Our own Talune_Silius reviews Hollowbody:
Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2123640/Hollowbody/
Final Rating: 7/10
Hollowbody is an almost perfect recreation of the survival horror games of the late 90’s and Early 2000’s. But its short duration and lack of depth hold it back from being anything more than a spooky walk down nostalgia lane.
I would have believed you if you had told me a week ago that Hollowbody was a remaster of an unknown PS2 survival horror game. Headware Games, a solo developer from the UK, has perfectly recreated the look and feel of games like Silent Hill and Dino Crisis while throwing in little touches that only modern games have. From the moment you start the game, you are greeted with a retro opening and title screen that looks exactly like a PS1 game. It continues throughout the entire game as this feeling persists that you are playing a game from an older generation.
The story of Hollowbody is interesting. The entire game is set in the distant future, where a disaster of unknown biological origin (potentially a bio-attack) happened on the outskirts of a metropolis. The government locked down the city and evacuated the most important people. But still, many died in the attack. What exactly happened in that area is unknown as no one is allowed to venture in. 60 years later, you take the role of Mica, a black-market smuggler who is on a run that has her flying over the quarantined area. But a strange issue with her vehicle causes her to crash right in the heart of the quarantine zone. Now, you must navigate the city in an attempt to find a way to escape, all while also figuring out what happened.
There are a lot of other side plots and hidden details lurking beneath the surface that I won’t spoil. Side plots like random phone calls from a person who seems to know Mica, to an entire subplot concerning a lover/partner who went missing 12 days ago and might also be in the city. The story is kept extremely cryptic across the 3-5 hour campaign and is mostly hidden within the various text documents scattered about. Many of the plots have satisfying conclusions while others almost never get resolved. When the credits roll, much of the deeper meaning is left up to the player’s interpretation.
I do personally feel that some of the plot points were not given enough time to flourish. As an example, I feel the subplot regarding the lost partner was almost dropped for 90% of the story only to come back up at the very end. Another sees a random nobody that can follow you for a good chunk of the game. But other than getting in the way for most of the game, he serves next to no purpose. I just kept waiting for a twist that he wasn’t even real to come up (which never happened). I think this was a case of the developer trying to cram too many plot points into such a short and simple story. This could have been a simple story about a smuggler crashing into a place where they weren’t supposed to be. But the game tries to weave other tales into the narrative that either get forgotten about for the majority of the story or aren’t fleshed out enough to be relevant.
But much like the town of Silent Hill, or the house from Resident Evil, the true protagonist of the story is the quarantined city. You will navigate many areas of this eerily quiet locale: ruined apartments, churches, city streets, and even deeper secrets. From a lore standpoint, the city is fairly competently crafted and tells a horrid story of what happened during the attack. Bodies lie in their homes, notes tell stories of horrors, and ghostly echoes detail the fall. Headware Games does a solid job of creating a believable city destroyed by monstrous growth.
Unfortunately, the later areas of the game do not receive as much love as the first two/three locations. The chapters become more video-gamey the closer you get to the source of the problem. This is fairly common for indie games, and it is noticeable here. What starts out as crawling through empty apartment complexes, where every room tells a bit of the story, leads into long corridors of nothing but spooky sound and monsters around the point where you reach the sewers. This effect makes the later half of the game feel hollow in comparison.
As for the gameplay, it feels like a mixed bag of very high highs, and very low lows. The entire game of Hollowbody plays out with fixed camera angles and pseudo-tank controls. Your main goal is to find a way out of the city. To do this, you will need to visit various locations on your way to the goal. The game plays out like your typical survival horror game where puzzles and monsters block your path. The typical tropes of the genre are present, like finding a hammer, breaking a lock on a safe, getting a keycard, and opening a door. Most of the puzzles are extremely basic and don’t require much thought. It feels like more care could have been put into some of the puzzles. Often times, the game outright tells you what you need to progress, with the item either being in the same room, or just a single room away.
There were only 3 puzzles across the game that I found even remotely challenging. The best one was a safe puzzle in chapter one that required you to do a bit of math regarding a birthday. But too many of the puzzles felt obvious. This felt strange because the levels are massive but often don’t use the space given. Using the first chapter as an example, you will see many rooms in the hotel you can go into. But many of the rooms only contain a bit of ammo or a note. Then the puzzles will have the key in the same room as the puzzle itself. This feeling is persistent in most of the game. Even the safe puzzle has all the clues in the same room as the safe. It leaves much of the apartment feeling like an empty set dressing as you go through many completely empty rooms.
This also becomes a problem when looking at the combat. The enemies in the game are monstrous husks of the humans who died in the attack. They will slowly lumber around in designated spots as you explore. But even on the harder difficulties, most of the enemies have little to no threat. There are only 4 enemy types in the game (with one just being a faster variant found in the final chapter). In the outdoor levels, there is absolutely no incentive to fight any of the enemies. They are all extremely slow and often don’t get in the way. They don’t chase you further than their 10-foot bubble and killing them is only a waste of ammo. You often aren’t required to backtrack (except for one spot), so fighting them serves no purpose. Which leaves the enemies in the cramped indoor spaces. The game loads enough ammo to win a war against these monsters (especially if you skipped fighting the outdoor monsters), which makes it easy to kill everything in sight.
By the end of the game I was loaded up with 3 different melee weapons, a revolver with 68 rounds remaining, a shotgun I never even fired once (28 shells remaining), and a secret weapon that I used for the final chapter. Melee was easy enough to learn, so I mostly stuck with that, thinking that I needed to save ammo. But by the final chapter, I was throwing ammo away because there was so much. I didn’t even get to use the shotgun because the final boss is taken out a different way (who also died within 20 seconds).
This leads to the game’s scare factor. Horror is very subjective, so it is hard for me to grade it. I did find the earliest moments tense as I didn’t know what was lurking in the darkness. But it was like discovering that the monster under your bed is just a bunny rabbit. The enemies were so generic and lacked any threat that I lost any tension by the time the first chapter was over. I can count a total of two times that the game got me, and both were in the first quarter of the game. This is unfortunate because the atmosphere is there.
Hollowbody is a valiant attempt at recreating the magic of older survival horror games. The fact that this was made by a single developer and nailed the aesthetic was wonderful. But the game was all presentation without any bite. At the end of the day, it truly was a hollow body: A beautiful exterior with no meat inside. I recommend it to anyone nostalgic for the old games. The game is worth a look, and it is short enough to be beaten within a day or two. It has at least had me interested in what is next for Headware Games.
