Charles Fort came up with the concept of “steam engine time” to explain how multiple inventors seem to have thought of the steam engine simultaneously yet separately. It was just an idea whose time had come. Well, right now it's Silent Hill time, baby. It's retro survival horror with a psychological edge o-fucking-clock.
Hollowbody is the latest survival horror game with fixed camera placement, wilfully clunky combat, surreal puzzles, and a pocket flashlight. It's even got a creepy radio, a gratuitous Sonic Youth reference, and mysterious phone calls—which double as your save points complete with that Silent Hill fade-to-red.
What makes it different is the setting, a near-future cyberpunk England. Most of the action takes place inside a fictional walled city called Brandon, a kind of Mega-Swindon One that's an endless slum of bleak concrete housing estates. It's broken Britain turned up to 11, an urban mausoleum where the poor were walled-in before being left to starve, then bombed. You can tell things got real bad because they even had guns. On the plus side, that means there are bullets everywhere for you to loot, as well as nanotech repair spray healing items. I guess at least the National Health was working up until the end.
Hollowbody is set years after Brandon was given a gentle bombing, Slough-style. You've arrived in your BladeRunner hovercar to search for your girlfriend who is doing foolishly dangerous research in the area. Also, now there are zombies. Or at least, zombie-adjacent enemies, some of whom are dogs.
There's also gray goo covering every other surface and a series of increasingly hallucinogenic puzzles to solve as you work your way through five or six hours' worth of abandoned locations, including an apartment building, a church, an underground train station, and finally the obligatory underworld. Because you can't be a Silent Hill-esque protagonist if you don't clamber down every ominous hole you find.
From the apartment building on I had a constant sense I was missing things in Hollowbody. Sometimes a door will lock behind you or you'll otherwise be prevented from backtracking, but there are so many hidden documents to find—as well as radio signals from the past you can somehow listen to if you turn on your radio in the right spot—that I was always nervous about what I hadn't found.
Yet I gave up on thorough exploration because the map was useless. It doesn't record points of interest or let you leave notes, so you just have to remember which identical green square was the room with the puzzle you haven't solved yet. I found myself longing for the maps of the original Silent Hill and Resident Evil games, which would conveniently record rooms you'd entered. Without that, exploring Hollowbody is more frustrating than it needs to be.
You probably should comb every corner, though. I'd have no idea what the plot was if I hadn't found a single newspaper article about a shady pharmaceuticals company called Echo Gardens, without which the entire storyline would have been totally opaque. Don't expect the cutscenes to fill you in, because they're too busy being spooky to be sensical.
There were definitely things I liked about Hollowbody. The guitar's a great melee weapon, especially the way it jangles when you brain a zombo. The creepy stuttering voice you hear over the phone has a subtle Shodan thing going on, and the monsters make terrifying noises that turn into unsettling baby cries as they die.
If you want to revisit the Wood Side Apartments from Silent Hill 2 only with a dystopian augmented reality device that tells you how everyone died in floating green text, that's basically what Hollowbody offers. In terms of other recent Silent Hill-likes, I enjoyed it more than Crow Country, less than Signalis. I'd say I've had enough of this type of game for a while, but then the actual Silent Hill 2 remake comes out next month and I know I'll be up to my elbows in that like a survival horror protagonist fishing a useful item out of a toilet.
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