Slitterhead certainly sounds like an action-horror game that might be razor-sharp given its intriguing body-swapping system, savage blood-based weapons, eerie Lovecraftian monsters, and the fact that it was inspired by the original Silent Hill. Unfortunately, despite having a good slash-em-up combat system, this time-looping murder mystery set in the neon-lit streets of a fictionalized Hong Kong has a jumbled plot, a surprisingly limited variety of enemies, and uninspired mission objectives that are repeated to an extremely tedious extent. It turns out that Slitterhead is not only an experience that is often out of body, but it also runs out of ideas very rapidly.
It is also a great shame because Slitterhead’s captivating premise captured my attention right away. We are given the role of a mysterious spiritual being known only as the “Night Owl,” who acts as a disembodied detective in an attempt to uncover a murderous threat known as the slitterheads, who can pose as humans after the bodies of residents are found in the back alleys of the Kowlong slums with holes in their heads where their brains used to be.
We can do this by beaming directly into another person’s body through an open window or the bars of a locked gate, for example, to gain access to places that are otherwise off-limits. We can also temporarily take control of human hosts to search for clues through brothels and back alleys.
Since these readily controlled flesh sacks are essentially mind-controlled marionettes, it may make some sense that they are simple in appearance and wooden in movement. Except for the limited number of distinct playable individuals known as “rarities,” there are no observable abilities or characteristics that set one controlling citizen apart from another, in contrast to the comparable crowdsourcing approach in Watch Dogs: Legion. The Night Owl discovers some victims who are close to death as the inquiry goes on.
Their damaged limbs bleed into Wolverine-like claws, spears, and genuine plasma swords once possessed, turning their grave wounds into weapons and making them essential tools for battling any slitterheads you come across. Slitterhead’s story loops around the same three-day sequence multiple times, bringing you back to revisit events in its timeline in an attempt to expose the criminals behind some crimes and possibly stop them from ever happening. The growing party of rarities can be divided into pairs to accompany you into each mission.
Unfortunately, that sounds far more intriguing than it is, as it entails going back to many of the same locations and performing many of the same easy tasks, such as tracking spectral apparitions along a predetermined path to piece together the last moments of a slitterhead victim. You get to spend some time with your growing list of rarities in between missions, but these exposition-dumping exchanges are so badly done that I had a hard time finding anything of value to truly connect with. I simply paged through them mindlessly long enough to start the next story chapter. They are presented in static text snippets over repetitive and primitive character animations.
This roughly 13-hour time-traveling story ends in such a depressing and pointless way that I wished I could have looped back to the beginning of my playthrough and avoided ever pressing the start button on the title screen. Even if I had been able to better buy into each rarity’s plights, I do not think it would have been worth my while. It is also not at all frightening, which is somewhat unexpected considering that it is a horror adventure created under the careful supervision of Keiichiro Toyama, the director of the first Silent Hill.
This roughly 13-hour time-traveling story ends in such a depressing and pointless way that I wished I could have looped back to the beginning of my playthrough and avoided ever pressing the start button on the title screen. Even if I had been able to better buy into each rarity’s plights, I do not think it would have been worth my while. It is also not at all frightening, which is somewhat unexpected considering that it is a horror adventure created under the careful supervision of Keiichiro Toyama, the director of the first Silent Hill.
Crowd Strife
But there is some appeal to combat. You may slit an enemy’s skull, throat, or any other part of their body that is within striking range of your crimson blades with a straightforward one-button attack combo, but Slitterhead’s combat is more complex than it initially appears. First of all, you may use the crowd to chip away at a target like a GoFundMe for fisticuffs by rapidly beaming between onlookers stationed around each arena to surprise a rival with a strike from behind. Non-uniqueness Slitterhead feels a bit like a supernatural take on the real-time character-swapping battles of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but I only ever stayed in control of humans for brief bursts before zipping back to my chosen rarity to unleash more damaging strikes. However, switching between them is a great way to draw enemy heat away.
Health is restored by vacuuming up the blood pools that emerge during each combat; there are no medkits to gather and use. It is an ingenious technique that soon becomes crucial for maintaining your rarity’s survival as well as making sure they have enough hand-me-down hemoglobin to carry out their distinctive blood-powered skills. Cult member Tri can summon some blood-blasting sentry turrets, motorbike rider Alex can create blood vortexes that pull enemies together and expose them to attacks, and special agent Blake can unleash a blood-powered mini-gun that quickly depletes his and his opponent’s health bars in high-risk, high-reward bursts.
As its list of rarities grows, it may accommodate a wider range of attack techniques, although Slitterhead’s fighting system is not perfect. Although its thumbstick-based parrying system is fairly easy to learn in one-on-one combat, I was never able to rely on it in battles with multiple enemies at once because the onscreen indicators too frequently failed to appear, even after I had invested in the “6th Sense” perk in Slitterhead’s simple skill tree system that is supposed to enable it. Most attacks land with all the weight of a wet newspaper.
Bloody Repetitive
This is mostly because, although the creators have spent a great deal of time generating an ever-expanding roster of up to eight rarities for you to select from, it appears that not nearly as much time has been spent designing engaging adversaries to encounter or situations for you to submerge them in. The pre-slitterhead humanoids with what appears to be a bunch of bananas for heads, the disgusting jumble of twisted limbs that are the evolved slitterheads themselves, the obnoxious worms that can be eliminated with a single blow, and the floppy, bipedal appendages that are only known as walking wieners are the only variety of enemies.
Although there are undoubtedly a few distinct slitterhead types to contend with, I found it difficult to discern any significant distinction between fighting an “octopus” and a “warty frogfish” type beyond their outward appearance. I approached them all with essentially the same tactic, hopping between bodies like a sailor on shore leave and continuously shifting the attack from all angles until they were eliminated.
I could not remember how many times I had to follow the same kinds of monsters through the same few filthy metropolitan environments on the same loops. By the end of Slitterhead’s campaign, I had visited every street, back alley, and rooftop so many times that I could probably map every location from memory. It is tiring in the first place, let alone the umpteenth. In the early going, I found it annoying that some of the game’s larger city areas lacked an in-game map.
Verdict
Due to its limited number of recurring level settings and mostly identical enemy encounters, Slitterhead never fully capitalizes on its intriguing body-swapping exploration or its distinctive blood-based battle system. Its time-looping concept is really a weak attempt to conceal the fact that it takes roughly one hour’s worth of plot mission ideas and repeats them nonstop throughout its 13-hour runtime, and its story is presented in a shockingly simplistic manner. Over time, Slitterhead becomes duller and eventually falls short, much like a bleeding blade dulled by too many conflicts.
