Slitterhead Review

One of the first things you do in Slitterhead, the ambiguous and deliberately unpleasant debut action-horror game from developer Bokeh Game Studio, is walk an innocent man off a building to his death. It’s a small moment within the context of the game’s systems, a tutorial for how to quickly switch possessed bodies to avoid taking lethal damage, but if you linger the way Slitterhead wants you to, it’s a harrowing statement of theme and intent. Forming under Keiichiro Toyama, creator of Silent Hill, just as the pandemic broke the world, Bokeh’s first game is a strange beast. The kind of singular experience you might expect from a name as hallowed as Toyamas in the Japanese horror scene, Slitterhead’s schlocky monster designs and limited character models belie a consistently compelling and uncomfortably alien experience. The body you left on the street a grim portent for what’s to come.

A fictionalised melding of two major Chinese cities, Kowlong is being slowly suffocated by a war between its paramilitary police force and “Slitterheads”. An underground conflict that has finally broken bad enough to spill into the streets, the Slitterheads are garish insectoid creatures who have assumed human identities to live, and feed, among us. In consuming the brains of a victim, a Slitterhead can fully emulate them, bones to soul, in a collision of lifeforms that is breeding a frenzied flash point of violent fear in the late 1990s.

The titular Slitterheads

The catalyst to Kowlong’s deteriorating state, you play as Night Owl, an amnesiac, disembodied spirit who can hijack human bodies and pilot them, occupying their minds adjacent to their existing consciousness. Slitterhead’s heightened body horror and cosmic inclinations slither and crawl over a tale of the human condition rife with political commentary and overt ideological questions. In keeping to places deemed undesirable, with people deemed so, Slitterhead smartly recognises that its foundational conflict between humans and Slitterheads is just so and builds a narrative atop it that houses familiar tropes and unabashed conclusions comfortably. The game’s broader narrative, and its subsequent framing devices, feel of a piece with the particular subgenre of horror its chasing for better or worse, but in its smaller moments you’ll find Slitterhead’s headier, or at least earnest, thoughts.

That its primary antagonist and protagonist forces both actively commodify and weaponise human bodies isn’t lost on Slitterhead, an uncomfortable tension forming the backbone for the game’s ruminations and truest horror. Jumping between countless nameless people, expending their blood and tearing flesh for incremental wins against a force mirroring your tactics is distressing, Slitterhead tuning it just so that it all but makes the player actively complicit in the horror, incentives it even.

Slitterhead’s composite genre work make skilled action play crucial to surviving its otherwise horror trappings, themselves a composite of sombre and schlocky science-fiction. Night Owl amasses a small army of characters with whom his soul is compatible, unlocking abilities far beyond the average human body and providing a loose narrative framework for the game’s skill trees and combat. From an unassuming convenience store worker to gritty detective, Slitterhead’s crew of playable “Rarities” run the gamut of compelling to cliché in their characterisation but find common ground in the game’s oddly demanding combat.

Julee’s blood claws were a highlight of Slitterhead’s range of weapons and skills

Mission structure typically revolves around exploration of a contained level, sometimes via rudimentary stealth systems, and often resulting in skirmishes with Slitterheads and their monstrous minions. These clashes are at their best when focused and singular; your Rarity will have a specialised weapon and range of skills to deploy between parrying, the core of Slitterhead’s combat. Holding the block and flicking the right stick in an indicated direction will trigger a perfect parry, opening the Slitterhead to a powerful riposte and buying precious time to refuel your dual skill/health meter with the blood splattered on the ground.

After some finagling, it’s an immensely satisfying rhythm that only really lacks in hit impact and when strained under multiple targets. Slitterhead’s escalating difficulty and enemy density borders on problematic in its backend, though this is at least somewhat mitigated by an equally escalating set of skills available to the player for status effects and crowd control. The crowd being uniquely important to Slitterhead’s unholy union of theme and system as survival depends on Night Owl’s constant body swapping (groups of humans will gather in combat arenas, somewhere between fodder and morbid observers to displays of violence) to avoid critical damage, leaving a trail of often mortally wounded individuals in his wake.

There’s a giddying thrill to such reckless abandonment of self playing out dozens of times per mission, Night Owl riding currents of an invisible world to slam in and out of unsuspecting vessels. Slitterhead feeds this blood lust too; pursuing fleeing Slitterheads through backstreets and across rooftops requires rapid choice body swapping, the state in which you leave the last be damned, just as stealth will see you slither through cracked windows and into small homes where a couple shares a meal only for you to pilot one of them abruptly from the room and most likely to their death, or worse.

This is cinema, I’m sorry.

That all of this unfolds within the confines a game so evidently uninterested in modern fidelity standards makes it the strange best it is. Slitterhead is a beautiful game, Toyama’s eye for mise-en-scene pulling together repeated assets and limited animations into something altogether stronger and more resonate than the individual components. Kowlong aches and sweats, expertly lit and densely layered in its design, the game asks you to return to levels multiple times over, each trip mapping itself into your mind’s eye so that when you’re called upon to look through the eyes of Slitterhead to find its location via Sightjacking, you can recall the corner or hallway it occupies. In these first-person instances, you’ll glimpse Kowlong through warbling and voyeristic eyes, the sway of a Slitterhead’s human mask melding with stark coloured filters and muted sounds.

If you’re at all familiar with Toyama’s work beyond Silent Hill this will all sound of a piece. Slitterhead echoes Siren, the 2003 PS2 horror series helmed by Toyama, in fascinating ways. Where Siren forged its identity from its stark use of photomapped human faces (a technology Slitterhead would have greatly benefited from, even as outside of the bounds of viable production as it would be), Slitterhead uses repeated, almost porcelain masked characters without much in the way of voice acting. Akira Yamaoka’s score brings his generational talent to bare with a soundscape between ethereal and sweaty, complimented in turn by the minimal human noises used to punctuate dialogue. As such, the game’s dramatic beats and grotesque horror are carried by strange and off-putting facsimiles of human faces, warping its way into becoming outright immersive if you’re willing to meet the game where it’s at.

Final Thoughts

And Slitterhead deserves your making the effort. Its presentation is often atypical for the medium, more at home with avant-garde camera and colour blocking than contemporary “cinematic” standards. Yet, it’s a game that oozes self-assuredness and clarity of intent, from UI to plot to system. No one of these things are without blemish but each are distinctly present and deliberate all the same. Much like Siren before it, Slitterhead feels destined to be the hidden horror gem of its generation, the kind of experience that vaguely academic writers and sicko genre enthusiasts rave about even as someone watches the trailer and cocks an eyebrow at its immediately recognisable limitations. It’s a game out of time, out of lockstep with its peers, and barely able to pull together a human facade amid a wholly sympathetic lack of polish and violently terrifying abilities beyond its initial form. It’s a Slitterhead.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

Click here for more information on WellPlayed’s review policy and ethics