I just completed my first run of a game called Hollowbody. This is an independently-made survival horror game; unmistakably modern, but with a clear sense of reverence for the classics. If I had to compare it to anything, I would say it’s like Silent Hill mixed with Chasing Static and maybe a little Among Ashes. Not that anyone knows what those last two are, but that’s the feeling I got from it.
Actually, I just looked it up, and Among Ashes was released a few months after Hollowbody, so… neither one is likely an inspiration for the other, but there are definitely a few shared elements between the two.
Aaaand digging deeper into it, Headware Games developed both Chasing Static and Hollowbody. So I suppose the mystery of why they feel somewhat alike has been solved.
Okay, anyway, back to what I actually came here to say: I like Hollowbody! A lot! So much so that I played the game start-to-finish in a single sitting, and I rarely ever do that for games with a run time of over about 90 minutes. There were multiple times when I thought “Ehhh, maybe it’s time to take a break…” but then just kept on trucking because I was so very enraptured. And that’s a little surprising in retrospect because the first half hour or so of the game was pretty darn rough.
This was actually partly my fault, albeit unwittingly, because Hollowbody offers two camera options: classic fixed(ish) camera, and a modern third-person camera. I opted to play with the fixed camera, because that seemed like the intended choice, but it’s jank as heck. The camera, in fact, is only “fixed” in the way that the player has very little control over it. It’s not actually fixed in any one place (usually), and quite often is flying all over the place, trying desperately to stay behind your character, which makes it hard to see what you’re doing, and also makes the controls feel really sloppy. It’s not game-breaking by any measure, but took longer to get used to than I would have liked.
Needless to say, I will be using the modern camera option on future playthroughs. And believe you me, there will indeed be future playthroughs.
However, that optional camera setting is my only major gripe with the game. This isn’t to say that it’s a perfect game, but the other things that I perceive as flaws can be more easily overlooked. For example: the small pool of enemy types or the fact that normal difficulty was actually very (very) easy.
So what did I really like about it? It gave me a creepy new world to explore, mostly. It’s a lot of the usual urban horror kind of places, like city streets, an apartment complex, a sewer, the subway, so on and so forth. But Hollowbody has a pretty unique atmosphere, given that you don’t really know what happened in these places, what the weird root/mold-like substance covering everything is, or why there are mutant monstrosities shambling about. The combination of mystery and horror is perfectly tuned here, at least for my tastes, and I’ll easily award an A+ for vibes.
I also thought that the puzzles were pretty good; none were too obtuse, but they did make me think a bit. There’s one in the cemetery area that I immediately understood by random interactable objects before the actual puzzle was presented to me, and that made me feel pretty clever. Though I will admit that I would have liked more puzzles, I think I’ve come away from every survival horror game that I’ve played recently with that same lack of puzzle satiety. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes ruined me that way.
What really put big cartoon hearts in my eyes though, was the fact that when I beat the game, a whole slew of crap unlocked to bait me into multiple playthroughs. Having literally just finished the game for the first time, I’m still feeling the butterflies so I can’t say for sure how many times I’ll play it again, but I definitely plan to give the hard mode a shot, and I’d like to get all three endings. Considering that my first playthrough only cost about four hours, it’s not out of the question that I could actually burn through a few more runs before my interest drops off.
To conclude: Hollowbody is a very good video game. As long as you play in third-person camera mode. Even the fixed camera isn’t that bad; I never got really frustrated by it, but it’s plain to see where some rough edges could have been sanded down.
Hollowbody is currently available on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, at a very fair price point of $22 Canada Bucks, so I heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoys the genre. Hell, if it gets ported to Switch (2) at some point I might even buy it again just to support the dev.