Charles Fort got here up with the idea of “steam engine time” to elucidate how a number of inventors appear to have considered the steam engine concurrently but individually. It was simply an thought whose time had come. Effectively, proper now it is Silent Hill time, child. It is retro survival horror with a psychological edge o-fucking-clock.
Hollowbody is the newest survival horror recreation with fastened digicam placement, wilfully clunky fight, surreal puzzles, and a pocket flashlight. It is even received a creepy radio, a gratuitous Sonic Youth reference, and mysterious cellphone calls—which double as your save factors full with that Silent Hill fade-to-red.
What makes it completely different is the setting, a near-future cyberpunk England. Many of the motion takes place inside a fictional walled metropolis known as Brandon, a sort of Mega-Swindon One which’s an infinite slum of bleak concrete housing estates. It is damaged Britain turned as much as 11, an city mausoleum the place the poor had been walled-in earlier than being left to starve, then bombed. You’ll be able to inform issues received actual unhealthy as a result of they even had weapons. On the plus aspect, which means there are bullets in every single place so that you can loot, in addition to nanotech restore spray therapeutic objects. I suppose at the least the Nationwide Well being was working up till the top.
Hollowbody is ready years after Brandon was given a delicate bombing, Slough-style. You have arrived in your BladeRunner hovercar to seek for your girlfriend who’s doing foolishly harmful analysis within the space. Additionally, now there are zombies. Or at the least, zombie-adjacent enemies, a few of whom are canines.
There’s additionally grey goo protecting each different floor and a collection of more and more hallucinogenic puzzles to unravel as you’re employed your manner by 5 – 6 hours’ value of deserted places, together with an residence constructing, a church, an underground prepare station, and eventually the compulsory underworld. As a result of you possibly can’t be a Silent Hill-esque protagonist if you happen to do not clamber down each ominous gap you discover.
From the residence constructing on I had a relentless sense I used to be lacking issues in Hollowbody. Typically a door will lock behind you otherwise you’ll in any other case be prevented from backtracking, however there are such a lot of hidden paperwork to search out—in addition to radio alerts from the previous you possibly can one way or the other take heed to if you happen to flip in your radio in the suitable spot—that I used to be at all times nervous about what I hadn’t discovered.
But I gave up on thorough exploration as a result of the map was ineffective. It would not document factors of curiosity or allow you to go away notes, so that you simply have to recollect which an identical inexperienced sq. was the room with the puzzle you have not solved but. I discovered myself eager for the maps of the unique Silent Hill and Resident Evil video games, which might conveniently document rooms you’d entered. With out that, exploring Hollowbody is extra irritating than it must be.
You most likely ought to comb each nook, although. I would don’t know what the plot was if I hadn’t discovered a single newspaper article a few shady prescription drugs firm known as Echo Gardens, with out which your complete storyline would have been completely opaque. Do not count on the cutscenes to fill you in, as a result of they’re too busy being spooky to be sensical.
There have been undoubtedly issues I appreciated about Hollowbody. The guitar’s an awesome melee weapon, particularly the best way it jangles once you mind a zombo. The creepy stuttering voice you hear over the cellphone has a delicate Shodan factor happening, and the monsters make terrifying noises that flip into unsettling child cries as they die.
If you wish to revisit the Wooden Aspect Residences from Silent Hill 2 solely with a dystopian augmented actuality gadget that tells you the way everybody died in floating inexperienced textual content, that is mainly what Hollowbody affords. By way of different current Silent Hill-likes, I loved it greater than Crow Nation, lower than Signalis. I would say I’ve had sufficient of this kind of recreation for some time, however then the precise Silent Hill 2 remake comes out subsequent month and I do know I will be as much as my elbows in that like a survival horror protagonist fishing a helpful merchandise out of a rest room.
Hollowbody is out now on Steam and GOG.
