Slitterhead

Slitterhead can be a slow-burn to begin with, but once its combat clicks, this is an action horror game like few others.

Slitterhead relies on the mechanic of possessing and controlling human bodies, which is not new, but is used to great effect in the game. Once you get past the clunky start and get into it, Slitterhead manages to deliver an impressive experience. Although it would be more spectacular if more things were clearer and better handled.

Slitterhead delivers a bloody and dark universe where its gameplay and mechanics can show its full potential. Even if it's not perfect, Slitterhead remains a good game.

Slitterhead is a graphically and structurally rather old game that fails in any way to approach either modern productions or the other glorious works of the Keiichiro Toyama. The only good cues come in the form of the ability to control different characters through possession, which make the traversal and combat dynamics varied, but the dilution and repetitiveness of certain quests tend to dull enthusiasm soon.

Slitterhead demonstrates admirable creative courage, and functions less as a final product and more as a creative manifesto - a glimpse of future possibilities. However, the forced cyclicality raises questions about how such a promising concept - a time loop of supernatural horror - can be simultaneously so expansive in its ambitions and so claustrophobic in its execution. For an independent studio on its first flight, there is something courageously poetic about creating a game about a formless entity that seeks to define itself through others. Perhaps, in the end, that's Slitterhead's real victory: not so much what it achieves technically, but what it tries to suggest.