Idle Thoughts

Welp, looks like we’ll still have to wait for the next Siren (★★☆☆☆)

So here it is, Keiichiro Toyama’s newest horror (?) game. The setup is this: you’re a body snatcher sent back in time to the Kowloon Walled City to eradicate other body snatchers. When you’re the one stealing other people’s bodies, the effect is less gruesome, so ostensibly that makes you the good guy. Since you can switch bodies at will, you’re more like a Nomad Soul (remember that?). This is basically the setup of Parasite Eve The 3rd Birthday (how about this one?).

Is Slitterhead any good? No, not really. Slitterhead has some interesting ideas, but is basically a game that does nothing right. I’d like to be more specific when saying the game does nothing right. Slitterhead is specifically aiming to be: a 3D melee combat game, a stealth game, a parkour game, a social deduction game AND a mind-blowing sci-fi/horror story. Let’s get into it… spoilers head.

Let’s start with the positive. The combat system is actually quite innovative. Combat is always set around a crowd and turning into a little soul and switching bodies is fully part of it. You possess a random dude in his boxers then switch into an old lady when he goes down. Who cares if one host dies, do you know just how many people there are out there? The tutorial even tells you to jump off a building and change host at the last moment to speed up your descent. The theming here is perfectly on point. The Kowloon Walled City was an area thick with human bodies. The game calls regular humans “bodies”, while special characters are “rarities”. Another game would call them your “heroes”. Not this one. You can have two rarities per mission, each with three special abilities, one of which they also give to each other and the regular humans as well. It’s a pretty cool system.

Your cast of “rarities” is a highlight of the game. It’s a varied bunch. You have an out-of-work actress, a nerdy kid, a prostitute, a hobo, a pissed off doctor. There’s even a headscarf-wearing housemaid that fights with bloody oven mitts. The “secret” character is a little old granny that looks like the queen of England. I’d like to specify that she’s not some kind of support character. She’s a fully offensive character. All of these “rarities” have red eyes that indicate they’re being possessed by you and put on some kind of mask while fighting. That perfectly rounds up their look as a bunch of bargain bin vigilantes. I mean that in a good way. I dig the style.

You spend blood (HP) to power most of your special abilities. In most games, it would be counter-intuitive to waste your HP on spells. Isn’t the whole point of a special ability that it might prevent you from getting hit? But here, who cares? Empty this host of its blood and you can just jump to another host. Plus, you can absorb blood pools to regain HP. There will be plenty of those when you’re fighting, don’t worry. One character even has the ability to turn bystanders into suicide bombers. That’s not very nice, but the end justifies the means, eh? We’re saving the world from monsters, after all.

In other words, your true power as a body snatcher is to control flesh. Steel… steel is nice, but flesh, now that is true power. Just ask Thulsa Doom, he’ll tell you.

In practice, the execution of the combat system is frankly a bit lacking. Locking on is finicky, so fighting more than one enemy is a nightmare. There’s little attack cancelling. It’s another one of those games based on parrying with perfect timing. Even worse, you don’t get any attack indicator when not actively blocking. You can easily get stunlocked. To be fair, jettisoning yourself out of your host is always a valid escape move. There’s all of four enemies in the game. The game introduces human Special Forces in one mission… and then you never really have to fight them ever again. Oh well.

Now combat is only one of the game’s basic mechanics. Many missions have stealth sections. You’d think the ability to switch bodies would create novel situations, but most NPCs are suddenly arbitrarily (and conveniently) immune to possession and can “spot” who you really are. Besides, those stealth areas are so cramped and scripted that there’s only a single solution. The stealth sections are frankly so bad it’s a wonder they even bothered.

It’s pretty much the same with the parkour. You see, sometimes you need to chase the body snatcher before it decides to go full monster. You can double jump over crates and do a sort of spider-man like thing, not to mention just switch bodies if that’s faster. You can only do the spider man thing where the game wants you to… those chases are all scripted as well. In fact, those chases are so sad that your prey will usually just sit there and wait for you if you stop moving. “You coming or not? I can’t morph into a big monster here, we gotta go to the designated combat area!”

Finally there’s the social deduction aspect. Basically, you sometimes need to sniff out the body snatcher posing as human. You get a kind of “flow” effect that acts as a compass and you can sightjack (ooh, a Siren reference!) your prey. Those sections are extremely easy. They are also scripted. I have no idea why they aren’t randomized or somehow elaborated upon. It was actually one of the game’s best ideas.

What makes all these so-so mechanics even worse is that the game has a very rigid mission system and a microscopic scale. Basically, the game has only 4-5 areas and only one decently-sized map, which it reuses many, many times. Every mission has 2 or 3 mandatory variants that tie into the time loop storyline. Every level is painfully predictable: explore a bit, fight 2-3 throwaway mobs, explore, stealth section, then finish with a Splitterhead fight. It’s a little routine. “Hey Gary, the level is ending, it’s your turn to morph into a monster!” “Sorry, I thought it was Stephanie’s turn, here goesARGHLKJD!” At best, maybe the stealth section will be a chase instead. Or maybe you’ll fight two Slitterheads during this mission, imagine! The Splitterheads themselves are actually fairly interesting and gross, but severely overused since all of them are basically the same. The game even has the gall to ask you to replay the missions again to find annoyingly hard to find collectibles.

My Lord is that game hampered by its scripted mission system. Slitterhead could have been a much better game with a different approach. Perhaps something with a “heat map” vaguely like XCOM: you get randomized missions pinpointed on your map. It’s your job to sniff the Slitterhead out in that area. Or perhaps they’ll find you first. Either way, maybe it is going to be aggressive, maybe it’ll try to escape. If the Slitterhead flees, they’ll be free to infect others. As the game goes on, perhaps more and more of the city is turning into Slitterheads. You get fewer and fewer possible hosts as the game goes on. You need to hide to keep on fighting. The hunter becomes the hunted.

Heck, you could add an element of social paranoia. Perhaps the Slitterheads could infest your inner circle of “rarities”. There’s a traitor among us… but who? I vote for Gary. It sucks to have to kill off one of your team, but it’s better to cut off the rot before it spreads, right? It could be something like that Vita JRPG Lost Dimension (remember that one?)… except perhaps with a final twist that makes more sense.

My point is that the game isn’t scary or surprising. When you can switch bodies at will and make a Gatling gun out of blood, massive praying mantis/octopuses posing as people aren’t much of a threat. There’s also the predictability of it all. The thing about The Thing is that if you know who’s going to transform into a monster and when, then it’s neither scary nor surprising. Fine, the game doesn’t have to be horror. But body snatchers are such an effective horror concept that it seems like a waste. I mean, who can you trust? Is he secretly a monster? Is she? Maybe they’re all monsters…

So what about the final element, the story? It’s another time loop thing isn’t it? It sure is! The worse kind! The kind where it’s impossible to figure out what’s going on and where there is no clear timeline of events. Even the menu is in on it. Why is there more than one “first” day? How can October 31 and November 17 be “3rd” days? What does that even mean? You also “rewrite” history by replaying missions a second time, so it’s hard to care about what’s going on. There’s no real link between most of the missions anyway.

Now I don’t want to be too harsh. There are some hints of genius in there. Scary or not, there are some serious attempts to throw you off balance. Early on, one Splitterhead starts begging for her mommy. Wait… that’s not the kind of talk that’s supposed to come from ugly tentacle monsters, is it? A bit later on, some of the Splitterheads seem to coexist peacefully with humans. That’s not supposed to happen either.

A lot of other things don’t add up. At one moment, the game pulls a world shift worthy of Silent Hill. And wait, has that dot always been blue? What is going on here? The three Splitterhead “leaders” don’t seem to do much to take over the world. The true antagonist is both weirder and dumber than what you’d expect.

I think the best twist, by far, is this: at the end, it is revealed that you’ve been secretly graded all along according to how many causalities you’ve caused. Or that you let happen. Ooops! Usually, I find a game grading you secretly annoying. Here, it’s fully coherent with the game’s theme. Have you been a good little body snatcher? Forget the story character, have you been good? Did you lose sight of your humanity while prosecuting your war on the Splitterheads? You’ve been using that nice girl’s skill that heals everybody in a radius, not that guy’s skill that blows people up, right? On the other hand, that reveal means you might need to replay some missions, which adds even more repetition. Heck, how can you actually save anyone if the whole thing is a time loop on repeat? A twist like this in service of a better game would have made it an all-time classic. That better game already exists: it’s called Undertale. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

I’ve reviewed the Silent Hill 2 remake the other day. Splitterhead was made by a former Silent Hill director, so it’s an interesting coincidence that both games were released so close to each other. The Silent Hill 2 remake takes an aging classic and stubbornly refuses to reinvent it at all, unless it’s to fit in with what everyone else is doing in 2024. Splitterhead has some very interesting and bold ideas, but basically screws up everything it tries. In the end, both games end up on the same level in my personal scale. Funny how that goes.