Charles Fort got here up with the idea of “steam engine time” to elucidate how a number of inventors appear to have considered the steam engine concurrently but individually. It was simply an thought whose time had come. Effectively, proper now it is Silent Hill time, child. It is retro survival horror with a psychological edge o-fucking-clock.
Hollowbody is the newest survival horror sport with mounted digital camera placement, wilfully clunky fight, surreal puzzles, and a pocket flashlight. It is even acquired a creepy radio, a gratuitous Sonic Youth reference, and Mysterious telephone calls—which double as your save factors full with that Silent Hill fade-to-red.
What makes it completely different is the setting, a near-future cyberpunk England. A lot of the motion takes place inside a fictional walled metropolis referred to as Brandon, a sort of Mega-Swindon One which’s an countless slum of bleak concrete housing estates. It is damaged Britain turned as much as 11, an city mausoleum the place the poor had been walled-in earlier than being left to starve, then bombed. You possibly can inform issues acquired actual unHealthy as a result of they even had weapons. On the plus facet, which means there are bullets in all places so that you can loot, in addition to nanotech restore spray therapeutic gadgets. I suppose a minimum of the Nationwide Well being was working up till the top.
Hollowbody is ready years after Brandon was given a mild bombing, Slough-style. You’ve got arrived in your BladeRunner hovercar to seek for your girlfriend who’s doing foolishly harmful analysis within the space. Additionally, now there are zombies. Or a minimum of, zombie-adjacent enemies, a few of whom are canines.
There’s additionally grey goo masking each different floor and a collection of more and more hallucinogenic puzzles to unravel as you’re employed your approach by 5 or 6 hours’ value of deserted places, together with an house constructing, a church, an underground practice station, and at last the compulsory underworld. As a result of you may’t be a Silent Hill-esque protagonist in case you do not clamber down each ominous gap you discover.
From the house constructing on I had a relentless sense I used to be lacking issues in Hollowbody. Generally a door will lock behind you otherwise you’ll in any other case be prevented from backtracking, however there are such a lot of hidden paperwork to search out—in addition to radio indicators from the previous you may by some means hearken to in case you flip in your radio in the precise spot—that I used to be all the time nervous about what I hadn’t discovered.
But I gave up on thorough exploration as a result of the map was ineffective. It does not file factors of curiosity or allow you to go away notes, so that you simply have to recollect which equivalent inexperienced sq. was the room with the puzzle you have not solved but. I discovered myself eager for the maps of the unique Silent Hill and Resident Evil video Games, which might conveniently file rooms you’d entered. With out that, exploring Hollowbody is extra irritating than it must be.
You in all probability ought to comb each nook, although. I would don’t know what the plot was if I hadn’t discovered a single newspaper article a couple of shady prescription drugs firm referred to as Echo Gardens, with out which all the storyline would have been completely opaque. Do not count on the cutscenes to fill you in, as a result of they’re too busy being spooky to be sensical.
There have been undoubtedly issues I favored about Hollowbody. The guitar’s an ideal melee weapon, particularly the best way it jangles whenever you mind a zombo. The creepy stuttering voice you hear over the telephone has a delicate Shodan factor occurring, and the monsters make terrifying noises that flip into unsettling child cries as they die.
If you wish to revisit the Wooden Aspect Flats from Silent Hill 2 solely with a dystopian augmented actuality machine that tells you ways everybody died in floating inexperienced textual content, that is mainly what Hollowbody provides. By way of different latest Silent Hill-likes, I loved it greater than Crow Nation, lower than Signalis. I would say I’ve had sufficient of this kind of sport for some time, however then the precise Silent Hill 2 remake comes out subsequent month and I do know I will be as much as my elbows in that like a survival horror protagonist fishing a helpful merchandise out of a bathroom.
Hollowbody is out now on Steam and GOG.
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