This was an interesting and very simple game. The premise is that you're in a horror setting full of Japanese architecture and lore, while being chased by...floating heads (Atama is Japanese for "head," so thus the title). Interestingly, these heads are not made to look especially gruesome. There's definitely an uncanny factor to seeing a disembodied head flying around and coming after you while making extremely odd noises, but there really isn't too much gore in the game or other totally grotesque elements. The main mechanic at your disposal is the ability to see through the eyes of all of the heads in the area, switching between them at the press of a button, giving you an idea of their perspective so you can plan your way to sneak past. Since you can't really fight them, essentially it is a stealth game.

If you are familiar with the (Forbidden) Siren series, then you'll likely see where the inspiration stems from. "Sightjacking" is a classic mechanic from those games you don't really see a lot elsewhere. The bizarre noises the enemies make when you're viewing their POV is also hallmark Siren. After hearing all this, I decided to give the game a go as just in the last couple years I finally got around to playing Siren 1 and 2 and loved them, despite how bizarre and absurdly difficult and obscure they can be.

Overall, the game was about as I expected. it's not great, but it did hit on the Siren vibes in a lot of ways and knowing I was going in for a fairly low-budget experience, I wasn't disappointed. There are some ways the game manages to be clever with how you need to solve certain encounters and slip past enemies, but it's not as ridiculously hard as Siren and the few puzzles in the game aren't amusingly nonsensical like Siren's. I think the difficulty was fair. I died a lot but mostly due to trial and error; once I figured out the correct approach it usually only took a couple tries. About the only part of that execution I didn't like is that with sightjacking in Siren you use the control stick to rotate to target different enemy POVs, meaning you got a pretty good idea of their relative position, providing really important context. In this game it's just numerical hotkeys that took a lot of inferring from their perspective where they were. The fact the environments are graphically very plain made this extra difficult as it was hard to spot landmarks that would tell me where they were and that was frustrating.

All that said, the game does look very low-budget. While I think the heads and weird sounds create an uncanny horror, I think they were also design choices influenced by the availability of stock model and sound assets that wouldn't require much creating anew. I think that takes it's own kind of creativity, but admittedly, the game does feel overly basic and is not especially nice to look at. It's also a little expensive (currently $15 on Steam) considering this and the fact the game is only about two hours long. But there's still a lot of creativity to the gameplay and setting. I think if you don't already like Siren or have some experience with it, this game is probably just gonna look like some goofy experiment. So my enjoyment still bears that significant caveat.

Another thing that's not really a plus or minus is that I've as a hobby started learning Unity and this game (it is made in Unity) was a fun experience given that background. I'm at a very basic level at this point, but it was really neat that I felt like I understood pretty much how they were doing most all of the things in the game, including the rather unique mechanic of shifting to the different enemies' POVs. While fairly unique as a mechanic, that's a rather simple trick to achieve in Unity and it was neat I was able to recognize that even from just playing it a little. It felt weirdly encouraging and stresses an important point of any creative endeavor that you don't necessarily need fancy tech and know-how to make something interesting and creative, basic building blocks are fully sufficient for many such projects. That said, more bells and whistles probably would've upped this into much better than just a "decent" game as I feel it is, despite being what I think is the target audience.