Slitterhead

Brutal and impactful, Slitterhead is an excellent debut title. With a great campaign time, it satisfies both action fans and horror fans, bringing a unique and visually disturbing atmosphere that will definitely mark those who give it a chance.

Slitterhead is a successful experiment. It combines a cryptic and complex story within an episodic mission system that simply works. All that spiced with precise, complex and visceral combat.

Bokeh Game Studio's debut horror title is a game entirely out of time with its genre contemporaries and all the more wild, compelling, and beautiful for it. Satisfying combat and a generational eye for tone and design collide in the year's strangest beast.

As an overall package, Slitterhead does not disappoint. Though a touch heavy-handed in some spots, it adopts a ‘swing for the fences'-type approach that you can't help but respect. Marry that with a design philosophy that oozes confidence and a soundtrack and story that manage to hit their mark and it's easy to recommend a trip to Kowlong. Just stay out of the alleyways.

Slitterhead is a divisive horror game that will either fascinate or frustrate players. Its unique blend of action, body horror, and surreal storytelling, coupled with a haunting soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka, creates an unforgettable, albeit flawed, experience.

Slitterhead won’t be for everyone due to its quirks, it’s a bit clunky and reuses content frequently. But behind its issues lies one of the most unique titles of the past few years. With a great mystery story, impressive world-building for a debut, and a possession mechanic that adds an extra strategic layer to combat. Slitterhead lives up to its pedigree.

You can feel Toyama's touch in a game with great personality right from the start, but that doesn't hide the fact that we feel a bit disappointed for the graphical performance of it. It's a noteworthy horror and action adventure, but it could have been so much more with a little more time and money.

In ten years, someone somewhere will most likely refer to Slitterhead as a hidden gem and a misunderstood masterpiece. In that distant future, maybe you'll agree. Or perhaps you won't. But the thing is - you don't have to wait for another decade to make this decision, Slitterhead deserves your attention right now.

Slitterhead is quite possibly the single most interesting game of 2024, but prospective players need to be aware of the journey that’s ahead of them. If seeing some genuinely bold and indulgent game design decisions is worth fighting against a bit of jank, then this game is absolutely for you. If you want to always know where to go and what to do next, maybe not. Even then, I think you should play Slitterhead, simply because you’re unlikely to see anything like it ever again.

Slitterhead is weird and rough around the edges, but boy am I glad it exists.

Slitterhead takes an innovative concept and places it at the forefront of the adventure. The possession mechanic leads to a frantic combat system that encourages you to quickly switch between characters to fight formidable foes. This bleeds throughout acting as a method of traversal and stealth. Although a little clunky and lacking polish, the game manages to deliver a truly unique experience that will resonate with fans of action and horror.

Bokeh Game Studio’s Slitterhead shows a lot of promise in terms of its unique possession action gameplay, direction, music and overall plot. It’s fun, electric and unlike any other game. New IPs are the lifeblood of the industry and the game is a key example of keeping that saying alive.

Slitterhead exemplifies what an indie developer with ambitious ideas can achieve within limited means. Where one system falters, another aspect of the game steps up, maintaining a balance between innovation and feasibility. While more resources could have enhanced the combat and voice acting, Slitterhead ultimately succeeds as a character-driven horror game with a focus on storytelling and atmosphere. For fans of narrative-driven horror, Slitterhead is a captivating experience that breaks the mold.

Frustrating at times but fearlessly inventive, Slitterhead is an absolute must-play if you’re looking for an original take on the survival horror genre. Serving as a spiritual successor to fan favourites like Siren, Gravity Rush, and Soul Sacrifice, this haunting tale about a body-hopping spirit – who uses humans as fodder to put a stop to the eponymous enemy – is a scintillating albeit occasionally undercooked debut from Bokeh Game Studios. Repetition and an overall lack of refinement do bring it down, but you’ll be hard-pushed to find a more imaginative experience this year.

Slitterhead is a set of fascinating ideas, which with a better application from a technical point of view and with a larger budget would probably have taken flight. Unfortunately, Toyama fails to package a product that is completely enjoyable to play. There are extremely original aspects, Alex and Julee are the most interesting Unicum available and appreciating their skills will be the first thing you will do in the almost 15 hours of gameplay necessary to reach the conclusion. However, too many anachronistic elements push Slitterhead away from the modern needs of video games.

There’s a decent time to be had in Slitterhead as a blood-wielding badass dealing with some dastardly demons in the striking and grungy concrete jungle of Kowlong. The game finds a satisfying balance of empowerment and challenge as you hijack body after body to topple your foes. Similarly, it’s exciting to use these supernatural powers to traverse the land and uncover mysteries across the city. The game, however, is held back by an obtuse story, a frustrating lack of apt signposting in some missions, and an adventure you never really wrap your head around in its twelve-hour runtime. It may not make a huge mark on the horror action scene, but to the select few that vibe with its freakishness, it’ll be an underrated gem for years to come.

Slitterhead is a significant waste. Many of the concepts underlying the game are brilliant and demonstrate how Toyama remains a creative mind capable of experimenting and crafting unconventional titles. However, it's evident that, deprived of the resources he once had and forced to start anew with a fresh team, he has not been able to adequately bring his initial vision to life. In our opinion, Bokeh Game Studio's debut work is still passable thanks to its originality and some well-executed aspects, but it’s a pity it amounts to nothing more than that.

If you can get past the jankiness, Slitterhead has a certain quality that makes it oddly compelling. Everything from the plot to the gameplay and the graphics is a strange combination of insanely dated and bizarrely structured. It's a bizarre, shambling mess of a game that has a flavor all its own, but it never quite manages to come together into something cohesive.

Slitterhead is an experiment that could have been better due to its ideas, mechanics, and studio. Elements like NPC possession, dynamic combat, musicalization, and a unique story fail to make this horror game stand out more and it falls short due to graphical issues, poor AI, and some technical bugs.

Slitterhead is an experience that's fantastic in still shots or in story trailers but the actual gameplay becomes a muddled mess when the player is forced into repetitive chase and combat sequences.

Slitterhead remains a curio worth examining - original and, yes, full-blooded in its approach. Lacking the subtleties of more psychological horror, Bokeh Game Studio justifies its flood of plasma and mountains body count both mechancially and thematically. In the end, though, it's the same anarchic roughness and lack of restraint that drags it down. [Issue#405, p.114]

Slitterhead is a bizarre, wobbly and repetitive, but also a generous, inventive and original game, thanks to its possession mechanic. Its themes are equally seductive, as are the combat, often enjoyable. the characters, Akira Yamaoka's music and its constantly strange aspect. We're fully aware of the huge flaws that couldn't pass for AAA, but we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. An imperfect but unique experience that deserves to exist. It's far form perfect, but it's a promising start for Bokeh Game Studio.

It’s great that the game retains the nostalgic feel of '90s Hong Kong, but the gameplay itself feels like something from console generations past. While it may not suit everyone, those with the right taste might still find it unexpectedly enjoyable.

Slitterhead is full of great ideas and some truly memorable examples of body horror despite not feeling like much of a horror game. Perhaps with more of a budget behind it, those positives could’ve been done justice, but sadly this isn’t the case. The possession gimmick allows for imaginative action scenes that are let down by repetition, lacking variety, and a bunch of less thought out gameplay that bogs the action down. Someone throw some money behind this concept, please. It deserves to be in a much better game.

Slitterhead’s body-swapping system is unique, and its grotesque monster design is definitely appealing. However, it feels like the choices the team had to make with its limited development budget did not work in the game’s favor. Combat needed more polish, the characters lack emotional expression, and the first half of the story is weak. Things do get more interesting towards the end of the game, but not enough to forget about its shortcomings. While its ambitious ideas deserve praise, it's a shame that Slitterhead was not able to fulfill its potential.

While it has some clever ideas, Slitterhead never realises its potential, feeling like it would have benefited from more time in development.

Slitterhead is destined to be a cult classic, though mainly because of what it could have been, as opposed to what it is. The combat is functional but feels dated and gets boring before the end, the dialogue sections are unvoiced and feel cheap as a result, and the loop of finding and then fighting enemies through various forms soon becomes unfortunately one note. I enjoyed immersing myself in the world of Slitterhead but the game itself feels too much like a relic of a bygone era than a new title by industry giants.

Slitterhead is an action horror game that collapses under its loop—both in terms of narrative and gameplay—and doesn't shine as much as it could have.

When it's good, it's really good, but it's hard to recommend wholeheatedly with all that confusion and tedium. Hardcore Siren fans who have been longing for another entry in the defunct franchise will certainly like it. Players with open minds and a lot of patience should certainly check it out. Slitterhead has a lot of great ideas: I just wish it was better at doling them out consistently.

Slitterhead is the perfect definition of a game that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It falters in both the action combat category as well as the horror genre, resulting in a middling experience overall.

Slitterhead has a narrative that we can consider as an OK, however, it brings a generic and crazy mix of the Parasyte anime with a flavor of Beyond: Two Souls. With reasonable gameplay, half-assed graphics, a very weak battle system and bad audio, this game is not worth of your time or your money.

Whether the combat is a deal breaker for the average player is going to depend on how much they value everything that Toyama and his team at Bokeh Studios have got right. For this writer, the answer to that conundrum is that, on the whole, Slitterhead’s positives do outweigh its negatives. It feels like Toyama is untethered again, and while not every design choice has worked out for the best, the fact that we have the horror legend operating independently and willing to create something unlike anything else is something to be celebrated.

Slitterhead features some interesting body-swapping exploration and a unique blood-based battle system, but it never fully capitalises on either of them due to its small handful of repeated level settings and largely indistinguishable enemy encounters. Its story is disappointingly primitive in its presentation, and its time-looping structure only really serves as a feeble attempt to mask the fact that it takes about one hour’s worth of story mission ideas and repeats them incessantly across its 13-hour duration. Like a bloody blade worn down by a few too many battles, Slitterhead grows increasingly dull over time and ultimately just doesn’t cut it.

Slitterhead’s clunky controls, forced stealth, and dull cutscenes make it a tedious, frustrating 15-hour experience that feels like watching paint dry.

The atmosphere of the rundown City of Kowlong and the disgusting depiction of the Slitterheads show potential despite the outdated technology, but the game fails to create genuine horror. What remains is a somewhat stiff action game with horror elements that never really scare or disturb you.

Slitterhead isn't very good, but it is very interesting. In an age of remakes, sequels and safe bets, it's heart-warming to see something that's so clearly such a singular vision. We're disappointed that vision is sold short by basic combat and a focus on the game's ugly characters, but we're glad it exists and would welcome more attempts like it.