In the last few years, I’ve played quite a few games that their creators describe as “inspired by,” or “a love letter to,” the classic period of survival horror. This dates back to roughly 1996 to 2005, between the releases of the original Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4.
Most indie survival horror games can be placed at points along a particular spectrum. At one end, you’ve got mostly original productions that nonetheless wear their influences on their sleeves (Tormented Souls, Signalis); at the other, it’s visibly somebody filing the serial numbers off their fanfiction (Daymare: 1998).
Hollowbody is well towards the latter end of that scale. It is not “inspired by” the first few Silent Hill games. It is a Silent Hill game. Like Conscript, Hollowbody occasionally stops to make sure you understand its references, and that can’t help but slow it down.
On the other hand, and in its defense, Hollowbody does understand why the first few Silent Hill games are classics. It’s creepy, often intense, doesn’t bog itself down with too many explanations, and lets its sound design do the heavy lifting. For an indie game made by a single developer, it’s an incredible accomplishment, albeit one that’s leaning hard on genre nostalgia.
Hollowbody is set in the early 22nd century, in the ruins of an unnamed city on the west coast of the British Isles. 60 years ago, a terrorist attack contaminated it and several neighboring cities with an unknown biohazard. The UK government evacuated “high-value” survivors, left the rest behind, bombed the cities flat, and quarantined what was left.
Sasha is one of a handful of people who are still looking into the actual story of the Western Cities’ destruction. Over the objections of her partner Mica, she takes a job with an illegal research team that’s headed into the exclusion zone.
12 days later, with no word from Sasha, Mica uses a forged set of credentials to fly into the Cities after her. Mica’s flying car promptly dies in mid-air and she crashes into the middle of a dead suburb. She’s left alone, on foot, and miles from her destination, in a neighborhood full of old ghosts, new mutants, unstable ruins, and a mysterious entity that’s watching her every move.
The first 20 minutes or so of Hollowbody stakes out an interesting middle ground. You initially crash-land in the middle of several blocks of abandoned tract housing. Every street and hallway looks exactly the same, but in a recognizable real-world way. Because it’s so easy to get turned around, every fight and chase turns into one of those nightmares about being pursued down an infinite corridor.
As a game, Hollowbody is self-consciously following the Silent Hill playbook, although it’s got a little Resident Evil thrown in for spice. You’re alone in dangerous territory with scarce resources, but you have no inventory limit and are given a couple of really strong melee weapons.
If you shoot everything you run into, you’ll be out of bullets before you know it, but you also get a spiked club that can stunlock most standard enemies. Hollowbody can be tough if you play on its hardest difficulty, when Mica can only take a couple of hits before dying, but if you’ve got any survival horror chops at all it’s a cakewalk.
That’s fine. The real reasons to pick up Hollowbody are its story and atmosphere. It relies on darkness, ambient sound, and a minimalist soundtrack to keep you on edge. Its map might be repetitive if you ever saw it clearly, as it’s set in a procession of abandoned apartments, old houses, and crumbling streets, but you typically have to navigate by the dim glow of Mica’s flashlight. There aren’t many traditional jump scares in Hollowbody, but one of them is consistently being startled by your own shadow.
In fact, much of Hollowbody is more about sorrow and despair than outright horror. Its setting is essentially an unsolved war crime, full of people who were left behind to die. You’re 60 years late to the scene of a government-enabled massacre, and while Mica says out loud that it’s awful, it’s also not why she’s here. It’s an atrocity as set dressing, which has more raw impact than any scene in which Mica’s jumped by zombies.
That’s a useful example of how Hollowbody, on the whole, is more grounded than many survival horror revivals (revival horror?). While it does have a couple of discordant puzzles, Hollowbody is built around common-sense solutions rather than an endless search for gems, cranks, and themed keys. When you’re stuck inside an apartment in the first area, you don’t need to put together a Rube Goldberg machine to escape; you find a claw hammer and bash through the weakest wall. After playing Crow Country, Withering Rooms, and Conscript this year, it’s a breath of fresh air.
That said, Hollowbody has a couple of sore points. You can’t skip all the way through its cutscenes, which makes it a pain to replay and/or speedrun, and it ends right when it’s hitting its stride. I was surprised when the credits started up, as it felt like I’d somehow skipped Hollowbody’s second act.
It’s one more way in which Hollowbody feels like a particularly ambitious fan project. When it breaks out into its own territory, it’s compelling, creepy work, but it takes a while to get there.
Hollowbody is absolutely a Silent Hill game at heart, especially for the first hour, but it’s the best Silent Hill game since SH4. Many of the games that claim to be inspired by SH don’t understand the assignment, and Hollowbody does. That has to count for something.
After seeing its ending, Hollowbody comes off as a short prologue for a much larger, more ambitious horror game. I hope its developer gets the chance to make it.
[I’m going to try to be more consistent about these disclaimers: Hollowbody, developed and published by Headware Games, is now available on Steam and GOG for $16.99. This review was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by the game’s PR representative.]
