Despite the fact that big budget game studios seem to have mostly abandoned classic survival horror, there’s definitely still an audience for it. Hollowbody, the latest game from Chasing Static developer Headware Games, proved that by raising over $35,000 on Kickstarter a few years ago. The game takes inspiration from the PlayStation 2 era of the genre, with a mix of fixed perspectives and dynamic camera movement, doing a great job of emulating one of the finest times for this style of game. Playing it definitely gives me a nostalgic feeling, and the game backs it up with a great look and feel.
One way Hollowbody immediately sets itself apart from its influences is its sci-fi setting. The beginning offers you a very Blade Runner vision of the future, with flying cars and sprawling cityscapes making a strong visual impression. You play as Mica, a black market shipper, who is trying to find her missing partner Sasha who vanished in a former urban area that’s been abandoned after a mysterious incident turned it into an exclusion zone. Once your hover car crash lands in the zone as the story begins, Hollowbody loses a bit of the cyberpunk theming, giving way to decaying living spaces infected with biomechanical rot.
This bleak landscape is brought to life with a gorgeous art style, evoking the spirit of PS2 era games while still feeling sleek and modern. The lighting effects are exceptional, creating a fantastic mood that permeates every moment of the game. You get a great sense of the environments by walking through them, telling a story of the place before you even find any expositional letters. Fixed camera angles help frame areas for maximum effect, demonstrating confident control over each frame.
This level of visual fidelity did sometimes cause points of friction for me though. Since the environments are so detailed, I did miss some interactable elements that didn’t stand out enough from the rest of the background for me, causing me to search for an item I walked by several times. These environments can get a bit repetitive, making it easy for you to get turned around. The apartment complex, an early section of the game, initially impressed me with its visual quality, but it quickly became difficult for me to tell one room from another, particularly when it seemed like many of them didn’t have any items or puzzles contained within. It also didn’t feel like the environments gave me that classic survival horror level design, with shortcuts that unlock to make backtracking easier, but for the most part areas were pretty self-contained and easy to get around once you get your bearings.
While there aren’t a ton of puzzles in the game, the ones that are there are extremely fun. A few of them require a bit of adventure game style logic to use items correctly, but the best of the lot have some great deduction that needs to be done. One of my favorites involves exploring an apartment to examine artifacts of the resident’s life in order to figure out her safe combination, which made me feel clever when I cracked it. Given the quality of that puzzle, I wished there were more in Hollowbody, but it’s possible they would have gotten in the way of the game’s overall strong pacing and mood.
The story is doled out in surprisingly stunning cutscenes that feature a combination of sharp direction and impressive voice acting. You don’t meet a ton of characters on your lonely trip through the abandoned city, making the ones you do impactful. Along the way, you’ll also come across some signals that can be picked up on your radio device, which give you a tragic short story of the people who met their untimely demise here. These are well executed, but I wish they were a little more unique. These tend to lean on a lot of economic disparity tragedy tropes, but I wish they would have found a way to leverage the unique sci-fi setting.
This underutilization of the sci-fi was one of my biggest points of disappointment with Hollowbody. It’s set up so strongly in the beginning, but by the end I felt like some of the locations and monsters would have felt at home more in a straight-up horror game like Silent Hill, which is obviously a huge influence. There are some UI touches that bring the future technology back into focus, like an overlay that comes up over dead bodies that identifies who they were and how they died, but those touches are not as frequent as I would have liked. Later sections have a bit more surreal nature to them, which is well done, but don’t have as strong of an individual identity as the opening. This could just be a taste thing, as what’s there is well done, just not as unique as I was hoping for.
The monsters you fight are mostly in the form of weird mutated humans or animals, which look good but aren’t terribly unique. They serve their purpose well, forcing you to decide which ones are worth taking out and which are better to just navigate around based on your resources on hand. Combat itself, particularly the melee, has a nice impact to it, with good animations and sound effects. These expressive animations did cause a slight issue for me, as the way the flashlight is attached to the character makes your light source swing wildly when you strike the creatures. More than once I had issues timing my attacks because I couldn’t keep track of where they were due to the lighting changing so dramatically during the fight.
I had a couple technical issues that came up through my playthrough, but nothing that completely stopped my enjoyment. The in-game map, which is generally nice and thematically high-tech looking, would occasionally reset on me, erasing any markers showing doors I had already opened or found to be locked. Weapons would disappear from my hands while interacting with parts of the environment, and sometimes the “pick up” prompt would remain after I picked up an item, which caused me some confusion while I was searching for the items I needed to move forward. It’s nothing that a few patches can’t solve, but these issues were occasionally a nuisance.
Hollowbody’s story lasts about four to five hours, which feels like just the right length for a game like this. Even after you beat it, there’s a new game plus that unlocks, along with a first person mode, which is a fun novelty. My final screen had a name listed for the ending that I got, so there are definitely multiple endings for you to discover. If I had to guess based on the Silent Hill influence, some of those endings may be only available on a new game plus, as there were items and puzzles that I saw but didn’t solve before completing the game. It’s not too demanding of a game, so I could definitely see myself finding some time to go back and check out alternate ways for the story to go.
I’m always on the hunt for something that will recapture that classic survival horror feeling of the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 eras, and Hollowbody does the trick. Even if it doesn’t quite lean into the sci-fi vibes as much as I would have preferred, its greatest strength is its mood created by the gorgeous visuals. Running through the rainy streets past burned-out cars and strange biomechanical growths set such a great tone for the game, the kind that I’m always chasing in my media. I wish the level design had more complexity to it, but it kept you moving through environments at a fast enough pace that I couldn’t be too mad at it. If you’ve been staring at the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake with skepticism, or just want something that can evoke that game without simply remaking it, the tragic world of Hollowbody is diving into.
Review code provided by publisher. Hollowbody is available now on PC via Steam and GOG.com.
