Hollowbody is almost a great survival horror game

Very good train tickets, though

Hollowbody’s introduction is masterful, and not just for a sallow skyline that captures the life-sapping dreariness of British coastlines. The horror nous required to impart unease in the middle of the day are somewhat eased up on when you’ve got all that serotonin-begone drizzle to work with, sure. But this feels more poignant than that. There’s a soulful drearines and utterly heartbreaking inevitability to the vibe here, as your character and rubber suited activist pals try to get the bottom of a horrific incident. It’s got best British indie horror film of the year written all over it.

Even after the introduction ends, and we’re introduced to the game’s vaguely Blade Runner future-UK, any glossy cyberpunk trappings are immediately subverted by the grim reality of dilapidated housing estates terrorised by proto-fascist private companies. It all feels so fresh, vital, and threatening.

It's a shame, then, that the feeling doesn't last. Now, I think you should give Hollowbody a go if you’re interested, because the things it does well are worth experiencing. For me, though, the meat of what I find interesting about the genre - the environments, puzzles, and sense of danger - feel too underdeveloped to stand out at a time where great indie survival horror is thriving.

Even as early as the first main area - an abandoned, rotting housing estate - exploration feels rote. The best survival horror offers purposeful, alternate routes through dangerous environments, inviting the player to compose mental checklists of locked doors and puzzles to return to. But there’s a watery, meandering quality to Hollowbody where I’d just happen across round pegs at the end of routes, then double-back on myself to find the very obvious round holes they belonged to.

Image credit: Headware Games

The corridors and rooms offer the occasional vaguely alarming obstacle in the form of a lumbering flesh goblin, but no real terror or shock. There’s a cutting desolation to the flats; one intensified by protag Mica’s scanner giving you details on the fate of the corpses found strewn about. But it’s undercut by Mica’s odd obsession with commenting on how filthy the identical showers and piles of dishes you find in every room are. She’ll say something like "These poor people... how could this happen" one moment, and then drop some variation of "Lol ever heard of Fairy Liquid m8" the next.

There is precisely one half-decent puzzle in the entire game, and if you don’t like taking notes or screenshots, there are no good puzzles. Here an example of a bad puzzle: I enter a corridor with a locked door at the end of it. The shutter slams closed behind me, letting me know that the solution to the door is contained within this small area. I immediately find a bottle of booze. Ah, I think, I have a lighter in my inventory - I know where this is going. A few steps on, I find a bin bag full of rags next to…get this... a big fucking sign on the wall that tells me starting a fire will cause the doors to open. That’s not a puzzle, it’s a series of puzzle-themed obligations.

Image credit: Headware Games

The recommended difficulty also left me with something like 50 handgun bullets and several health items. There’s a few wide-open sections where you’re basically invited to run past every enemy, and even the speedy dogs basically have no chance of catching up to you, and give up after a few moments besides. I died none times, and felt like I was in genuine danger twice, both during scripted boss sequences.

I moan - I must make clear - because I love so much of what Hollowbody is doing elsewhere. Without spoiling anything, both the end boss and ending are so good I was left asking where this sort of creativity was during the actual game. The unfolding tale of why everything has gone to shit feels terrifyingly plausible. Also, I must shout out the mundane British detail gone into specifying that a train ticket in a hellish underground station is an "off peak single." I don’t want to scare you off Hollowbody, because if you’re looking for a creative indie horror you can finish in a few hours, there’s a lot of really special stuff here. But if you’re coming in fresh off the back of games like Signalis, Tormented Souls, or Conscript, you might find the skeleton propping up the story a bit malnourished.