Hollowbody review: Survival Horror played it safe

The PS2 aesthetic has become the new trend in recent years, especially in the survival horror genre. Games like Crow Country, Signalis, and Conscript all took inspiration from classic games of that era, namely Silent Hill and Resident Evil, each finding an audience among fans of the genre. This week a new game came into play. A game with clear parallels to the survival horror classics mentioned above – parallels that arise not only from its art style, but also from its philosophy, its eerie atmosphere, desolate and mystifying, and perhaps most importantly, its fixed camera angles. This game is Hollowbody.

A journey through desolation

Officially described on the Steam store page as “a tech-noir survival horror novella, set in the urban decay of a long-abandoned British town”, Hollowbody finds Mica, a smuggler, searching for her partner lost, Sasha. This search takes her to a town that has long been closed down, abandoned and essentially left to rot by the British government after a catastrophic event that occurred years before. As you might expect, the adventure involves a plethora of unwelcoming encounters.

It’s a fairly generic premise that makes for a great story, but honestly, I was much more interested in the game’s subplots and uncovering the mystery of what happened to bring this city to such ruin. To paint the picture, you pass through a city covered in a black, fleshy mass, teeming with necromorph-like creatures and littered with bodies on every corner. It’s a town that was abandoned by something disastrous, and learning what exactly that something is and how it got there is what stuck with me the most during my roughly 4 hour playthrough.

In addition to the notes and documents left behind that you would find in any other survival horror game, Hollowbody has an interesting mechanic whereby Mica can exploit radio signals that allow him to listen in on previous events occurred at the location where it is located. finding and listening to these events, as they made more sense of the landscape around him in the present and provided greater insight into life just before the disaster.

Survival Horror gameplay returns

Anyone who has played a survival horror game will be familiar with the gameplay featured in Hollowbody. You walk through strange, dark corridors, collect and read ancient documents, and try to save as much ammo as possible while passing various enemies, but this time with a mix of fixed and dynamic camera angles. I found the camera variation to be quite nice, however, there were more than a few instances where useful elements were placed in areas of the screen that were almost invisible due to camera placement and simply by due to their fusion in the environment.

The combat was exactly what I expect from this genre. You have a variety of options for melee combat, as well as, of course, your trusty pistol. It’s a fairly simple combat system with instant lock-on similar to Signalis; The challenge comes when you’re fighting multiple enemies at once or trying to figure out how to get past an enemy without getting hurt or wasting your precious ammo.

Like any survival horror, Hollowbody offers a range of suitably clever puzzles to solve. I noticed that they started to get a little easier as I progressed through the game, but I always had that “aha!” feeling when I understood what I had to do. However, the game does not implement all the basic elements of the genre. For example, Hollowbody removes some of the more tedious mechanics of survival horror games, like inventory management and heavy backtracking, in order to keep a much shorter, tighter experience for the player.

A competent Silent Hill

At a glance, it’s clear that Silent Hill and Resident Evil had a major influence on the indie horror game Hollowbody. While its retro PS2-style visuals are what initially drew me to the game, it contains a competent survival horror experience that, without doing too much different from its predecessors, establishes a world and setting that deserves to be explored. If you’re looking for a game to scratch the itch for those classic survival horror experiences, Hollowbody is definitely worth your time.

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This review is based on a Steam version of Hollowbody purchased by the reviewer. Hollowbody is available now on PC.