Slitterhead’s Killer Hook Mostly Makes Up for Looping Repetition

By Elijah Gonzalez | November 4, 2024 | 6:01am

Video Games Reviews Slitterhead

Slitterhead’s Killer Hook Mostly Makes Up for Looping Repetition

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Videogames are frequently about puppeteering little guys around, whether that means guiding Mario through an obstacle course of Koopas, doing your best to ensure your Pikmin don’t become Bulborb food, or even when staring down the sights in first-person experiences. But much of the time, games try to massage the strange relationship we have with our avatars, striving to make it feel like it’s you who is immersed in this world instead of a character you’re piloting from afar.

By contrast, Slitterhead, an action horror game made by many developers who worked on Silent Hill, Siren, and Gravity Rush, hyperfocuses on the perverse nature of this kind of control. It encourages you to treat human beings like bags of meat, using blood and bone as fuel in a war against brain-eating monsters right out of a B-movie, before flipping the script and making you reflect on your gory deeds. Basically, it’s the type of game people will lovingly think back on ten years from now when its many little annoyances and imperfections have faded from memory, as you only remember its interesting ideas, unique twists, and eye-catching violence.

Set inside Kowloon Walled City in the ‘90s, you play as a mysterious floating entity, eventually nicknamed a Hiyoki, who doesn’t remember who they are or where they came from. To physically interact with the world, they possess a host, taking control of human bodies to battle grotesque, shapeshifting creatures called Slitterheads. Much like The Thing or Parasyte, these foes can disguise themselves as humans, attacking victims before sucking out their gray matter and replacing them. When pressed, they metamorphize into their true form, bursting out of people’s skulls while sprouting insectoid limbs or tentacles; it’s pretty gross!

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To combat them, you form weapons and projectiles from coagulated blood, jumping between a small roster of characters you’re attuned with and random passersby as you sacrifice these pawns in deadly scuffles. To be specific, you can go into “Possession Mode” at any time, where the spirit leaps from their current host to another, slowing down time while you pick your next target—there’s no cooldown, and your only limitation is that they need to be possession-compatible and in range. Jump between middle-aged dads collecting their groceries and youthful college students in between classes as their blood is hardened into maces and bombs. Beyond this, there are also special humans called Rarities who are particularly in tune with the Hiyoki, meaning they come equipped with sweet powers. If the standard people you possess mostly fare how you would expect from a random bystander trying to best flesh-tearing hellspawn, the Rarities play closer to standard monster vanquishing videogame heroes, each wielding enticing abilities.

There’s Julee with her blood claws and strong healing, Betty, a beefed-up brawler who can power through attacks, a teammate who can summon more civilians and mind-control them, and several guys with guns. Utilizing these powers is essential for victory but also just really damn fun, which is more than a little concerning given the carnage involved. Skills are bound to short cooldowns and cost either blood (your health), which can be absorbed right off the battlefield, or Spirit Power, which can be obtained through defensive movements. Both of these commodities are easy to come by, and because you can pick two rarities for each level and freely swap between them and your lesser minions, you’ll constantly be mixing and matching these maneuvers to set up satisfying combos. Use Alex’s Blood Well to pull a group together before throwing a bomb into the crowd, or activate Edo’s Burning Edge, which reduces his defenses but lets him shred through flesh, and then pop Julee’s healing ability to offset the incoming damage.

Outside of these skills, another central mechanic is this game’s version of parries, called deflecting, where you can negate all incoming damage by hitting the right stick in the direction of incoming strikes. Guarding without parrying lowers your weapon health, leaving you open when diminished completely, so using this technique is more of a requirement than a suggestion. The big thing is that if you deflect enough times in a short burst, it kicks off a satisfying slow-mo sequence (called Blood Time) where you can easily tear foes to ribbons. Together, these systems largely defy 1:1 comparisons to other games; sure, there are elements of spectacle fighters like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, but there aren’t really substantive combos or aerial mobility, and while there’s a roll, things aren’t slow and deliberate enough to feel like a Souls-like. Instead, it has a unique, rancid flavor, where you hop between victims as you manipulate their flesh to hack, slash, and stab, all while pulling off stylish defensive sequences.

Bodies and blood are your resources, and the only way to get a Game Over screen is if there’s no one in the vicinity to possess when your current host bites it or if you get killed three times while possessing someone. Basically, if your previous avatar gets walloped a half second after you switch out of them, it’s not really your problem. Because of this and other little buffs you get right after performing a possession, you’re incentivized to constantly switch between humans at will, sometimes even jumping off buildings before diving into someone else right before their body goes splat on the pavement. It’s a positively vile setup that ties in nicely with the game’s horror framing.

And while I wouldn’t have been surprised if it elided all the uncomfortable implications about what you are doing for the sake of gory fun, the story directly explores the consequences of these unpleasant deeds. As you hunt for Slitterheads with the Hiyoki, the consciousness of this spirit mixes with those of their allies, raising questions of control and causing all parties involved to question their actions. Things may begin with the pulpy premise of battling brain-devouring creatures, but events slowly become more involved as sci-fi wackiness and ethical dilemmas enter the picture. Before long, the Hiyoki realizes they can transfer their consciousness temporally, setting up convoluted time loop scenarios that go to some surprising places. Admittedly, much of this is conveyed via fairly clunky dialogue that isn’t helped by the general absence of voice acting, and the plot is full of messing musings on prejudice and violent revenge plots that don’t congeal as well as your blood-based weapons, but there’s at least marginally more going on here than just brainless power fantasy.

That said, some occasionally messy storytelling isn’t the main issue, and as things wear on, grinding repetition enters the picture, in large part because of the previously mentioned Groundhog Day situation. Specifically, by the end of the 15-ish hour story, you will have fought the same enemies and revisited the same locales far past the point of overfamiliarity. There are basically four recurring monster types: little larva guys, nasty worm-headed dudes, humanoid Slitterheads, and Slitterheads after they’ve transformed into their final states, all mandibles and stretched human features. While there are variations for these last two with different attack patterns, there isn’t enough unique about them to carry these encounters, and even when more unique foes were introduced near the end, these last few adversaries were so annoying that I longed for the overfamiliar.

Worse yet, the attempts at mixing things up between these fights are even worse, like the handful of mediocre stealth segments and the overabundance of one-note chase segments. To progress the story, you need to unlock all the characters, which often requires jumping back into the same levels multiple times. And even when a mission is technically “new,” the time loop conceit makes it so that you’re seeing the same handful of Kowloon street corners, even if there can be striking differences in how things play out there. While there’s a wide arsenal of viscera-producing instruments thanks to the variation in abilities, upgrades, and new Rarities, the frequent repeats drag things down.

There are lots of other small gaffes, too. At one point, a character joined my team so abruptly and with so little explanation that it felt like I hit a bug or a level got cut. During more chaotic fights, the parry system basically breaks down because it feels more designed around 1v1 duels. Some of the attack animations don’t look great. Visually, it’s not exactly on the cutting edge, and I wish it leaned a bit more into its stylized look, which is particularly well-delivered in the body horror transformation scenes.

But even with these many obvious pain points, there’s a certain something to Slitterhead’s foul vibes. While I’m sure many will come to it for the pedigree of its development team, on the surface, it doesn’t have much in common with Silent Hill, Gravity Rush, or Siren. Honestly, the only surface-level overlap with Silent Hill beyond the broad horror connections is that the menu sound effects are basically the same, possibly due to composer Akira Yamaoka’s involvement—even though he scored both, these soundtracks are mostly only comparable in that they both help establish these unsettling worlds.

What it does share, though, is a similar idiosyncratic streak. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything else that plays quite like Bokeh Game Studio’s freshman work; it’s all about darting between hosts as you chip away at unsightly creatures through even more unsightly acts of manipulation. In a time where it’s increasingly easy to rag on AAA releases for playing it safe (something they mostly do to offset rising development costs), this game feels like a throwback to the creatively risky mid-budget titles of yesteryear that the industry has largely left behind. Slitterhead may have a lot of obvious shortcomings, but I’d generally rather play a messy splatter fest than an overly sterile bore, and this game is more than happy to paint everything red.

Slitterhead was developed and published by Bokeh Game Studio. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It is also available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11 and on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.