Hollowbody Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Given the significance of the UK in gaming development it is surprising how rare games set here are. Even those that do exist tend to be either quaint backdrops like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture or ‘ye olde’ period pieces like Chivalry. Hollowbody breaks this trend by being set in a future dystopian version of an abandoned British city; taking this uncannily familiar location and using it to produce a love letter to classic survival horror. The resulting title is up there with the very best of indie survival horror games and feels like a lost classic from the PS2 era.

I’ve been following the development of Hollowbody for a couple of years and developer Headware Games has done a great job in chronicling the process of indie game production through their social media presence. I get a real kick out of this kind of information and seeing a game develop from early prototype through pre-release demos and finally the finished build is always a joy. From the very beginning Hollowbody has had a clear vision and a distinctive aesthetic and this has ensured that the final game is successful, both as its own thing and as homage to past greats.

The futuristic setting of Hollowbody feels like a banal Blade Runner – Edge Jogger, maybe? – complete with flying cars and neon skies. Everything feels like the future except, of course, for the exclusion zone, the site of a mysterious outbreak that left a twenty mile area sealed off for the wider population’s protection. The only people to venture into the exclusion area are never heard from again. Until, that is, your partner Sasha heads in to find out what happened and you have to go in to find her. The background takes in equal parts Resident Evil, Contagion, and Escape from New York and immediately established a clear narrative and emotional reason for Mica risking her life and I appreciated the generally understated but drip-fed nature of the story-telling here. No lengthy expositions or overloading but instead notes and uncanny