Slitterhead is confidently weird, but greatly flawed

videogameschronicle.com:

Slitterhead feels like a PS3 game that never existed.  It’s so profoundly strange in so many ways, and frustrating in others, but you can never accuse it of being anything other than 100% sincere.

It’s awkward to control, it doesn’t look great visually, and it’s profoundly low-budget in several ways, but nevertheless, we’re happy it exists. It’s the kind of game that wouldn’t have gotten a Western release 20 years ago. Fodder for a “most expensive PS2 games” list after a short print run. It is, after all, from director Keiichiro Toyama, the man behind cult classics Silent Hill, Gravity Rush, and Siren.

In Slitterhead, players embody a shapeless, bodiless entity that can possess humans. Set in a fictional ’90s Hong Kong-style city, bodies are piling high after repulsive monsters, known as Slitterheads, quietly begin killing citizens. The player, named Night Owl, alongside Familiars, which are people that can be possessed but still maintain bodily autonomy, must get to the bottom of the mystery of the Slitterheads.

The game’s main mechanic sees players possess humans in order to either solve puzzles or fight Slitterheads. Puzzles can be things like accessing locked areas of buildings by possessing a body through a window or taking over the body of someone who’s permitted to access that restricted zone.

These puzzles are never difficult to complete, but there’s an occasional novelty to them. An early puzzle sees the player trying to access a brothel in order to find a sex worker the player believes to be a Slitterhead. While the owner of the brothel won’t speak to Julee since she’s a young girl, they will speak to a sweaty old man that the brothel thinks they can make some money from.

Similarly, when the game’s truly turgid stealth sequences crop up, one of them is solved by possessing a man covered in his own sick from drinking so much that he can pass through a bar undetected. The stealth sequences are particularly contrived. There are in-universe reasons as to why some