Tristan Ogilvie
Given its interesting body-swapping system, gnarly blood-based weaponry, creepy Lovecraftian monsters, and the fact that it’s sprung forth from the mind behind the original Silent Hill, Slitterhead certainly sounds like an action-horror game that could be razor sharp. Unfortunately, while this time-looping murder mystery set in the neon lit streets of a fictionalized Hong Kong serves up a solid slash ‘em up combat system, its story has been hacked to the bone, its enemy variety is surprisingly sparse, and its uninspired mission objectives are repeated to a truly tiresome degree. As it turns out, Slitterhead isn’t just an adventure that’s frequently out-of-body, it’s also one that’s quickly out of ideas.
It’s a real shame too, since Slitterhead’s intriguing premise certainly got its hooks into me early. After the bodies of local citizens are discovered in the back alleys of the Kowlong slums with holes in their heads where their brains used to be, we’re cast in the role of a mysterious spiritual entity known only as the ‘Night Owl’, acting as a disembodied detective in an effort to uncover a murderous menace known as the slitterheads who can disguise themselves in human form. To do so, we’re free to hop in and out of almost every person within a small radius, temporarily taking control of human hosts in order to hunt for clues through back alleys and brothels, and providing us with some interesting ways to infiltrate otherwise off-limits locations by beaming straight into another body through an open window or the bars of a locked gate, for example.
These easily manipulated meat sacks are basic in appearance and wooden in their movement, which perhaps makes some sort of sense given that they’re basically just mind-controlled marionettes. Unlike the similar crowdsourcing system in Watch Dogs: Legion, there are no discernible skills or traits that distinguish one controllable citizen from another – that is, with the exception of the small cast of unique playable characters known as ‘rarities’. As the investigation progresses, the Night Owl comes across certain victims that are near death. Once possessed, their mortal wounds transform into weapons as their mangled arms bleed into the form of Wolverine-like claws, spears, and literal plasma swords, making them vital vessels for taking on any slitterheads you expose along the way. The growing party of rarities can be separated into pairs to accompany you into each mission, and Slitterhead’s story loops several times around the same three-day sequence, pulling you back to revisit events in its timeline in an effort to unmask the perpetrators behind certain crimes and potentially prevent them from ever happening.
That unfortunately sounds a lot more interesting than it actually proves to be, since it involves retracing steps through a lot of the same areas and redoing a lot of the same simple tasks, like following ghostly apparitions along a preset path to piece together a slitterhead victim’s final moments. In between each mission you get to spend a little bit of time with your expanding roster of rarities, but unfortunately these exposition-dumping conversations are so poorly presented that I struggled to find anything of substance to really latch onto. They’re delivered in static snippets of text over repeated and rudimentary character animations, and I basically just mindlessly paged through them long enough to trigger the next story chapter.
Even if I’d been able to better buy into each rarity’s individual plights, I don’t think it would have been worth my while, since this roughly 13-hour time travelling tale culminates in such a deflating and futile finale that it made me wish I could have looped back around to the beginning of my playthrough and prevented myself from ever hitting the start button on the title screen. It’s not even remotely scary either, which comes as a bit of a surprise given that it’s a horror adventure that’s been developed under the watchful eye of Keiichiro Toyama, director of the original Silent Hill.
Crowd Strife
Combat is not without its charms, however. A simple one-button attack combo allows you to slit a head, throat, or whichever enemy body part comes within swinging distance of your bloody blades, but there’s more to Slitterhead’s fighting than first meets the eye. For starters, you can quickly beam between bystanders gathered around each arena in order to catch an enemy off guard with an attack from the rear, using the crowd to chip away at a target like some sort of GoFundMe for fisticuffs. Non-rarity humans have minimal amounts of health so I only ever stayed in control of them for short bursts before zipping back to my chosen rarity to unleash more damaging strikes, but hopping back and forth between them is a great way to draw enemy heat away and makes Slitterhead feel a bit like a supernatural spin on the real-time character-swapping battles of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
There are no medkits to collect and use, and instead health is replenished by hoovering up the pools of blood that form during each battle. It’s actually a pretty clever system, and it quickly becomes essential not only in terms of keeping your rarity alive, but also ensuring they’re topped up with enough hand-me-down hemoglobin to perform their unique blood-powered special abilities. Motorbike-rider Alex can create blood vortexes that drag enemies together and leave them open to attacks, cult member Tri can conjure up some blood blasting sentry turrets, while special agent Blake can unfurl a blood-powered mini-gun that rapidly whittles down both his and his opponent’s health bars in bursts of high risk and reward.
It may cater to a variety of attack methods as its roster of rarities expands, however Slitterhead’s fighting system is not without its flaws. Most attacks land with all the weight of a wet newspaper, and although its thumbstick-based parrying system is fairly easy to get the hang of during one-on-one encounters, I could never rely on it during battles with multiple enemies at a time because the onscreen indicators too often failed to appear – even after I’d invested in the ‘6th Sense’ perk in Slitterhead’s modest skill tree system that’s supposedly meant to enable it.
I also bumped up against the fact that my progress through Slitterhead’s story came to a screeching halt on occasions when I hadn’t found a specific rarity, forcing me to replay levels (some that I’d already revisited as part of the story) in order to track them down and unlock a subsequent story chapter. At one point I was stuck spinning my wheels while I was forced to search for the same elderly woman rarity in six different levels, who had no involvement in the main story whatsoever and whom I never even used after I’d acquired her. In fact, although I did try most of the rarities as I recruited them, I ultimately continued to fall back on pairing the handy healing abilities of young actress Julee with the powerful double-barrelled blood gun attacks of Alex, since Slitterhead’s combat never really evolved to the point that I felt obligated to experiment with any other combination.
Bloody Repetitive
That’s largely because, while the developers have clearly spent a lot of time creating an expanding roster of up to eight rarities for you to choose from, it seems that not nearly enough time has been invested in crafting interesting enemies to face or scenarios for you to toss them into. Enemy variety is basically limited to the same rehashed handful of breeds – the pre-slitterhead humanoids with what look like a bunch of bananas for their heads, the repulsive mess of contorted limbs that are the evolved slitterheads themselves, annoying worms that can be wiped out with one hit, and the floppy, bipedal appendages that can really only be described as walking wieners. Admittedly, there are certainly a few different slitterhead types to take on, but I struggled to really find any meaningful difference between fighting an ‘octopus’ type and the ‘warty frogfish’ kind beyond their appearance, and tackled them all using more or less the exact same strategy – hopping between bodies like a sailor on shore leave and constantly shifting the attack from all angles until they were dispatched.
There were a handful of instances where I was forced to think on my feet a little bit more, like in an early assault against SWAT-style human soldiers – some with machine guns, others with riot shields, and a few armed with jamming devices that temporarily disarmed my rarities of their special abilities. That at least forced me to prioritise the super power-spoiling soldiers first before I mopped up the rest of them, although strangely I never had to contend with that particular enemy type ever again. Elsewhere Slitterhead occasionally tried to impose a bit of urgency into an encounter by setting a scrap against a ticking time limit, but really the only clock I ever had my eye on was the one strapped to my wrist as I impatiently fought an ongoing battle against the same small set of enemy types and my own growing sense of deja vu.
It’s not just the monsters that are recycled either, but wholesale mission structures. There are a few rare exceptions, like the time I had to figure out how to enter the top floor of a nightclub by teleporting back and forth between crane operators to swing iron girder platforms into place, or infiltrate a slitterhead-worshipping cult by sneaking past dimwitted guards shuffling along the most predictable, PSone-era patrol paths imaginable. But the bulk of Slitterhead’s objectives involve tracking down a monster disguised in human form by following a blue trail and using a ‘sightjack’ ability to get a glimpse of their current surroundings, ultimately exposing them, and then getting dragged into a clunky on-foot chase that’s less of a thrilling hot pursuit and closer to a tepid game of tag.
I lost count of how many times I was forced to chase after the exact same monster types along the exact same loops through the exact same handful of grimy urban settings. It’s exhausting in the first instance, let alone the umpteenth – and although in the opening hours I found it annoying that there was no in-game map for some of its larger city areas, by the end of Slitterhead’s campaign I’d revisited every street, back alley, and rooftop so frequently that I could probably chart each locale from memory.
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