Slitterhead Review - Surface Tension

Third-person action game Slitterhead often presents a pretty compelling front. At first, it sounds like an out-there horror game with an inventive approach to gameplay. You play as a formless spirit that can possess humans, hunting vicious monsters capable of imitating normal people. Those creatures explode from the heads of their human bodies to reveal their true forms when discovered.

As cool as all those words clearly are, Slitterhead never reaches the promise of its premise, apart from a few gorgeous cutscenes where a human twists and mutates into a disgusting, multi-armed abomination. Instead, it's usually frustrating and repetitive, with its interesting ideas turning to gimmicks that wear themselves thin after the first few hours.

Those gimmicks feel like they have potential, at least at first. Slitterhead opens with you taking on the role of the Hyoki: a floating spirit that can zip into the brains of random humans populating the dense city of Kowlong, briefly taking control of their bodies. The Hyoki can't remember anything about itself or what it's doing, until it encounters its first slitterhead--which, after eating the brains of an unsuspecting victim, bursts from the skull of its host and chases you down alleys as you zap from one hapless soul to another to stay just ahead of it. The concept is weird, changing the way you think about characterization and physical gameplay space, and slitterheads are scary--it's a great way to start the game.