Episode 3 - An Adult Baby - Slitterhead

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Happy Halloween oooooooooooooooh! and welcome back to the podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about Slitterhead, an action horror title, and the first game from developer Bokeh Game Studio, founded by one of the creators of Silent Hill. In Slitterhead, you play as a kind of spirit entity with the ability to possess regular people. Some of these people are more special than others, “rarities,” and they mostly act as your main playable characters throughout the game. While possessed, characters can attack and use skills and you can swap between people with very few restrictions. This allows you to cover distance quickly, make it harder for enemies to hit you, as well as more specific tech like “avoiding” fall damage and setting traps with certain skills. This is a really cool concept for a combat system and an even cooler concept for the tone and narrative of the game. Unfortunately, that’s about the best that Slitterhead gets. The whole game is designed in a very dated way, with disconnected missions that need to be replayed multiple times with little to no variation, a lack of enemy types to flesh out the combat system which could have been fairly deep, and generally shows a lack of polish that could have really helped it sing. What is there can still be cool, if you’re particularly nostalgic for that sixth or seventh generation design, but it requires some patience and the ability to appreciate the ideas the game has despite its flaws. We’re going to be talking about the classifications of rarities and what we think the game was trying to accomplish with its systems, the frustration of being forced to play through a section multiple times, and we lament the state of development that makes games so expensive.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This is one of those games that feels like it has such a good idea that it just wasn’t quite capable of delivering on that makes the finished product more disappointing than anything, but still, I’ve seen the game has its fans. If that’s you, let us know what it is you like about it in the comments or over on our Discord. I’m sure some things that were a big deal for us might not be for you, and some of our negatives are positives in your eyes, it’s all subjective. Next time, however, we’re going to be talking about Silent Hill f, so we hope you’ll join us then!