Once a pioneer of unique Sony IP from Forbidden Siren to Gravity Rush, Keiichiro Toyama is a bit of a notable figurehead when it comes to unique gaming experiences. The established genres he has dabbled in are given new life as he finds creative ways to subvert the player's expectations and turn a genre into something completely new. As one of Bokeh Game Studio's first titles, Slitterhead aims to bring the hidden-in-plain-sight horrors of the Forbidden Siren series while empowering players to take up arms and defend themselves while solving an elaborate mystery of aliens and those who aim to use humans as an unwilling food source.
Undeniably, one of Slitterhead’s strongest aspects is the aesthetic from which the world is built. It’s the sort of lived-in world that famed film director Wong Kar-Wai was known for in the early 90’s (if you haven’t yet seen Fallen Angels, I’d recommend putting that on instead of rushing out to pick up a copy of Slitterhead). Neon Cantonese signs advertising all matter of restaurants and massages illuminate the market stalls below. Studio apartments that offer no degree of separation between the toilet and kitchen. Dingy apartment hallways where you could practically smell the cigarette tar clinging to the unwashed walls. All of this fits together to create a fictional city of Kowlong that is home to the residents still attempting to go about their daily lives while an alien organism is slowly killing them off for nourishment or even just for sport. It’s a damn good thing that Bokeh Game Studio invested so much of their time into making Kowlong look the best it can, as players will be creeping those same cramped corridors on more than three occasions.
The various characters that make up Slitterhead’s main playable cast are prime examples of where the majority of the time spent in animation was spent. Each of the playable Rarities brings an expressive personality to the narrative, and even the downtime between missions where the unseen player spirit converses with their teammates presents every character in their natural environment, whether it’s relaxing, cooking, or spending time at the firing range. Unfortunately, any character that isn’t integral to pushing Slitterhead’s narrative forward missed these final passes of quality and instead animated themselves with the same dead-eyed expression one would see from a celebrity cameo on Celebrity Deathmatch.
The tiny, beady-eyed, dead stare into the void that every regular human NPC brings to the world clashes sharply with the rest of the aesthetic and routinely would take me out of the scene if the lack of voice acting didn’t already. Even crucial story scenes that provide a great inner secret to the nature of the Slitterheads and their role in the ecosystem are instead relegated to the same generic grunts and off-note comments of agreement where even a bit of spoken dialogue would have readily set the tone.
Suppose you look back at game director Keiichiro Toyama’s previous works, most notably the Siren series on PlayStation. In that example, combat is rarely the focus of the gameplay; instead, it focuses on hiding from a much more powerful entity. Slitterhead changes that around by empowering the playable Rarity characters with weapons and abilities draw from blood and take the form of items that hold a strong sense of significance for that character, be it the scalpel they use as a street doctor or the painted nails that a prostitute applies daily. These weapons are immensely powerful against the Slitterheads and their aversion to blood (despite their penchant for eating flesh) and are often the one tool that can take them down. Regular old humans, on the other hand, can only turn their blood into a simply club-like weapon and smack enemies around with them (even the powerful military-type characters that one specific Rarity can turn into temporary allies drop their unique weapons and instead swing around crystallized bars made of blood).
Slitterhead features a mind-jumping mechanic in its combat where players can hop from one host body to the next and use them in hordes to take out an enemy Slitterhead. In actual practice, this is a rough system where players don’t do much damage or generally feel ineffective if not inhabiting the body of a Rarity and using their unique skillset. I suppose you could use a human to shout and draw the enemy’s attention or turn themselves into a ticking time bomb, but that’s about the extent of their usefulness. In most other instances, it’s almost always better to play as a Rarity whenever possible, and usually one of three of them specifically in most instances.
Combat, unfortunately, is one of Slitterhead’s weaker and generally more frustrating components. Each aspect of combat sounds functional on paper but the actual execution is sadly something that Bokeh Game Studio was unable to pull off. Enemies range from fodder penis monsters that go down in one hit to massive bug or octopus abominations that make up the majority of Slitterhead’s boss fights. Despite routinely having a horde of humans to call upon as host bodies, the AI will typically go for the player character above all else and focus fire, even as players may have lost an arm and are left stumbling around long enough to heal it back or run to the nearest pool of blood to replenish health and ability power. Enemies with longer-range attacks, most notably the seahorse-looking monsters that can whip their head around from halfway across a room, can keep harassing the player and keeping them from healing up or even switching bodies in some instances.
The lock-on system also suffers in tight environments or even tracking a single enemy when a group is coming at the player. Slitterhead’s awful parry system also forces players to stick with one particular enemy, as being able to parry requires locking onto the attacking foe (there are passive skills on select Rarities that allow them to parry from all directions) and guarding while flicking the analog stick in the direction of the incoming attack. There’s a glowing bar that’s supposed to indicate the direction and timing of the attack so players can parry it, but even the in-game tutorials tell players to ignore that and watch the enemy’s animations instead.
Parrying a large number of these attacks in rapid succession invokes a Witch Time-esque state where time slows down for all but the player, but the amount of time invested to get to this state sometimes meant the fight would be over unless the player just stopped doing anything other than blocking and waiting for enemy attacks. I only achieved this state 10-15 times during my playthrough, far less than the 50 times the in-game achievements were asking.
Without playing as certain Rarities, most notably the ones that gain access to a blood-infused shotgun or minigun, boss encounters feel bloated with their health pools and how long it takes to overcome their strength. Even with investing in a variety of passive skills and powering up the signature attacks on each Rarity, fights were drawn-out ordeals, and I lamented having to replay when diving back into a stage to seek out hidden collectibles I missed the first or third time around. It’s far more engaging than the run-and-hide gameplay with the Shibito of the Siren series, but with combat being such a major focus to Slitterhead, the imperfections to combat become glaringly obvious during repeat playthroughs of a given mission.
Chase sequences and tracking down hidden Slitterheads are also another aspect of the gameplay that I feel might have been interesting callbacks to Toyama’s earlier works: they become dull and repetitive over time. There’s a Sightjacking ability that’s used only a small handful of times to take over the sight of an enemy Slitterhead and track them down based on their visible surroundings that’s meant to perhaps be the flipside to Forbidden Siren’s hide-and-seek mechanics from the Shibito there. In execution, a Slitterhead takes the same path, typically inhabits the same host body, and follows a very routine schedule (some are often found just staring out of windows) that the mechanic largely felt superfluous outside of the few instances where the player has to rewind time and revisit a stage on an earlier timeline to prevent the death of a key character.
For Bokeh Game Studio’s inaugural title, Slitterhead is such a strange anomaly to try and recommend over the other horror games that have topped 2024’s list of new releases. Those intimately familiar with Keiichiro Toyama’s general vibes would gladly find some enjoyment in his new studio’s new IP, but it can be tough to recommend for fans who haven’t already been lured in with the premise of a playable Wong War-Kai experience.
[Editor's Note: This review was based on a PlayStation 5 copy of Slitterhead provided by the developer.]
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
