Hollowbody Review - Inner City Blues
I grew up on horror. I have dissociative amnesia so I don’t really remember anything before I was eighteen, so my gaming memories are pretty rough. My earliest, and fondest memories were around early 2000’s horror games and movies, as it’s the one thing I could really feel the effects of. Much like many people, horror became a little bit of a security blanket; something to lull us to sleep. Even now, I listen to horror podcasts as I fall asleep. I mention this, because Hollowbody hearkens back to those early horror memories for me.
You play as Mica, a black market shipper who sets off to a dilapidated exclusion zone to find her partner, Sasha. On the way, things go bad any you’re stranded in the zone and need to find a way out. When you are given control of your character, the vibe that Headware Games is going for hits you like a truck. Things are bad in town: there’s no signs of life, everything is run down or on fire, and supplies will be scarce.
With horror games, the vibe is often the most important thing. That’s true here too. When you show your hand with either the threat you’re up against, or can show that they’re no threat at all due to the protagonist being too powerful, it’s all over. Hollowbody plays well in this space; it’ll be almost an hour into the game until you find your first enemy, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be on edge. I was tense the entire time, a great sign. Admittedly, this is where the first bugbear comes up. Enemies aren’t the most interesting or threatening thing in the world, a lot of times they can be stunlocked and beaten into submission. Ammo’s not plentiful, but I had enough to get a few good shots at the enemy before I finished them off with my weapon. There isn’t a huge variety with enemies too, but maybe that’s the entire point as they all have the same beginnings: humans.
Incidentally, I think this game is actually a really good game for people to start with if they want to dip their toes into survival horror. It’s not too long; my first playthrough clocked in at a bit over four hours. It’s also heavy on atmosphere and lighter on enemies, which new players may really enjoy as a gateway to the genre.
This being said, I still got my fill with the game. I will admit that it’s lucky it came out before the Silent Hill 2 remake, which has a much bigger staff working on it and Hollowbody takes some clear inspirations from. If it had come out after, I don’t know if it would have had the same reception.
Hollowbody is a game just screaming for multiple plays through. After I got my first ending I unlocked a first person mode, a new difficulty and some other novelty modes. I love this, and it encourages people to try for a different one of the game’s three endings.
The game’s environments don’t feel too different, but honestly I took this as a kind of reflection of current society. Apartments are very much in vogue and there’s scant differences between them. This is a region which the government has locked people into and then ignored. Honestly, feels like a push of the needle to the extreme on today’s society. But not something that couldn’t happen. This is the important thing about horror too: to look at what’s driving the fear. Hollowbody is very much a game about governments and corporations failing to help people and leaving them to fend for themselves.
I adored the storytelling too. The environmental storytelling is good enough as is, but then there’s the documentation you can pick up and signals you can tune to in specific places to hear people’s thoughts. There’s also the harsh juxtaposition of Mica making comments on people’s living situation with a level of disconnected scorn I couldn’t help but find very funny. Every bath she comes across she’ll talk about how wild it is that people used them, or how she’d never be caught dead in them. I read this as a huge disconnect in social class where people outside the exclusion zone almost treat the people inside it as savage folk, where in reality they’re just struggling to get by and couldn’t rise up above their situation before they got locked in and forgotten. The abrasive way that Mica speaks about these people, who were trapped, forgotten and then died without much fanfare really speaks to me as I grew up very poor and lower class.
Hollowbody is a love letter to early turn-of-the-century horror. It’s not the most elegant at dealing with the pieces; some of the puzzles vary wildly in difficulty, enemies are fairly generic and the game is pretty short but you know what? I think, for the fact that this is a solo developer and it’s not highly priced it’s still a solid recommend from me. Even if you’re wanting to wade into the muck of survival horror, this makes a great entry into the genre.
Hollowbody was reviewed on PC with a code kindly provided by the developer.
