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, 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.
Slitterhead reviewDeveloper: Bokeh Game StudioPublisher: Bokeh Game StudioPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 8th November on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox Series X/S and PS4/PS5
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 . 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 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 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.
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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.