‘Slitterhead’ Review – A Lack of Polish Drags Down a Promising Game

Silent Hill has been dominating the conversation this year. The conclusion of Silent Hill: Ascension, the free Short Message, and the excellent remake of Silent Hill 2 all were released in 2024, and now Silent Hill is coming into the conversation in a different way. Bokeh Game Studio, lead by the director of the original Silent Hill, Keiichiro Toyama, has released their first game Slitterhead, which actually feels more like a distant relative of one of Toyama’s other games, Siren. In what seems like an evolution of that franchise’s sightjacking gimmick, which actually shows up in this game as well, Slitterhead is an action-horror game where you are possessing people in your hunt for mysterious shapeshifting monsters terrorizing the fictional city of Kowlong.

After watching the trailers for the game, I had a hard time figuring out exactly what the game was going to play like. After playing it, it’s easy to see why; there’s a lot going on in this game. The melee-focused combat already feels like enough, but adding the possession gimmick on top of it adds even more for you to be thinking about during fights. Outside of combat, there’s moments of traversal that involve combinations of grappling with blood magic and jumping into bodies to get to out of reach places. On top of that, there’s also stealth and light possession-based puzzles that you’ll need to do in order to get into different areas. All these disparate elements make for good variety, but they have trouble coming together or feeling fully polished throughout.

The character you play is a disembodied spirit called Hyoki that can only enact its war against the titular Slitterheads by controlling the bodies of others. This extends to a surprising number of people in the game, allowing you to possess almost any NPC you see. At certain points in the narrative, you’ll come across characters the game calls ‘rarities’ which your character has a higher affinity with. These will be added to your roster that can be picked when you start a level, and each of them comes with their own unique set of abilities. These rarities can be upgraded as the game progresses, allowing them to become significantly more useful than the basic NPCs.

Given the focus on rarities and skill trees, it’s very obvious that this game is extremely action-focused, but it seems like the gameplay is more wide than deep. There’s a lot of layers to the combat mechanics, but none of them are particularly fleshed out, making many encounters a bit of a mixed bag. Each character, including the unnamed NPCs, create a blood weapon when possessed, which you use to do simple combos against the enemies while doing a combination of blocking and dodging enemy attacks. You can also deflect enemy attacks, which is done by flicking the right stick in the orientation shown with a big indicator on the screen, right as the attack lands. All this is well and good, but it doesn’t feel quite as tight as it could. Some attack animations feel sluggish, it’s hard to change which enemy you’re focused on, and the deflecting never felt like an essential part of my arsenal.

Each rarity has three abilities that they bring to combat, some of which are extended to NPCs you possess when they are on a mission, and these do a decent job of adding more spice to the melee combat. For example, Alex has a shotgun-like attack that can do big damage to enemies, and also has a blood well ability that pulls enemies together into one spot, setting them up for your blast. It’s cool to find synergies between characters, as you’ll be able to select two rarities to go with you on each mission, but since there’s not really specific non-combat abilities that would assist you in other parts of the game, I didn’t have a ton of incentive to branch out and try other people when I already had a good pair that worked for me, so if the mission didn’t require a specific character I generally stuck with my trusty duo that I’d been levelling up from the start.

One of the most compelling elements of the combat was that most of the special abilities in your arsenal use your HP to cast them. This allowed for interesting decision making in the heat of combat, calculating whether it’s worth it or not to use precious life force to do bigger damage to the enemy. This is made even more dynamic by the method of healing for your player. To recover health, you need to absorb blood pools on the ground, which form when enemies or player characters get hurt. It’s a smart way to keep you moving around the arena, often incentivizing you to swap characters in order to get to a more advantageous place for blood absorption.

When it clicks, the fights feel really exciting and dynamic. You’ll possess a nameless NPC and use a couple abilities to drain their small HP pool, then move on from their body just before they die to one of your rarities and absorb the blood from your previous attack and hit the creature hard. It feels like using an Elden Ring summon to draw aggro, except you are the one briefly controlling that summon before jumping back to your main character, making for an exciting gameplay loop.

You have three ‘lives’ before you get a game over screen, but they only are reduced if the character dies while you’re possessing it, so if you jump out right before a fatal blow you’re safe. NPCs can be revived within a limited window before they pass away for good, leaving you with less options going forward. If you find yourself without anyone to possess as your host dies, that will be a game over, regardless of how many lives you have left.

Aside from the aforementioned polish issues, my main problem with the combat is that it never really finds ways to add complexity to make encounters more fun. There aren’t that many enemy types; you have human Slitterheads, some of which transform into larger boss type enemies, then some smaller worm-like creatures, and that’s about it. Most of them have pretty similar overall looks and attack patterns, with only a few bigger bosses that mix up the flow of things with unique moves.

Enemies can inflict status effects on you, but these almost universally felt unfun to be stricken with. Draining health, halved move speed, and the inability to dodge are effective in making the fights more challenging, but not in a way that retains anything that makes the combat enjoyable, sometimes forcing you to awkwardly run around until they wear off. There’s also a very superfluous gimmick where you can get your arm chopped off, either forcing you to succeed at a QTE to reattach it quickly or to wait for it to regrow. It feels like there are just too many extra layers that probably should have been edited back in order to focus on tightening up the core mechanics, which are so close to being great.

Slitterhead is a mission-based game, and at the beginning the levels follows a clever structure. There’s a rash of brutal murders in the city, and Hyoki feels connected to them, knowing they are being committed by a race of monsters that it’s compelled to hunt down. You’ll show up in the area the crime is committed and try to figure out who is the hidden shapeshifting monster that committed the crime. There’s an almost Hitman-like structure to the way some of these missions play out, asking you to ‘disguise’ yourself by possessing the right NPCs in order to gain entry into an area. Sometimes this infiltration sees you floating your spirit up to places you couldn’t normally reach and possessing someone there in order to break in.

The possession mechanic also adds spice to the stealth sequences in the game, allowing your spirit to scout around corners to see what’s coming, but the patrol routes for these sections are extremely basic with very few options for improvisation. Once again though, these are some really clever ideas, but it doesn’t really feel like it’s ever fully developed or iterated on outside of the basic concept, which feels like a missed opportunity.

Once you find the disguised Slitterhead, it will usually turn into a boss fight, but a lot of times you’ll have to do a chase scene through the city. In concept, this is really fun. You have the ability to grapple your way to points, like on signs or flagpoles, as your prey leaps away from you. When you get in the rhythm, it feels very cinematic and exciting, but there are weird quirks to it that get in the way. It seems like the game wants you to be speedy as you jump from point to point, but if you happen to go a little too quick and grapple to the place the enemy is, it just knocks you back down to the ground, seemingly punishing you for your reflexes. The little icon for grapple points is also small and can easily blend into the neon signs of Kowlong, occasionally making you stop in your tracks to try to locate the next point.

After a while into the game, the investigation sections fall to the wayside, switching the focus to chases and combat as your war with the Slitterheads escalates. There’s a time loop aspect that gets introduced fairly early on, allowing you to relive previous missions with more knowledge going in, revealing new layers to them. It also gives you the opportunity to find some of the hidden bonuses in each level, but due to the linear nature of most levels, exploration and secret finding never really feels particularly satisfying or rewarding.

Much like the combat gameplay, the narrative of Slitterhead seems to be stuffed with too many ideas. The plot features an amnesiac spirit, shapeshifting monsters, time travel, cults, military plots, and other elements that are too much of a spoiler to get into. It can feel very scattershot and overwhelming, even when it’s hitting high notes. Between missions, you’re presented with opportunities to chat with the rarities you’ve met so far, and they each have their own personality and issues going on. These can be really neat, diving into ideas about how their personalities are bleeding into the Hyoki, but it feels like only a few of these characters have any significant part in the plot. As far as the pacing goes, there were several times in the game where I felt like it was reaching a climax, only to have me discover another rarity or have another concept be introduced to the game that dragged it on for longer. There is a compelling conflict that is the focus of the end of the game that reaches a satisfying conclusion, but the 15 hour journey to that finale felt too long and meandering to make it fully stick the landing.

During the conversation scenes, you’re mostly just watching the character do idle animations while some surreal, “swimming” effects go on around them, with little soundbytes playing instead of fully voiced dialog. It’s got a neat effect, but the lack of voice acting does take the punch out of some of these moments, particularly when this is how some of the more dramatic twists are revealed. Fortunately, the music that backs these segments, and the whole game, is from Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka, who does an excellent job creating a unique identity for the game. Somehow I missed that he was involved in this game, but I was immediately drawn in by the opening credits music and said “hell yeah” out loud when his name showed up on screen. Even days after playing, I still have even basic tracks like the menu music stuck in my head.

Unfortunately I can’t say the same about the visual style of the game, which feels a bit dated and unambitious. I’m not usually someone who craves photorealistic graphics in my games, but not only do the character models look like they could be from a PlayStation 3 game, the art style doesn’t do much for me. I think the city streets generally look good, capturing the 90s neon vibe they are going for, but the enemies aren’t particularly creative, mostly looking like big bugs mixed with some of the less imaginative Resident Evil mutations. The lack of variety in the enemies that held back the gameplay also holds back the artistic vision of the game overall, as I wanted to see this shapeshifting gimmick played with in more creative ways.

The lack of visual polish also carries over into the animation. Anything that isn’t an attack animation or cutscene feels pretty stiff, making many of the NPCs feel lifeless. I remember the first time I was doing a stealth mission, I was watching guard patterns, and I chuckled to myself as the guard came to a full stop and did an extremely rigid 90 degree turn before proceeding down the next hall.

While the action and the chase sequences can be smooth most of the time, there’s a lot of moments that oddly bring the game to a screeching halt, giving it a segmented and janky feel. For example, your character will get within a certain range of the target it’s chasing, only to stop dead in their tracks in order for the dialog to come up in the subtitles, forcing you to press a button to proceed with the chase. I get that you need to be able to focus and read the dialog since it’s not voice acted, but it can be really frustrating to see how much it kills the momentum of the action.

Aside from the general scattershot plotting I mentioned before, I feel like the dialog also isn’t super strong, with a script that feels more like a rough draft. It’s hard to say if this is a translation issue or not, but it definitely felt unnatural at times, and not in a purposefully uncanny or cheesy way. There’s also some strangely out of date attitudes in the game that also put me off. There’s a big focus on sex workers in this game, and I feel like they are treated in a very cliche manner that doesn’t really consider them as anything beyond sex objects. For example, there was another bit where a sex worker was making fun of a kid for being a virgin, then offered him a session on the house. Much like the graphics, it felt like the attitudes of the game were also stuck in the PS3 era, and I wish it would have tried to do something more nuanced with the way it presented themes like this.

Slitterhead is a game defined by breadth over depth. Both the gameplay and the narrative have so many different moving pieces, and none of them are really fully explored to the extent they deserve. The game is an example of a 6/10 that’s memorable for the things it tries, but needed more refinement to be truly great. In both presentation and design, it feels like it comes from an older era, in good and bad ways. When the combat works, it feels great, and the story has a few really high points that impressed me, but the game is constantly finding ways to inadvertently screw up the flow and pacing with strange decisions or a lack of polish. For every moment I was excited about a turn the plot took or a really great fight, there was another moment that frustrated or baffled me.

I recently saw a quote from Toyama saying that the studio was committed to originality, even if it means being a bit rough around the edges, and I can definitely see that in the final product. Rough edges are not always deal breakers for me and can often make a game feel charming, but every rough edge I ran into in Slitterhead seemed to get in the way of core fun I was trying my hardest to enjoy. There’s a really good core to the game somewhere in there, it just needed more editing on polish to make it truly shine.

Review code provided by the publisher.

Slitterhead will release on November 8 for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.

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