Hollowbody’s familiar magic doesn’t lie in otherworldly places. It lies in the rubble of the ordinary.
Hollowbody
Developer: Headware Games
Publisher: Headware Games
Played on: PC via Steam
Availability: Out now
Though ostensibly set in a future of flying cars and holographic IDs, Hollowbody’s world is one that most of us would recognise – and I don’t just mean its damp, dark British weather. I could exit my front door right now and take you to half dozen housing estates in my immediate vicinity that boast the same identikit 60s semis seen in Hollowbody. The same block of flats you explore here sits on the skyline of every city in the country.
Is that why Hollowbody unsettles me more than I’d like to admit? Is that why poking around abandoned flats and canvassing empty streets leaves me so on edge? I’ve always had a penchant for horror set against the humdrum. Put me in an H.R. Giger-inspired world, and I’m grossed out, sure, but it’s a setting so, ahem, alien to me, it’s hard to feel real fear because I just can’t imagine ever being there.
Drop me into a haunted semi-detached, though? Make me paw through a kitchen where the plates from last night’s meal are still stacked up in the sink, or force me to rummage through someone’s bedroom where a body melts into the bedsheets and the book they were reading sits exactly where it was left, mouldering on the bedside table? That stuff terrifies me.
The whole Britishness of Hollowbody’s set pieces ratchets this up even further, too. It’s a world bruised and broken by anguish and agony, tiny vignettes sharing voyeuristic peeks into people’s last moments. How people speak and the accents they have shouldn’t make a difference. I do know that. And yet, hearing two sisters discuss their suicide pact in a regional accent so, so close to where I’m sitting here, typing these words, absolutely does make it difference.
It makes it so much worse.
The more you explore, the bleaker it gets, too. Picking through the detritus of someone else’s life is desperately sad enough, but occasionally you’ll stumble upon their remains, too. Some people are alone. Some people lie side by side. Some died slowly and painfully. Some hurried death along. Others got together and sought refuge at church, but death came for them anyway. They still sit on the pews they died on, their faces obscured by dirty sheets.
Of course, world-building like this isn’t novel in gaming. Plenty of games of all sizes and scope have done it before. And this brings us to Hollowbody’s main issue. Put aside that more unique layer of British-ness and you’re left with a game doing many things have been done many times elsewhere before. Its fixed camera angles and dark score and polygon-tastic graphics are a dead-ringer for the survival horror games we grew up with, and in particular Silent Hill.
Because without Silent Hill, I don’t think we’d ever have Hollowbody.
In its defence, Hollowbody in no way tries to emulate Silent Hill 2’s much-aped story, and for that, we can only be grateful. It does, however, adopt many of the series’ seminal features, and rely on now-established genre tropes. Fans will find plenty familiar – from Hollowbody’s similar-sounding soundtrack, use of a pocket flashlight, and its inventory screen – here, even down to the sounds of you moving through your items.
Some story moments are faintly reminiscent of ones that have come before it; others feel directly inspired. One particularly surprising segment looks to have been pulled directly from (the sadly much-maligned) Silent Hill 4. It made me question where the line between inspiration ends and imitation begins.
It might not be original, but I am very, very glad Hollowbody exists. Despite magpie-ing from notable horror games that came before it, Headware has created something that, despite its familiarity, still stands on its own. This is a deliciously atmospheric, slow-burn horror and one that ultimately does enough to sculpt its own story and sit amongst other entries in the genre it has clearly been inspired by.
