Slitterhead review: Silent Hill creator’s latest aims high, misses the mark

digitaltrends.com:

Slitterhead MSRP $60.00 Score Details Pros

• Extremely creative
• Thought-provoking narrative
• Body-hopping mechanic is novel

• Lack of voice acting in key scenes
• Underbaked combat
• Extremely repetitive

When a lauded creator goes independent to create their own project, the results are always fascinating. More importantly, they’re typically quite weird. We’ve previously seen this with games like Death Stranding, but Slitterhead is the latest entry into that eccentric pantheon.

Slitterhead is a new action horror game from Keiichiro Toyama, the director behind classics like the first Silent Hill, Siren, and Gravity Rush. What Toyama’s team at Bokeh Game Studio has created is unlike anything else I’ve played before. Slitterhead is imperfect, as its action gameplay doesn’t wholly hit the mark, and Bokeh’s ambition seemed to be a little bigger than what it could achieve as an independent studio working on its first game.

• The grotesque new game from Silent Hill’s director launches this fall
• Silent Hill Transmission stream: How to watch and what to expect
• Unannounced game Silent Hill: The Short Message rated in Korea

I don’t regret playing Slitterhead, though, as it’s the kind of funky, creative experience you only get from creators who are not worried about holding anything back now that they’re on their own.

The cycle of violence

In Slitterhead, players control a spirit sent back in time and trapped in an eternal battle with bug-like creatures called Slitterheads that eat people’s brains and then possess them as mimics. The character designs of these Slitterheads are all outstanding, as is Akira Yamaoka’s soundtrack. With Siren, Toyama showed adeptness at creating a nonlinear narrative, and Slitterhead is quite similar in that manner, as all of its missions are set across the span of three days.

It’s shooting for the stars, but can’t quite get there.

Slitterhead’s narrative is nonlinear in terms of when events take place on the