As many of the juggernauts of survival horror continue to diverge significantly from the genres they either created or made popular, there’s a small group of indie developers continuing to mine away in the pits of macabre madness. By embracing the mechanics that were groundbreaking back in the day, even if they haven’t aged as well as we would have liked, they’ve managed to keep the traditional survival horror genre kicking with new scares, grotesque creature designs and interesting stories.
Some have gone big. Most have stayed small. And Hollowbody is one of those games that takes a smaller, more personal take on its horror. If Resident Evil is a ghastly novel, then Hollowbody is the short story that leaves you wanting more.
Set somewhere in the UK after an unexplained environmental apocalypse, you’re Mica, a Shipper, who needs to travel beyond the walls that have been erected to protect the city from the environmental hazards beyond it. But when your partner goes missing beyond the walls, in this desolate exclusion zone, you have no choice but to try and find her. But when you crash beyond the wall with no reliable means of communication, you find that the exclusion zone is not as empty as it seems. . .
Story and World Building
Continuing with the short story analogy, Hollowbody drops you into its world with little in the way of fanfare, explanation or even an understandable setup. Instead, it relies on you putting the vague pieces of information together to build up its world, and what may have happened in the desolate town you find yourself in. There’s a lot left open to interpretation here, along with far too many unanswered questions about our protagonist.
Questions such as what is a Shipper, who exactly Sasha is and whether or not this disaster was man-made or the cause of humans poking their noses in where they shouldn’t have, are meant to be filled in by the documents you find scattered around or the bits of the past that you hear through radio signals. As such, there’s a lot that’s left vague and uncertain, even by the game’s resolution, yet it fits into the format of a short story, a vignette into a world already in the process of breaking completely.
Atmosphere Over Action
How much you enjoy that from a storytelling point of view will be up to personal taste as the game seems geared more towards creating an atmosphere of tension, dread and hopelessness. Hollowbody is less Resident Evil and a lot more Silent Hill in this respect. Both in the way it plays out across it’s deserted, muted and grey streets and in the manner in which enemies are heralded by noise from your radio.
But where Silent Hill used it’s iconic fog to hide the threats approaching you, Hollowbody let’s you see them coming from quite a ways off. The game plays itself out across two types of areas mainly, large neighbourhood streets that are blocked off by collapsed roadways and internal, claustrophobic corridors.
It’s the internal areas, those slovenly apartment buildings and tight, detritus filled sewer tunnels where Hollowbody hits it’s stride. There’s just the right amount of exploration, story and creature encounters to keep these sequences tense.
The outdoor areas don’t fare as well, more because you can run from everything roaming the streets as there’s more than enough room to avoid the beasties. They may follow you all over the map, but they’re slow enough that it’s never a problem. As such, I feel like the external areas are here more to drive home the desolation wreaked by the disaster and how helpless mankind was to stop it.
Visuals and Sound Design
Atmosphere is by far Hollowbody’s strongest aspect. And this is conveyed through it’s late PS1, early PS2 visuals and backed up by a very strong, minimalist audio score that knows just when to crank up the environmental audio cues to creep you out or relay an air of desolation. And the visuals do a wonderful job of creating a sad and deary setting. Enemies may be all too familiar and somewhat derivative of other games, with their tentacled, blob-like rotting flesh and shambling movements and attack patterns.
While these designs may tie in nicely to the games other theme of environmental destruction, they’re just not scary enough, especially when you can avoid most of them in the open areas. As a whole though, Hollowbody isn’t a scary game, just a creepy one.
Classic Survival Horror Gameplay
Gameplay is as traditional as it gets with melee attacks, projectile attacks and puzzles to solve. Ammo is limited so you’re going to have pick and choose when to use it. Melee attacks are the way to go in the games slow paced combat. There’s a decent lock-on system that means you won’t be wasting ammo, but melee combat is pretty janky and you can easily swing past an enemy that it seems like you’re going to hit. Slow and steady is the pace for combat here, a deliberate back and forth to make sure you don’t get stuck in a continuous loop of getting pulverised.
Puzzles and Exploration
Puzzles aren’t particularly difficult, but there were moments where it took me a couple of minutes to find something in the environment that I needed to progress. Suffice to say, you won’t be getting stuck on any of them here as they’re logically laid out to what you’ll find in the environment as clues or objects to use.
Old School Design with Modern Options
If it weren’t for some of the more modern quality of life experiences, you’d be hard pressed not to think that Hollowbody had launched in the early 2000’s. Tank controls are here for the masochist but modern analog controls are just the best way to play today. Static camera angles as well abound along with a modern third person camera. Both camera systems are prone to some annoying camera sway that can be a bit disorientating but for my money, the third person camera is great for external areas while the static camera is great for indoor areas where the third person one struggles a bit due to the geometry confines.
Replayability and Multiple Endings
Like a short story, Hollowbody can be completed in quick succession. There’s only a handful of hours of playtime, but like any good short story, it incentivise’s you to return. Not just to experience it’s sad story again, but because like many older games, there are multiple endings to experience along with a variety of gameplay changing unlocks such as a dungeon crawler mode and a New Game+.
Final Verdict
Hollowbody may become a bit rote halfway through the campaign, but what it lacks in scares and innovative gameplay is more than made up for with an atmospheric world, great sound design and multiple endings, all of which I wanted to see. Hollowbody hits all the beats of early survival horror games to a tee, making it a perfect, short-lived treat for retro-style game lovers.
Hollowbody Launch Trailer
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The game was provided to us for the express purpose of reviewing.
Reviewed on Xbox Series X.
