Review Etrail 3/5 · Oct 30, 2024
Impressive in some ways, but a bit disappointing
Hollowbody is a survival horror game that is very clearly Silent Hill-inspired at many layers of its design. Perhaps most interestingly, this game was developed essentially by just one person. I've played a few one/two-person dev team games by now and I think I can safely say this was the best one by a wide margin. That said, that …
Hollowbody is a survival horror game that is very clearly Silent Hill-inspired at many layers of its design. Perhaps most interestingly, this game was developed essentially by just one person. I've played a few one/two-person dev team games by now and I think I can safely say this was the best one by a wide margin. That said, that bar is admittedly low and I did ultimately have a hard time getting into this one. I'm thus left in the awkward position where on the one hand, I think its development is extremely impressive, but on a level of simply how much I enjoyed the game itself, it's in the "meh" range.
The game's strongest suit is its atmosphere. After the brief prologue, you can immediately recognize the Silent Hill influence with the dark obscured ruined streets full of shambling monstrosities. The lighting from your flashlight works well with a lot of the environments and the sound design mostly works as accompaniment. Despite the fact there are cyberpunk elements and an (in some ways) more grounded premise, it mostly achieves a similar feel to the early games of that franchise with graphics that really do look quite good but don't detract from the classic feel.
The story seems kind of intriguing at first but it's rather hard to follow and once I did catch on, I just felt like it wasn't all that interesting after all. While I wouldn't want a simple clone, it's in some ways surprising that the story wasn't more cerebral and is just a bit more sci-fi post-apocalypse. There seems to be some psychological elements and maybe some things went over my head, but if so, I'd blame the game at least in part considering I simply didn't feel too engaged with what was going on.
The gameplay is also kind of rough. Combat is fairly basic and straight forward, not quite "bad," but not especially enjoyable either. I realize there were limited resources to the development but with everything else the game manages, it's a little surprising there's not a single boss fight (other than a sort of puzzle fight near the end I guess). The puzzles I thought were okay and helped pull me along some, but it does rely on the kind of crummy theme of "wander around looking for items to click on till you find the puzzles solution then click around till you find where it goes." As well, much of the game takes place in an apartment building, incorporating probably one of Silent Hill's worst elements of boring map layouts with halls of doors and too many uniform rooms. The other environments in the game are better, but this apartment section is a good 1/3-1/2 of the game and it was definitely the slog that kept me from completing the game in one sitting despite its relatively short 3/4-hour length.
Truthfully this game is a bit more of a 2.5 star for me. I didn't particularly dislike it and thought it had some neat aspects like the atmosphere, but it lost my interest at several points. However, given it was made by just one person and imagining all the work that would take, I feel comfortable giving the generous rounding to 3 stars. However, I wouldn't highly recommend it to anyone other than fans of the genre who are looking for any and all callbacks to this older style. Even that recommendation would bear significant caveats.
