Hollowbody Reviews

A good little horror game that doesn't drag out its' run time. Also average day in England.

A love letter to Silent Hill 2 that does little to break free of the mold. Worth it if you don't mind a 3-5 hour game on your first run.

Neat little survival horror with British themes. Has a few standout vibe moments, especially in the apartment complex.

i'd give this game a 5/10. it has some dark, rich atmospheres and a couple unsettling moments here and there. you might get some fun out of it if you're a fan of the genre and want to kill a few hours. but you won't miss out on anything if you skip it. the main story is a little light on the details. there aren't too many turns in the story, or major events, or other notable points, or really any interesting characters. it's a basic "go find your friend", with a couple (voice-only) scenes here and there where the main characters endear themselves to each other or do some vague reminiscing. you end up meandering through the ruined town, and it feels like you incidentally stumble upon your target. compare to a rich and powerful reunion type story from Signalis, and you will find Hollowbody's to be a bit empty. the creature design is pretty uninspired; there is one very common enemy, a basic wispy-looking, raspy-sounding humanoid that weakly and predictably flails at you. then there a couple other enemies that are a minor spin on that one: slightly larger, makes a different noise, and has slightly different attacks. compared to some of the famous creatures from well-known series such as Resident Evil's Lickers or Silent Hill's Bubblehead Nurses, the creatures in Hollowbody are don't inspire any awe or fear, and dont feel like they pose much danger. they are easy to avoid or kill. not to mention, i didn't detect much context about the creatures. where did they come from? why are they attacking me? many of the levels feel a bit too large -- there are wide open city areas with not much to see. collect a jack in one corner, and hike all the way to the other end of the city to use it on a door. it would have been nice if there were more buildings to enter, or alcoves to explore, or people to meet. any kind of reward for taking a moment to stop and look around. there was one optional "quest" that involved an insane amount of boring backtracking. i would never want to do it, even though there was a big reward. it's just not fun enough. i was surprised that the final (and only?) boss was the final boss, because it didn't have anything to do with the story -- it was just a huge bug that comes out of nowhere and attacks you. you kill it just by setting off bombs in the area, so you don't use any ammo that you saved thoughout the game. compare it to the final bosses in resident evil 2 or silent hill 3. they are challenging and it feels good to finally use your 100 shotgun shells that you labored to save. killing them holds big weight in the story and the fight is a pivotal moment. in Hollowbody it is: "ahh! a big bug! blow it up!!" and that's it. how about if the final boss was a mutated form of your lost lover? or that creepy person that calls you on the phone all game? the final fight should be some kind of crescendo, but it felt pretty flat. a lot of the notes and other world-building details that you find are a little boring. there's lots of documents that are just like "hey the apartment building is changing management". humm ok. i had to read like 3 paragraphs to learn that. i'm not very interested. there is some lore scattered about in the form of radio transmissions. you get to listen to dialogue from some randoms from the past who are experiencing the disastrous fate of the town and citizens. but overall, they feel a bit generic and don't really add much to the world. a couple of them painted a good image, but some of them were just a couple guys being like "ahh damn there's so many bodies" or some women saying "i guess we should kill ourselves instead of facing the horrors". would have been cool if there was some details in there that expanded my understanding of the world, or what led up to the disaster, or revealed some details about the creatures outside. the puzzles are pretty decent -- about what you'd expect from the genre. one of them requires you to gather some information from a few documents and do a little bit of deduction, which offered a little challenge. most puzzles are more like using an item that you incidentally found in the most obvious way. for the most part, nothing special but not bad. minor note, but there was a tiny bit of humor injected into the game that missed the mark and detracted from the atmosphere. i'm thinking of the guy who died by the TV and some of the dialog with the hovercar voice. final verdict: catch it on sale or just play another game in the genre instead.

Has a great atmosphere but its lacking in a lot of other areas, like enemy variety and too much empty space but still had some fun with it.

It's okay, I expected a bit more out of this game but overall I think its an enjoyable experience. I think if this game had come out 10 years ago it would have a small cult following but indie Survival Horror games in the recent years have been nothing short of incredible. From Alisa, Signalis, Crow Country, Sorry We're Closed, Conscript, etc. this game falls more into the Tormented Souls and Remothered category, good horror games that fall a bit short of greatness. Still, would recommend for die-hard Survival Horror fans. Just don't expect to find the next big indie Survival Horror game here.

The atmosphere was great, but the enemies felt generic. The final boss was underwhelming—especially as the only boss in the game—and its appearance seemed random. The cutscenes were inconsistent, with moments of dialogue where the camera simply showed a static character with no mouth movement. Whether intentional or not, better camera angles could have helped mask this, as it really broke immersion. The cutscene with Sasha, despite serving as a sort of crescendo, felt lacking; for example, I would much rather see the main character physically carry out these actions instead of relying on on-screen text to describe them. In this cutscene, the text should have been reserved for actions that can't be animated, such as internal thoughts—or better yet, leave the emotions open to interpretation.

So, so close to being above average. It has moments, but I've played a lot of survival horror throwbacks; the competition is just too stiff to consider Hollowbody anywhere close to greatness. The core experience is the same old same old, with too many holes in the design to take advantage of the mechanical tension that the survival horror framework can provide. What good is resource management when so much of the game is linear, and enemies can be run around, or neutralised with melee attacks? On the other hand, melee combat feels rubbish and movement is very wobbly. Puzzles are also dull, with some pixel-hunt fetch-questing and New Game+ locked keys that tease you on a fresh run for good measure. One optional weapon even requires you backtrack from the final point of no return all the way to the beginning of the game, which is a half-hour round trip. I almost admire that tenacity, but not quite. What almost saves Hollowbody is the setting, and especially the set-up. With talks of economic segregation, government cover-ups and leaving the lower classes to fend for themselves, the worldbuilding has a cyberpunk tint to it just pronounced enough to add flavour and grit to what is otherwise yet another ghost story about saving your girlfriend. The little flourishes like the understated late-game reveal of cyborgs, the techno-inspired UI hinting at your own character's background, sci-fi goop clashing with grey British cityscapes, it gives it a weird flair not seen in this genre. Great music and ambient audio also aid the atmosphere. At the same time, let's be real: Signalis was probably the goalpost, and it is running circles around Hollowbody in style and substance. Whatever thrills the endgame poses in its narrative just don't hit as hard when the climax happens in a flash, and reading up on alternate endings and theories almost left me with a Fobia-esque feeling of dissatisfaction at how flimsy it feels in the end.

A little rough around the edges but still an enjoyable game with a good story

Do I recommend this game? Maybe? I think it's hard to boil it down to that level but I find it hard to recommend a game that I felt thoroughly let down by. The shining star of this game is the soundtrack. The music is genuinely excellent, in my view it carries the majority of the atmosphere and is a strong counterweight to any negative feelings I had, I can't really be mad if I got to hear all that. The visual design is pretty solid on a techincal level, but the environments are very much done to death except for the exception of the very beginning (the beach is excellent) and the very end (mines). There was real potential here, and seeing this was made by one person is nonetheless impressive, and I hope to see more by Nathan Hamley or Headware in the future. Let's start with the mechanics. The most core parts of this kind of game are probably camera/controls and combat, and unfortunately I think these were very poorly handled. I am *extremely* familiar with survival horror and the SH series in particular, and this game feels like SIlent HIll 4, which is extremely damning. Hollowbody replicates some of the ideas of the fixed camera classics, but it feels like they understood the form of fixed cam without understanding the actual functions. The best survival horror games used these camera angles to create physical and narrative distance from the protagonist, and carefully disorient the player without it being overwhelming, in this case Silent Hill 4 and Hollowbody fail drastically and identically. There both wasn't any interesting use of fixed camera angles and frequently moments of incomprehensible camera placement (reaching a dead end can flip the cam 180, but it is intrusive in other places), I was fighting it the entire time, and the only real boss fight at the end of the game is primarily against the camera, fortunately its open enough to make it essentially trivial. I can't help but think that the multiple different camera options shows that the role of the camera was either not considered meaningfully or it didn't have nearly enough time to be finished. Unfortunately the combat is far worse. It pains me to say that the only positive thing it did was make me want to eventually avoid engaging in combat because it felt like pulling teeth. You have a combat stance which locks onto the nearest enemy, however there is no max range because you can aim at enemies that are 500 miles away through 17 walls and floors and might not even exist? That's a pretty immersion breaking thing in the apartments when there's an enemy placed behind walls that you can lock onto but never encounter, it turns a nice touch of being a little uneasy with an enemy you can't find into feeling like a rushjob that was clearly overlooked. This all applies to ranged combat, janky but serviceable. Melee combat is unfortunately inexcusably terrible, if this game had actual difficulty, even the power of spite couldn't have made me pull through it. Melee combat deviated from the Silent Hill formula of a light/strong attack that you can repeat, into extremely janky combos that have a strong chance of missing even when performing the same action twice, Mica awkwardly rotates in combat which I suspect may be the culprit. Damage is also highly inconsistent, on multiple occasions I picked up on a bug where my melee weapon (guitar or axe) would get lodged in the opponent leading to massive damage. That was kinda awesome but I'm pretty confident it was entirely accidental. Stomping enemies isn't the worst thing in the world, but the tracking was poor enough where on several occasions I was on top of an enemy and fully whiffed my kick and took damage. The game ends up having random anti-stun lock because of how easy it is for you to miss when point blank in a 1-on-1. The narrative and atmosphere, for the most part failed to grab me. I've seen a thousand apartments, streets, churches, etc. I enjoyed the beginning beach, end mines, and the sewers (good contrast to the open streets we just came from) for some creativity if nothing else, this game is futuristic and dystopian but that only shows up in extremely few areas, mostly the opening sequence with the beautiful window shot and flying car. The incredible music carries a lot of this, god damn it fuckin ROCKS (Hate to say it but it was better than SH2R's music direction, which is very high praise but stronger condemnation of SH2R). I don't think the bulk of narrative is fundamentally interesting, the opening sequence and first 3 codec's establish essentially the entirety of the notes and visuals we see. Authoritarian government, containing a contagion, some kind of cover-up is occuring, people are miserable and losing grip of their humanity. I found the twins who took their own life, and the husband who was lashing out to be particularly compelling, but I started to skim notes because I didn't feel that interested. The voice of "the antagonist", conveyed through phone calls, was a bit too cliche for me to fully enjoy. Had I been more invested I might have thought differently, but feeling like I've played this game already and getting continuously harassed by spooky phone guy ended up grating. I will say that the ending segment pulled me back, enough that I anticipate a second playthrough when I've cooled down from the first, with a different perspective and higher difficulty. But I don't think the game earned the intrigue that the ending provided, and if I didn't want to like the game as much as I did I don't think I would've reached it. Rapid fire other stuff. The map is basically useless, honestly I don't know how this was supposed to be helpful, I only used it at the beginning with the apartments,. Once the area becomes somewhat complex with height variation, its a huge downgrade from a SH style paper map, with no indicators of locked/jammed/open doors, completed puzzles, unfinished puzzles, etc. It sells the futurism but with no functionality, maybe this is actually realistic? There's no SH style head turn so I almost missed the guitar because there's no way of communicating to the player what is helpful, paying more attention doesn't help much when everything is gray. The puzzles are basically non existent. This game does a really annoying and unpolished thing where some environment interactions prompt you to use an item immediately, but others don't. I had a minor break in my playthrough and got stuck because I forgot that was actually a mechanic and you can use items on interactions without being asked to. This felt extremely sloppy. Oh, on puzzles, I was only ever stuck on the plastic explosives. To my knowledge you're never asked to shoot to interact with another object in the game, and notably, plastic explosives won't detonate when you shoot them in real life. I might have figured it out earlier if I was ever certain if I picked everything up! I don't ask for realism but this could've been done better, hell I had an extra fuse which I figured was related to creating a detonator, nope waste to even think. There's basically 3 enemy types, dog, gray, and big gray, I understand its related to this pathogen/virus/whatever but overwhelmingly bland visuals throughout aren't being helped by that. There's a few highly intrusive invisible walls. With all due respect, are you fuckin serious lmao. There's an invisible wall that blocks me from going into one place that I can go around and reach, and then I can't get back. If that's supposed to guide the player it needs to be actual level geometry and foliage, not the force. Conclusion I'd recommend this to hardcore survival horror fans who are looking for more, and on a sale, I am absolutely not a dollars = hours guy but a game I kinda liked but felt very disappointed by isn't a compelling package. HWG if you read this, I have a immense respect as an amateur dev myself, there's great stuff here. Next title? I will be there no matter what lol