which leads me to believe this game was actually finished a few years ago, and then held back for the sake of polish... And it shows. On a technical level, this game looks and runs AMAZING. Like the actual quality of the assets and geometry seems low, and it has a lot of parts that show the budget was tight, but it still manages to feel like it's running perfectly, to the point you don't notice it. What did kinda bother me, though, was the lack of voice acting. It's there, used VERY sparingly in a few key cutscenes, but it's mostly text only with lots of "Hmm"s and "Oh"s in lieu of recorded dialogue. This is one where I think voiced dialogue throughout the action segments would have been preferred, though I do kinda like the style they went with for the "Talk" segments where your disembodied spirit player character interacts with the people you control in combat.

Down to brass tacks though, this is extremely effective horror absolutely drowning in inspired ideas, and I'm frankly shocked this game even exists. This is the kind of thing nobody dares publish, because it's just too fucking weird. And like... Yeah. That's this game in a nutshell. It's weird, it's disgusting, it's repulsive, but it's done with a certain maturity and poetry that elevates the subject matter from compelling horror to a sort of reflective commentary on the human condition. Somehow. But it's inspired. It's smart. It's the kind of special game I love to see, and I really connected deeply with this one. It's janky as hell, it's gonna take a while to grow on you, but it's worth the ride.

AND AS A FINAL NOTE. A few games journalists gave this game 3/10 review scores... I can absolutely, without a doubt, guarantee you that anyone who gave it a score that low did not finish the game. They did not take the time to "get" what the story and mechanics were going for, got frustrated, and assumed it was cheap crap. It's not. It's on a budget, for sure, but man... This ain't 3/10. Give your head a shake.

I don't get people, the market, or even reviews.

This game was set up as "the bad game that freaks love", and while I am a freak and love it... The game is just good? Like it's not even janky, it's well made and interesting, and freaky. A body horror action romp. It was never set up to be a revolution of horror, or the new bombastic franchise... But people still find it to be rough?

Are voices really that important to people? Most games I play don't have voices, I find they have a higher chance of worsening the narrative than improving it tbh, but it seems they are important enough to others that the perspective on this game is shifted completely. I saw it as it is, mostly an indie game with, tbh, very good looking graphics, that focused on other things instead of making the characters realistic and movie-like.

I might be an out of touch old fart! Edo best character, but I really like the design and concept behind everyone in the cast.

I really wish this and Kunitsu did better so more games like them could come out, but it seems it's just gonna be another year of gacha gaas and battle royales.

Slitterhead is a wild ride, to be sure. It's a game that ends up going so far off the rails of reality that it evades any attempt at a succinct description because of the sheer amount of foundational context the game sets up in its early hours. So I guess I'll just call it "a nightmarish bodysnatcher horror tale where you're the one snatching bodies" and leave it at that. This game is more concerned with exploring the morality of its characters than the carnage unfolding around them though.

The combat pulls heavily from Soulslikes but it's mindful about how it does so; it never feels like it's mindlessly copying the staples of the genre. I really appreciated how unique it felt to play and this is what kept me motivated to keep going even when the plot seemed kind of disjointed and lacking any solid ground to stand on early on.

As you do battle with the many freakish monstrosities that get in your way you'll become accustomed to hopping between bodies constantly to make the best use of your characters' special hemomancy abilities. My favorite character combo ended up being Blake and Tri, which allowed me to pump out damage while providing support via my own blood sentry guns. There's a lot of potential to create your own strategy with the varied playstyles they all offer.

Slitterhead uses an old school mission structure to tell its story. I can see how this type of approach worked for what the writing wanted to accomplish, but I'd be lying if I said I liked this aspect. It made it difficult for me to feel immersed in the city environment and by the end of the game I was struggling to care about the collateral damage of each violent confrontation, despite the game insisting that I should. Thankfully, I knew from other reviews I'd read that I should try to keep civilian casualties to a minimum as I played, and as a result I didn't have to go replay any levels and fix it. Fun fact, the game makes you play the final boss twice even if your casualties are low enough for the true ending the first time.

The visuals are stylish and cool as hell, with neon street signs and lamps cutting through the darkness of the crowded city of Kowloon. The visual effects during combat feel well integrated and fairly intuitively communicate their effects on appearance alone. The character models are more hit and miss. The playable characters look great! There's a nice mix of body types and the models all seem reasonably high quality. The NPCs on the other hand remind me a lot of the ones from Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. I loved that game, but those were hideous over 10 years ago. I'm not sure what happened here.

Slitterhead features some full voice acting in its more important cutscenes, but outside of that typically goes the route of having each character mumble a few "uhms" and "ahhs" that play over whatever they can be loosely applied to. I don't typically mind this in games, but the utilization of these vocal clips here often undermined the gravity/tone of scenes they were used in. I'd have preferred silence to having to listen to the weird mumbling.

I think my final major criticism of the game is that there are a ton of sequences where you're chasing down an enemy to eventually corner and fight them. These ruin the pacing surround the fights themselves and bloat the game's playtime by... probably several hours in total. They really suck and I think the game would have been vastly improved with at least half of them cut out entirely.

Slitterhead feels a little rough around the edges but I have to respect how unique it is and that it feels very cerebral in how it tries to dig into the motivations of its cast to make a statement about human nature on a larger scale. It's worth a look as long as you have the patience to see it through to the end.