Hollowbody PC Review
Summary: Hollowbody is a wonderful throwback to the golden age of survival horror games in the sixth console generation with an interesting and engaging story and excellent sound design.
4.3
Nostalgic!
Survival horror has gone through a bit of an evolution over the last 20 years or so. The golden age the genre went through in the late nineties and early to mid-noughties with titles such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill solidifying survival horror as a fan favourite. Tropes such as often unwieldy tank controls and combat, fixed camera angles, and obtuse puzzles became a genre staple.
Many of these aspects have been supplanted by modern techniques – better controls, dynamic and first-person cameras, and the obvious upgrade to visual fidelity that comes with generational leaps. There’s a small group of developers, however, who have kept what made those old games so memorable, and Headware Games, developer of Hollowbody, is one of them.
A dark survival horror, set in an abandoned city in England, Hollowbody takes many of the best aspects of the genre’s history and puts them into a modern environment.
Decades after a disaster that saw vast sections of the country walled off from the outside world, with only the elite members of society being shipped out to an oceanic haven. Players take control of Mica, a black market smuggler who journeys to the exclusion zone around the abandoned city to attempt to locate her missing partner. Waking up in a dark and foreboding residential area after the almost mandatory crash landing, Mica has to discover the secrets of the town and find a way to escape.
Fixed camera angles, environmental puzzles, and resource management are all here, and there is even an option for tank controls if you want a truly authentic experience. Hollowbody certainly nails its tone, leaning far closer to Silent Hill than Resident Evil or Dead Space. Enemies are grotesque approximations of humanity, often found shambling around the streets or hidden away in the corners of the many buildings that are necessary to be explored to make any headway. For the most part, they don’t need to be dealt with. Mica is relatively agile, and areas are often large enough to simply run around most of the foes in your way.
On the odd occasion where combat can’t be avoided, there are two options. Melee or ranged. Various flavours of makeshift weapons can be found to bludgeon enemies with. A street sign, wood with nails protruding at one end, etc. For the standard fodder enemies that make up the majority of the creatures that stalk the town, this is more than adequate. The left trigger locks on and the right trigger swings away at whatever is in front of you. It’s quite easy to stun-lock them, beating them down before they have any real chance of getting a hit in.
The other option is firearms. There aren’t many in the game, a pistol, a shotgun, flamethrower, and strangely a bow. In the same manner as melee combat, the left trigger locks on, and the right trigger fires. It’s a very basic system, but it works well enough, just don’t expect anything deep or particularly immersive in this area.
Thankfully, exploration and puzzles take up the majority of the gameplay. For the most part, puzzles are intuitive and it’s usually apparent what needs to be done to progress, even if it isn’t immediately obvious as to how to go about doing it. There’s a lot of key hunting, but there is the occasional bit of deduction required, such as early on when a combination for a safe has to be figured out from a collection of letters and photographs strewn around an apartment.
Being largely set in dilapidated residential areas and neighbourhoods (uncomfortably close to the ones that I grew up in), there’s a lot of wandering around semi-detached houses, flats, and streets and a mercifully short, sewer section. This doesn’t lend itself to a huge amount of variety in the level design.
Hollowbody leans into the visual style of the sixth console generation. Everything is very low poly by modern standards. Chunky graphics and simple geometry. Textures and materials reflect this too. It’s all very cohesive and hits the nostalgic part of my brain in just the right way. There’s a tremendous sense of atmosphere, an unspoken, underlying oppression that oozes from every pore.
This is further enhanced by some of the best sound design in the genre in years. Everything is draped in an eerie sense of stillness that simultaneously feels unsettlingly alive at the same time. Voice acting, while not the best, is generally good enough, being a cut above the campy, cheese of classic Resident Evil games, but not quite hitting the Silent Hill 2 level of quality.
Final Thoughts?
Hollowbody is a love letter to classic survival horror games, harking back to the sixth console generation. The mixture of fixed and semi-dynamic cameras put a slightly more modern twist on the formula. Despite the camera frustratingly swinging around wildly on occasion it manages to straddle the fine line of classic and modern gameplay.
It isn’t a particularly long game, and it sits a little on the easy side of things, even on the intended difficulty. Ammo was never really an issue, and aside from the odd puzzle that bordered on adventure game logic, the game was a breeze to get through.
All-in-all though, Hollowbody is a fantastic game that fans of classic survival horror should definitely check out.
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