Slitterhead review – singular and unapologetically strange

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

I love Slitterhead. I love it despite the fact there’s a lot about Slitterhead I don’t like very much. A little like that lad you went to school with that you barely liked then and like even less now in adulthood, Slitterhead is crass and seedy and pretty gross. Your other half keeps asking why you don’t just ghost him if he’s that bad, but the truth is, you’re kinda crass, seedy and pretty gross, too. He just brings it out in you, the same as Bokeh Game Studios apparently brings this out in me.

Cards on the table: I did not expect this. An hour in, I’m having a nightmare, and I’m not just talking about the twisted forms of Slitterhead’s eponymous enemies. Tutorials are popping up every fifteen seconds, and my old enough-to-have-a-kid-graduating-university fingers just can’t adapt to the chaos on screen. I’m struggling to not just button-mash as furiously as the game demands but also to understand why. There are too many button prompts, and I am tired of scanning tiny tutorial text in a desperate – and usually failed – attempt to stay alive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, I initially bounced off Slitterhead hard, frustrated by the systems and overwhelmed by the combat… which is a problem, I’ll admit, when you’re playing an action horror game. If I’d been playing this on my own time, I reckon I probably would’ve put the controller down a couple of hours in and called it a day. Not because it’s bad, but because I felt like I was. I was desperate to explore more and uncover the mystery but couldn’t because I was stopped every ten minutes by a mini-boss fight that overwhelmed me in seconds.

Slitterhead takes place in the underbelly of a 90s neon-soaked Kowlong, a dark, dirty, and sleazy place so beautiful that I endlessly abused my screenshot button. It’s a delight to explore, which is just as well, as – courtesy of a time loop-esque element that I’m simply not going to mention again so as not to spoil anything – you’ll find yourself revisiting some backdrops quite often. Hyoki, the incorporeal spirit we embody (or not, as the case may be), has no memory or past but is hellbent on finding and destroying every one of the bizarre Slitterheads masquerading as Kowlong’s population.

With no physical form, though, Hyoki’s pretty much useless. Instead, they move through the city by invading people like a psychic parasite. They can’t travel far without a host, so once you’ve manoeuvred your current human as far as they can go, you’ll need to swap to another consciousness. Young, old, short, tall, fat, thin – it doesn’t matter. All can be mentally seized by you and forced to do your bidding, their very blood fashioned into weapons – clubs, poles, claws, blades, shotguns; you name it – as you track down the bizarre monsters they call Slitterheads.

Hyoki may rely on humans, but they have no regard for them. Using and abusing bodies with reckless abandon, they’re happy to sacrifice a human’s frail blood and bones if it means getting closer to their objective, darting from person to person as they brawl, recycling Kowlong’s poor inhabitants as unwitting collateral. Don’t expect to play favourites, though. You can’t. Stick with, or in, one soul for too long and you’re dead. Hyoki is essentially rewarded for moving swiftly between hosts, as every time you shift possession, you’ll briefly unlock enhanced abilities and max blood level.

Every now and then, however, Hyoki happens upon a human that isn’t quite… well, normal. Dubbed Rarities, they can not only sense when Hyoki infiltrates them, but they’re also infused with special abilities that Hyoki can use in battle. Again, this took me a bloody age to acclimate to, not least because using abilities comes at the cost of your human’s “blood power” (and until you learn to replenish it by sucking up the blood of the fallen, it’ll always feel like you’re seconds away from death).

Happily, Rarities are more permanent kinds of companions than your regular human cannon fodder. You can bring up to two of them with you on missions, and each has their own set of bespoke abilities to upgrade via their respective skill trees. Once I’d found one to suit my playstyle, that was when Slitterhead finally started to click for me. Though I must admit they weren’t without their own annoyances. They accompany you as physical entities in the world, for example, and they frequently got left behind as I hopped between humans – especially if one was on the other side of a locked gate, say. In battle, they’re not available straight away, either, so if you start fighting as a bog-standard human, you’ll need to hold out for a while before your Rarity finally decides to pitch in.

They’re certainly not the most intuitive companions I’ve ever dealt with, then, and it did take a beat to internalise all this and get used to the rhythms of how they worked. Eventually, though, once I’d unlocked some more abilities and different skills – not to mention more Rarities – I realised I wasn’t enduring these fights anymore as much as I was enjoying them. I’ll admit that sometimes it all feels just a little inelegant, and occasionally the controls feel clunky and unrefined, particularly around platforming. But only rarely did they get in my way or verge toward frustration.

(Although, combat sequences where you have to tackle a legion of idiot humans and their laser rifles as well as Slitterheads are still a special blend of maddening).

Zooming from soul to soul as you flick poison darts from here, a bloody gunshot blast from there, never stopping in a body long enough for the Slitter to decipher which host you’re using – it’s all devilishly good fun, especially as you mix up close- and far-ranged weapons. Block, evade, fight, and deflect – parry, in other words – at the right times, and you’ll be able to pull off even more special moves, such as the Slitterhead’s bullet time ability, Blood Time. In theory, anyway. Again, I don’t have the reflexes for this kind of stuff, and my dearth of successful deflects proves it.

That said, it’s what Slitterhead does outside of the combat that I love best. As you learn more about Slitterheads, you’ll realise their motivations may not be quite what they seem. The mystery of how Hyoki came to be and why these dreadful creatures are here is an enticing one, and how you piece things together – scouting for clues, eavesdropping on conversations, creeping through no-go areas – it’s great, that stuff. Sometimes Hyoki has to find the right person to possess to slip through the crowds unnoticed. Other times, it needs to utilise a Blood Jump power that lets mere mortals sail across the rooftops and neon lights in search of Slitters. In one particularly memorable sequence, Hyoki leaps from consciousness to consciousness, trying to bust out of prison. Traversal becomes its own kind of environmental puzzle in these situations, and it’s here where Slitterhead shines brightest – and I wish there were more of them.

Interestingly, the story itself mostly plays out in stylised “inter-mission” conversations through which Hyoki learns to better understand humanity and the Rarities they inhabit. There’s very little spoken word – most, if not quite all, is conveyed via grunts and sighs on top of subtitles – but the more you talk to your Rarities, the more clues you uncover, which in turn unlocks hidden missions.

The rub comes in how those hidden missions are presented, as your progress can stall if you don’t keep on top of them. Many involve returning to previously completed missions, for example, and scouring them afresh for new paths leading to hitherto unknown characters – characters you have to find to get further in the game. Other times, you may need to scratch around for a missing clue. Slitterhead isn’t particularly forthcoming in explaining all of this, and some may find it rather grating. For me, though, I relished going back to these levels and spending more time poking through Kowlong’s streets. As it stands, there’s not much incentive for stepping off the beaten path here, and Slitterhead always felt more alive for me when I could put my sleuthing hat on as opposed to splattering enemies with blood bullets.

Slitterhead’s macabre presentation and salacious storytelling may not suit all tastes. For a brief while there, I was pretty certain it didn’t suit mine, and if you prefer your horror a tad less frenetic and a little more cerebral, I posit this may not be the game for you. However, from the moment you boot it up and realise that the dissonate human scatting and squeaking you hear is “music”, you’ll know Slitterhead is something different. Something weird. It’s campy and schlocky and violent and gross, and I can confirm that yes, its content warnings of “scenes of sexual acts, nudity, violence, murder, suicide, depictions of blood, criminal activity, and the consumption of alcohol and cigarettes” are all there in spades, so it’s probably not one to play in front of your kids. Or your mum. Or anyone with a phobia of blood.

But at the same time, Slitterhead is stylish and thrilling and unusual (and really, how can you say no when one particular Slitterhead that looks uncannily like Beetlejuice?). How lucky we are that something as singular and unapologetically strange as this exists.

A copy of Slitterhead was provided for review by Bokeh Game Studio.