I was really interested in Hollowbody when I first saw it because, as anyone familiar with my writing will know, the horror genre is one of my favourites in video games. However, as anyone familiar with my writing will also know, my bar for horror is pretty high, and despite always believing in the indie scene’s ability to craft interesting games, this is one genre where it’s hard to hit the mark effectively.
As is the case with so many of the interesting horror games I’ve tried, there’s a fine line between aspiration and execution. Hollowbody may look like a game from the bygone era of horror games, but it certainly doesn’t play like one.
Before I begin, I want to give credit where it’s due, Hollowbody is trying its little heart out. It’s got a certain 2000s-era cheesiness to it that I can’t help but love. It takes me back to that bygone era of the PS2 when horror games were plentiful, even if they weren’t all good—good lord, remember ObsCure? I definitely appreciate everything it’s doing, but that doesn’t mean it’s done well.
The story is set in the year 2065, several years after a suspected bioterrorism attack devastated a small UK city. You play as a woman named Mica whose best friend Sasha went missing in the Exclusion Zone after accepting a research job there. Mica sets off to find her best friend but ends up stranded in the EZ needing to fight for her life while finding answers and hopefully her best friend.
“Hollowbody may look like a game from the bygone era of horror games, but it certainly doesn’t play like one.”
It’s a plot that certainly wears its inspiration on its sleeve, however in its attempt to evoke the classics of the genre—namely Resident Evil and Silent Hill—it fails to do anything interesting with the ideas it set out for itself. I thought it was particularly interesting when Mica was flying into the EZ in her Blade Runner-esque flying car because it initially sets up an idea that the game is set far enough in the future that we would have flying cars. But once you’re in the game, it’s all fairly standard current-day technology with little to no interesting elements. I get that the EZ was sealed off from the rest of the UK, but the game says it’s only been a few years since that happened, so this kind of future tech would’ve been available.
This could have made both the story and the gameplay far more interesting—not only adding a proper cyberpunk style to the horror but also giving Mica futuristic equipment to investigate her surroundings, unique weapons and more techno-inspired environments. Games like SOMA proved we could have interesting futuristic horror games, instead what we here get is familiar horror trappings of the 2000s set in the hyper-advanced future…just because.
Of course, like most horror games, Hollowbody gives players a general idea of the story, with text and audio logs to flesh out the world. Or at least…it tries to. Of all the text documents I found, almost all of them add little, if not nothing, to the story. They’re either obvious clues to the immediate “puzzles” that need solving—and we’ll get to the puzzles—or pathetically obvious attempts to add edge to the story.
On top of that, there are radio calls you can receive in certain areas that act like echoes of the past. Almost every radio call is just two people talking with the general point being “world bad.” It adds no mystery to the setting, if anything it actively subtracts it.
Games like Resident Evil or even Silent Hill peppered in text documents to add small bits of context to their setting but never really spelled it out. But almost every one of these radio calls is just two people living in an apocalypse, talking about either how bad it is or blatantly foreshadowing how bad it’s going to be.
But the gameplay is where Hollowbody suffers the most. Again, I want to say up front that I LOVE what it’s trying to do. Evoking the vibe, semi-clunky combat and puzzle-solving of late 90s/early 2000s horror games is something I’m always going to be on board with. The problem is that Hollowbody doesn’t really get any of these ideas right.
“If you’re expecting your players to have to guess at potential solutions in the hopes that one of them works, you’ve designed a bad puzzle.”
Let’s start with the biggest offender: the puzzles—if they can graciously be called that. Like so many other mediocre horror games that I’ve played, Hollowbody’s puzzles range from laughably obvious to infuriatingly obtuse. The first puzzle the game presents you with is a safe with no indication as to what the four-digit combination is. On the safe was a postcard that read, “graduation,” and scattered around the room were a couple of photos, one of which was a graduation photo with a woman who was visibly pregnant.
Another photo was of a birthday party where a woman was holding a child who was said to be about “three or four years old,” and the only other document of note was a medical exam stating a woman’s date of birth. So, for a puzzle requiring numbers, the only piece of information you’re given that includes numbers is a birth date. So I tried all those numbers in different sequences, all of them incorrect.
It was then I noticed the birthday photo had balloons in the background shaped like the number 30. So I tried adding 30 to the year of birth, which also didn’t work, and only until I added 30 and then subtracted three—which was a lucky guess because the “hint” said three or four—that it was correct. This took so much longer than it needed to because I naturally assumed the birthday picture was just a stock photo, and the 30 was background dressing because the in-game text made no mention of it.
“Hollowbody’s puzzles range from laughably obvious to infuriatingly obtuse.”
Broken record time: PUZZLES ARE SOMETHING YOU HAVE EVERY PIECE OF INFORMATION TO, AND THE CHALLENGE COMES FROM YOUR ABILITY TO SOLVE IT. If you’re expecting your players to have to guess at potential solutions in the hopes that one of them works, you’ve designed a bad puzzle. This is just one example, but it was the one that angered me the most. Trust me, I kept a running list of all the terrible puzzles that made no sense in this game. And this is the only way the puzzles manufacture challenge because they’re not particularly deep or complex.
Unlike games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill that would present you with a lock—often in the form of a puzzle—and place the key somewhere deeper in the level, forcing exploration and keeping the player on edge, almost every puzzle puts everything you need to solve it in the immediate vicinity, so they just end up being annoying roadblocks until you get to the next roadblock.
Then there’s the combat, which isn’t particularly remarkable and feels horribly unbalanced. Even compared to the games Hollowbody is inspired by, melee combat is particularly terrible, with Mica taking ages to wind up an attack and cycling through different animations so you’re never sure where or when you’re going to hit. Not that it’s really necessary since pistol ammo is pretty abundant, and using a gun is a simpler, point-and-shoot affair.
“Visually, there’s a lot to like about Hollowbody…”
But the combat is a dreadful experience because Mica is built like paper-mache and can be killed by basic enemies after only three or four hits. This isn’t helped by the fact enemies can throw out attacks with almost no in-between frames, and even after you’ve downed them and tried to stomp them to death to conserve ammo, they can slap you two or three times in a row and kill you almost instantly. Good thing there are also plenty of health items available.
Visually, there’s a lot to like about Hollowbody. Like I said, it has a great PS2 aesthetic—which more games should really try to emulate—and it actually creates some pretty atmospheric environments. There’s a particular gloominess to everything, with muted colours and a good use of darkness, and everything looks grimy and dirty in a way that makes the whole world feel uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, that’s about all it has going for it. The only other place the visuals really count, the monster design, is woefully underwhelming—just your average grey humanoid mutants. On top of this, the game uses both fixed and dynamic cameras which is an incredibly weird choice since the camera can be following behind Mica at one point and then shift to a fixed angle for almost no reason.
None of the angles are placed in ways that make sense—sometimes swapping angles a mere two steps away from each other—and add nothing to the atmosphere. Again, fixed cameras are meant to disorient the player and make them feel at odds with the game, but this is confusing at the best of times and laughably ineffective at the worst.
Furthermore, Hollowbody feels somewhat graphically amateurish. The framerate frequently stutters, animations are wonky at times and there are some noticeable glitches—like when big chunks of the item screen had holes revealing the menu screen behind it. There’s also a weird animation where when players stop aiming while moving, Mica snaps to her idle pose, causing her to freeze up for a second.
The audio also suffers from these same issues. While the soundtrack can, at times, be genuinely offputting and create a sense of unease, there’s usually so little going on that it comes off scary for scariness’s sake. On top of that, there are weird audio glitches, like how the stomping sound refuses to play sometimes or how Mica’s footsteps disappear when walking while aiming.
The problem is Hollowbody doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. If it had committed to one single style, one source of inspiration, it could have been really interesting. Instead, it’s a mishmash of ideas that conflict with each other and make the game mediocre at best and mind-numbingly boring at worst.
On top of all that, it isn’t remotely scary, which is my number one problem with horror games. It does so little in the way of building tension or creating a hostile environment that it just becomes a boring walking tour through a gloomy environment and needing to solve an obtuse puzzle occasionally. If you’re starved for horror games, you could definitely do worse, but Hollowbody is definitely a pass for me. At least it’s short.
