I’ve been eagerly anticipating the release of solo developer Nathan Hamley’s (Headware Games) Hollowbody since its reveal. Not only is it a survival horror game deriving inspiration from Silent Hill, but it’s set in a tech-noir world and takes place in an abandoned British city. Unfortunately, despite absolutely nailing the atmosphere, Hollowbody really misses the mark when it comes to its gameplay.
Set sixty years after a biological incident, presumed to be a terrorist attack, we start Hollowbody as Sasha who’s working with other scientists to get to the bottom of what really happened to this abandoned and unnamed city in the UK. Now known as the Exclusion Zone, the area was cordoned off with towering walls, leaving its citizens to die and fend for themselves inside. Meanwhile, high-value citizens (including Sasha’s parents) were evacuated to the neighboring city of Aeonis, a metropolis built on a man-made landmass in the North Atlantic Ocean. When one of the team of scientists goes missing, Sasha goes to investigate, discovering a strange cave within the cliffside where her colleague suddenly attacks her. Twelve days later, an unlicensed black market shipper named Mica is concerned about her missing partner and decides to travel to the Exclusion Zone to search for her. On the way there, her hovercraft crashlands and she finds herself stranded amongst the now-mutated inhabitants of the city.
As mentioned before, Hollowbody kicks off the atmosphere from the get-go. The sound design is amazing, the environments are filled to the brim with various ambient noises to set the scene. There are three types of creature and the two humanoid ones have a distinct noise accompanied by what sounds like radio static which makes them recognizable if they’re around the corner. I also really loved the bleak, ambient soundtrack, also crafted by Hamley.
Partnered with this is an equally bleak art design crafted from PlayStation 2-style graphics and consisting of an almost monochrome color palette with a few instances of red lighting effects to set the tone. Half the excitement of exploring this abandoned city was recognizing all the British things since it’s an infrequent setting for a video game. From the familiar terrace houses to even the train tickets looking exactly the same as the ones I pick up on a regular basis. While Hollowbody mostly focuses on its combat and overall atmosphere, much like Resident Evil, there were quite a few nail biting moments of horror; mirrors cracking, the walls seeping with blood, the occasional jump scare, etc. There are also plenty of gruesome scenes left behind by those abandoned by the government and left to starve and go mad.
In terms of gameplay, we spend most of Hollowbody working out environmental puzzles so we can move to the next section. While I found the puzzles to be quite fun and I enjoyed exploring the various areas and buildings, there are a few hiccups. With puzzles, this mostly came from confusion in examining things. For example, if you examine a door, the description may say that it’s locked but not always that we need to find the key. So, I often found myself assuming the door is permanently locked (a common trope in survival horror, especially Silent Hill) and not requiring me to search for a key. Another thing was one occurrence where I was halfway through what seemed like an optional puzzle and accidentally left the area without solving it because I wasn’t forewarned that I was about to leave and not be able to return. That being said, these are minor nitpicks as the puzzle and general exploration were the better parts of Hollowbody’s gameplay.
Unfortunately the combat is incredibly clunky, but I could have lived with this had the game’s camera controls not been so tricky. Rather than opting for either a fixed or dynamic camera, the developer has opted for both. The player has no control over the camera, and must instead rely on it slowly turning to keep up with them or they can press a button to immediately straighten it up, which should be the least of their problems in combat but actually becomes a major hindrance to keep an eye on. To make things worse, at certain sections it will jump to a fixed camera, which is incredibly jarring and repeatedly threw me off my sense of direction which made certain sections of the game, especially the sewer, much more difficult to navigate than they needed to be – ESPECIALLY as the map stops working during these underground parts. Because of this, I felt no desire to further explore these sections besides trying to get the hell out of them – meaning I likely did miss further weapons and information on the overall story.
In terms of the combat, the gunplay uses auto aim, allowing the player to switch between targets with the press of a button. In the likely event that you run out of ammo due to Hollowbody’s limited resources as a survival horror, you can switch between a variety of melee weapons which you pick up as the game progresses. This is all fine until you need to stomp on a downed enemy to finish it off, which quite often you’ll keep missing because the game struggles to register objects on the ground. This also comes into play when trying to pick up loot, and sometimes it would happen when trying to press a button or pick something up off the side too. The enemy AI could also be very unintelligent, often not noticing me if I shot at it and the dog enemies run around on a loop and will try to bite you if they happen to come across you. Overall, the combat is very unenjoyable and the enemy AI could often just be avoided when out on the streets and only really needed to be confronted at close quarters.
In terms of the storyline, Hollowbody is really intriguing. It opens up with a text intro describing the events of the city suffering from an undisclosed biological incident which was assumed to be terrorism. So, we spend a lot of the game trying to uncover what exactly happened. This is in the form of notes left around buildings and in the street and our radio also picking up strange paranormal signals where we can listen in on conversations and events of the past. While a lot of the plot is left up to interpretation, there are plenty of great moments and finding Sasha and the truth behind the city kept me going. There are also a few different endings influenced by a few major decisions in the game.
Hollowbody is also fully voice acted and the cast do a brilliant job with no weak links at all. Kirsten Riaa especially did amazing work as Mica and boosted the emotional impact of certain parts of the story tremendously.
Overall, Hollowbody is a beautifully designed survival horror but it feels like the gameplay needs some work. Most of all, it was the camera which impacted my overall experience as the combat could have been bearable if I wasn’t also trying to manage a camera which had a mind of its own.
Jess played Hollowbody on PC with her own bought copy.
