It is 2 a.m. I don’t know if I should go to bed or start a new game. I just completed my first playthrough of Hollowbody. From start to finish, about six hours in total, I couldn’t pull myself away. In the dim light of my dying laptop, I feel compelled to discover the uncomfortable secrets I missed.
I want to know more about the former residents of this little town in the exclusion zone. I want to know if those beating hearts I “found” affected the game’s ending.
But I also have work later in the morning.
I hear a bump in the other room.
Is that a hungry creature?
Of course, it is—my cat cries from the living room for a late-night snack. I’m totally not a little jumpy.
Let’s get this out of the way: Headware Games’s Hollowbody is the best new third-person Silent Hill game in 20 years. No, it isn’t technically a Silent Hill game; it also isn’t published or distributed by Konami. Regardless, Hollowbody deserves a spot beside the best of the PlayStation 2-era Silent Hill games.
In its gameplay, story, and aesthetics, Hollowbody pays homage to its inspiration while putting clever twists on the genre that Silent Hill pioneered. It may not be the most original, but it is undoubtedly one of the best survival horror games of 2024.
(Editor’s note: This review was written before the embargo lifted for Konami’s Silent Hill 2 remake. In the days since, Silent Hill 2 has garnered widespread critical acclaim.)
Alone in This Town
Hollowbody plays like you remember Silent Hill. For those who haven’t picked up a third-person Silent Hill in a few years: A tortured protagonist is drawn to a desolate town in hopes of finding a loved one. The town unfurls like a labyrinth as the protagonist navigates its dreary alleys, decaying buildings, monstrous locals, and intricate puzzles.
Hollowbody successfully checks each of these boxes with an understanding that the atmosphere is a character itself. An unlicensed black market shipper named Mica travels to the isolated and lonely “exclusion zone” in search of her partner Sasha. The exclusion zone—like the familiar town of Silent Hill—hides secrets about its former residents and current creatures.
Headware Games has carefully crafted the exclusion zone to both resemble and honor the town that inspired it while also carving out its own creepy spaces. At times, the two towns feel uncannily familiar. The similarity works well for a good scare but means aesthetically that Hollowbody lacks a real identity beyond its inspiration. This isn’t a terrible (nor seemingly an unwanted) comparison.
Mica navigates the exclusion zone with little fear. She responds to the horrors around her but is rarely hesitant. She knows her way around the melee weapons that she picks up, as well as the occasional firearm. And that knowledge is necessary, as players must overcome various creatures throughout the city.
Hollowbody’s combat is intimate. Like PlayStation 2 horror games, monsters get up close and personal with our protagonist. The melee combat and gunplay feel pulled directly from a previous generation, with fixed camera angles and slow, methodological attacks. For a survival horror game, though, Mica felt surprisingly well-stocked; I completed the game with more ammo and health sprays than I could possibly use.
The puzzles throughout Hollowbody present a challenge while never being true hindrances. They use the environment and guide Mica through strange rooms, toward strange objects, and back out to the dark streets of the exclusion zone.
Area Weird
Playing Hollowbody after reading Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 Annihilation (The Southern Reach Series, Book 1) feels surreal. Hollowbody’s opening moment on a mysterious beach in the exclusion zone feels inspired by strange Area X in Annihilation (or at least Alex Garland’s 2018 film adaptation). It harks back to the “New Weird” genre, a kind of subversive subgenre of science fiction and fantasy that often melds literary tropes and aesthetics into something altogether new and strange.
Like the New Weird aesthetic of Remedy’s Control, Hollowbody’s world feels both intimately close and set in a not-too-distant future. It’s discomforting to play a game where the technology and city of a cyberpunk world lurk in the background, while Mica herself is surrounded by a decaying suburban town—as if we’re looking just beyond the horizon. The town’s abandoned apartment buildings, townhomes, and playgrounds do little to negate this feeling, as they are reminiscent of the late ‘90s and early aughts.
Mica lives in a world with flying cars, yet your only weapons against hellish creatures consist of makeshift melee weapons, like a broken bottle and a guitar. Like its inspiration, everyday low-tech items like coathangers and yo-yos must be combined to create tools to complete puzzles or access the next space. You’ll also discover card writers, which unlock digital locks, and a COTAC radio that lets you listen to haunting signals throughout the exclusion zone.
I rarely felt like Mica was in serious danger in Hollowbody, but I also never felt she was safe. The world around her is terrifying, but at the same time doesn’t feel alive. I don’t mean to call it “dead”; rather, it feels both hollow and organic. The creatures—interestingly designed—are never consequential, but feel like they grew into the space like moss on a dying tree.
Final Thoughts
Midway through Hollowbody, Mica finds an outdoor playground in a dark corner of the exclusion zone. The environmental storytelling fused with the story of the residents in the area gave me chills deep into the night. It is a moment that I came back to time and again during (and after) my playthrough. The creatures lurked from a distance, but the horrors of this lonely town felt nearer than ever.
The solo developer of Headware Games, Nathan Hamley, has created an excellent horror game that stands on its own. At times, it lingers too close to its inspirations, with moments and areas that feel as if they were pulled straight out of Silent Hill 2 or Silent Hill: Homecoming. Thankfully, these moments don’t distract, leaning fully into the nostalgia. The game surprises, just as it’ll haunt the dark corners of your thoughts.
A remake of Silent Hill 2 comes out tomorrow—a game that promises to feel quite familiar, even 20 years later. The game’s famed antagonist Pyramid Head has not only appeared in horror franchises like Dead by Daylight but also made an appearance in Astro Bot. I’ve longed for a new game in the series for over a decade, and though Silent Hill: The Short Message scratched an itch earlier this year, Hollowbody is the closest we’ve come in some time to recapturing the feeling of that town.
I can’t wait to return to the edge of the exclusion zone. With additional secrets to find and endings to discover, I imagine it will be very soon.
