Preview: Slitterhead Has Its Jank, But Also Promise and Heart

Enough time has passed that a reverence for the jankier, AA games of the PS3 generation is now starting to appear, and for the horror genre at least, Slitterhead is about to be its poster child. Gamescom provided us with the chance to check out 45 minutes of the debut title from Bokeh Game Studio, playing the full introduction and a short section later on. Our main takeaway is that while the game is clearly being made on a smaller budget than what Keiichiro Toyama has had to work with in the past, there's a distinct direction and main mechanic here, which it leans into wholeheartedly.

In Slitterhead, you're not necessarily playing as a human being; you're instead playing as a kind of entity with the ability to possess them. You jump from person to person, briefly taking control of them before jumping onto the next, either to access the next part of the level or to avoid death. There certainly seem to be a few main characters that prove more powerful when you take over their body, but generally, you're bouncing around anatomies to survive.

Low on health and lacking combat prowess, these humans are considered expendable. A section of the demo sees you throwing yourself off the top of a building just so you can possess someone else on ground level, condemning that past body to its demise. You'll have to set aside any care for fellow humans to make much of any progress in Slitterhead.

Alongside combat, which we'll touch on shortly, this body-swapping mechanic was the main focus of the Gamescom play session. It's how you navigate the linear world, entertaining one set of weak limbs for a short while until you find someone better — or with a bit more health during battle. It's... interesting. Whether the feature can remain engaging across an entire game is another story, but for now, Slitterhead at least sets itself apart with such a unique approach to traversal. You'll use it to cross through blocked paths and gates, reach higher points in the city, and generally just get about. Without your own legs to walk, you need to rely on others to do it for you.

Where the jankiness is really felt is in the combat. Having encountered a monster, you'll take whichever human you're controlling at the time into a fight, and they automatically turn one of their arms into a bladed weapon. There's not much satisfying feedback to landing your hits, and with an irritative camera, you'll flail in the wrong direction a lot and miss some blows. It worked most of the time during the hands on preview, but we'd sometimes get trapped up against a wall, lose sight of our character, and have to sprint off in any direction to try and save who we possessed. Special abilities are mapped to the D-Pad, with the demo featuring a time bomb, poison daggers, and more powerful attacks.

These two elements come together to form — in the preview at least — the main crux of the game: navigating the environment by switching between bodies and fighting monsters while still possessing them. Besides some gory and eye-catching enemy design, it wasn't particularly scary, but then it feels like Slitterhead dashed the assumptions it was purely a horror game in recent trailers anyway. While it might control and feel like a game of generations past at times, there's a very clear soul and some amount of promise bursting out the title's seams. Slitterhead will need to prove its body-swapping feature can hold up across the full experience, but in a Gamescom demo at least, it sets itself apart from anything else we played at the convention.

Slitterhead releases for PS5 and PS4 on 8th November 2024. Are you excited for the game? Let us know in the comments below.