Keiichirō Toyama is a developer’s developer. He may not be a name you know off the top of your head, like Shigeru Miyamoto or Hideo Kojima, but you’re probably familiar with one of the many games he’s directed, such as Silent Hill, Siren, or Gravity Rush. His latest game, Slitterhead, feels like a culmination of his nearly 30-year career so far: an action-horror stealth thriller about two warring factions of parasitic creatures vying for control over the fate of humanity. Moreover, it’s a game where truth really is just a matter of perspective, as you jump between several different characters in your search for both an understanding of and resolution to the game’s ongoing conflict.
In Slitterhead, players assume the role of a Hyoki, a nameless, disembodied entity with the power to possess unsuspecting living creatures and control their bodies at will. At the game’s outset, you find yourself in the body of a stray dog wandering the back alleys of Kowlong, a fictional neon-bathed metropolis inspired by ’90s Hong Kong, specifically the densely populated enclave known as Kowloon Walled City. You have no memory of who you are, what you are, and how you got here.
For all the things you don’t know, there yet remains one fact that burns with certainty in your mind: Humanity has been infiltrated by a parasitic species of body snatching creatures known as “Slitterheads,” who devour the brains of their victims before assuming their identities. The Slitterheads are your natural enemy, so it falls to you to hunt down and kill every one that you can find throughout the city until humanity is saved.
To successfully navigate the city and track down the Slitterheads, who are masquerading using the bodies of their prey, the player must jump between different humans, possessing their bodies and repressing their consciousness in the process. When fighting, you can manipulate the blood and bones of your human hosts to create weapons to pummel your enemies and block oncoming attacks. If you manage to block an attack right as an on-screen icon pops up, you’ll be able to deflect the attack and your weapon will regain its durability. Likewise, if you fail to block an attack in time, or if you take too many successive hits while blocking, you’ll lose health and your weapon might shatter, leaving you momentarily unable to counterattack.
You’re not alone in your battle against the Slitterheads, however. Over the course of the game, you gain allies known as “Rarities” — humans who not only are able to retain their consciousness and personalities while possessed by the player, but who boast special blood-based abilities that can aid them while fighting against a Slitterhead. The first Rarity you encounter and recruit in the game, an aspiring actress named Julee who works at a convenience store, bears a striking resemblance to Faye Wong’s character in Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film Chungking Express; Toyama has cited Wong’s films as one of the principal inspirations for Slitterhead’s setting. Hyoki’s abilities when possessing Julee range from offensive powers, like sprouting bloody talon-like claws or flinging daggers made out of blood, to defensive abilities, such as regaining health or attracting nearby humans to offer the player an opportunity to outnumber and overpower their opponents. Later in the game, you’ll acquire the ability to assign two Rarities to the same mission instead of only one, forcing you to think strategically as to how you want each particular ability to complement another while in battle.
All the combat encounters in Slitterhead more or less resemble one another: You encounter a Slitterhead, alternate between dodging and blocking against attacks, pummel your enemy when their own guard is down, and frantically leap between the human whose body you have possessed at the moment and other nearby human hosts to get the drop on your opponent and deliver a killing blow.
There are a bunch of other subordinate mechanics that blossom out of Slitterhead’s core gameplay loop, such as the ability to sever your enemy’s limbs to regain health, or being temporarily disabled when your own limbs are severed. Bottom line: You’ll be doing a lot of jumping back and forth between bodies in the middle of fights if you want to survive.
You don’t just switch between bodies during battles, however. You’ll have to use the Hyoki’s ability to possess others to traverse Kowlong and its many facets, adopting the bodies and personas of innocent bystanders and Rarities alike if you want to uncover all of Kowlong’s secrets and put an end to the Slitterheads’ campaign against humanity.
One of the stranger and arguably defining mechanics of Slitterhead is “sight jacking,” which allows the player to see through the eyes of a Slitterhead in hiding right before they’re about to attack someone. By switching back and forth between your character’s perspective and the Slitterhead’s, you’ll have to intuit where a Slitterhead is located using context clues visible in their range of sight.
If you’re familiar with Toyama’s work as a developer, you’ll recognize that sight jacking was first introduced in 2003’s Siren and became a staple throughout the Siren franchise. It’s through the lens of Slitterhead’s incorporation of sight jacking by which the game’s ethos as whole become clear. It’s the culmination of Toyama’s career up until this point, as well as his first independent game since leaving Sony Interactive Entertainment following the closure of Japan Studio in 2021. Knowing that, it makes sense that Slitterhead comes across as such a chaotic yet entertaining blend of several different mechanics stacked and tied together by the power to peer through the eyes of other people: The game ultimately reads as an expression of Toyama taking stock of his career up until this point, as well as his opportunity to experiment with new ideas and mechanics he might otherwise have been unable to while working at Sony.
Slitterhead is a very peculiar game, one that throws a dozen or so different ideas at the wall, and, to the game’s credit, most of them manage to stick over time. With the exception of some occasionally finicky platforming, an inherently chaotic combat system, and near-constant drip feed of tutorials introducing new mechanics as the game progresses, the game is a compelling hodgepodge of ideas that feels like the survival horror equivalent of the multi-perspective gameplay of Watch Dogs: Legion. Its eccentricities may be a turn-off for some players, but on a whole, Slitterhead is an entertaining and experimental experience that only gets better as it goes on.
Slitterhead will be released Nov. 8 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Bokeh Game Studio. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
About Author
