izigame.me

Do I recommend this game? Maybe? I think it's hard to boil it down to that level but I find it hard to recommend a game that I felt thoroughly let down by.
The shining star of this game is the soundtrack. The music is genuinely excellent, in my view it carries the majority of the atmosphere and is a strong counterweight to any negative feelings I had, I can't really be mad if I got to hear all that. The visual design is pretty solid on a techincal level, but the environments are very much done to death except for the exception of the very beginning (the beach is excellent) and the very end (mines). There was real potential here, and seeing this was made by one person is nonetheless impressive, and I hope to see more by Nathan Hamley or Headware in the future.
Let's start with the mechanics. The most core parts of this kind of game are probably camera/controls and combat, and unfortunately I think these were very poorly handled. I am *extremely* familiar with survival horror and the SH series in particular, and this game feels like SIlent HIll 4, which is extremely damning.
Hollowbody replicates some of the ideas of the fixed camera classics, but it feels like they understood the form of fixed cam without understanding the actual functions. The best survival horror games used these camera angles to create physical and narrative distance from the protagonist, and carefully disorient the player without it being overwhelming, in this case Silent Hill 4 and Hollowbody fail drastically and identically. There both wasn't any interesting use of fixed camera angles and frequently moments of incomprehensible camera placement (reaching a dead end can flip the cam 180, but it is intrusive in other places), I was fighting it the entire time, and the only real boss fight at the end of the game is primarily against the camera, fortunately its open enough to make it essentially trivial. I can't help but think that the multiple different camera options shows that the role of the camera was either not considered meaningfully or it didn't have nearly enough time to be finished.
Unfortunately the combat is far worse. It pains me to say that the only positive thing it did was make me want to eventually avoid engaging in combat because it felt like pulling teeth.
You have a combat stance which locks onto the nearest enemy, however there is no max range because you can aim at enemies that are 500 miles away through 17 walls and floors and might not even exist? That's a pretty immersion breaking thing in the apartments when there's an enemy placed behind walls that you can lock onto but never encounter, it turns a nice touch of being a little uneasy with an enemy you can't find into feeling like a rushjob that was clearly overlooked. This all applies to ranged combat, janky but serviceable.
Melee combat is unfortunately inexcusably terrible, if this game had actual difficulty, even the power of spite couldn't have made me pull through it. Melee combat deviated from the Silent Hill formula of a light/strong attack that you can repeat, into extremely janky combos that have a strong chance of missing even when performing the same action twice, Mica awkwardly rotates in combat which I suspect may be the culprit. Damage is also highly inconsistent, on multiple occasions I picked up on a bug where my melee weapon (guitar or axe) would get lodged in the opponent leading to massive damage. That was kinda awesome but I'm pretty confident it was entirely accidental. Stomping enemies isn't the worst thing in the world, but the tracking was poor enough where on several occasions I was on top of an enemy and fully whiffed my kick and took damage. The game ends up having random anti-stun lock because of how easy it is for you to miss when point blank in a 1-on-1.
The narrative and atmosphere, for the most part failed to grab me. I've seen a thousand apartments, streets, churches, etc. I enjoyed the beginning beach, end mines, and the sewers (good contrast to the open streets we just came from) for some creativity if nothing else, this game is futuristic and dystopian but that only shows up in extremely few areas, mostly the opening sequence with the beautiful window shot and flying car. The incredible music carries a lot of this, god damn it fuckin ROCKS (Hate to say it but it was better than SH2R's music direction, which is very high praise but stronger condemnation of SH2R). I don't think the bulk of narrative is fundamentally interesting, the opening sequence and first 3 codec's establish essentially the entirety of the notes and visuals we see. Authoritarian government, containing a contagion, some kind of cover-up is occuring, people are miserable and losing grip of their humanity. I found the twins who took their own life, and the husband who was lashing out to be particularly compelling, but I started to skim notes because I didn't feel that interested. The voice of "the antagonist", conveyed through phone calls, was a bit too cliche for me to fully enjoy. Had I been more invested I might have thought differently, but feeling like I've played this game already and getting continuously harassed by spooky phone guy ended up grating.
I will say that the ending segment pulled me back, enough that I anticipate a second playthrough when I've cooled down from the first, with a different perspective and higher difficulty. But I don't think the game earned the intrigue that the ending provided, and if I didn't want to like the game as much as I did I don't think I would've reached it.
Rapid fire other stuff.
The map is basically useless, honestly I don't know how this was supposed to be helpful, I only used it at the beginning with the apartments,. Once the area becomes somewhat complex with height variation, its a huge downgrade from a SH style paper map, with no indicators of locked/jammed/open doors, completed puzzles, unfinished puzzles, etc. It sells the futurism but with no functionality, maybe this is actually realistic?
There's no SH style head turn so I almost missed the guitar because there's no way of communicating to the player what is helpful, paying more attention doesn't help much when everything is gray.
The puzzles are basically non existent. This game does a really annoying and unpolished thing where some environment interactions prompt you to use an item immediately, but others don't. I had a minor break in my playthrough and got stuck because I forgot that was actually a mechanic and you can use items on interactions without being asked to. This felt extremely sloppy.
Oh, on puzzles, I was only ever stuck on the plastic explosives. To my knowledge you're never asked to shoot to interact with another object in the game, and notably, plastic explosives won't detonate when you shoot them in real life. I might have figured it out earlier if I was ever certain if I picked everything up! I don't ask for realism but this could've been done better, hell I had an extra fuse which I figured was related to creating a detonator, nope waste to even think.
There's basically 3 enemy types, dog, gray, and big gray, I understand its related to this pathogen/virus/whatever but overwhelmingly bland visuals throughout aren't being helped by that.
There's a few highly intrusive invisible walls. With all due respect, are you fuckin serious lmao. There's an invisible wall that blocks me from going into one place that I can go around and reach, and then I can't get back. If that's supposed to guide the player it needs to be actual level geometry and foliage, not the force.

Conclusion
I'd recommend this to hardcore survival horror fans who are looking for more, and on a sale, I am absolutely not a dollars = hours guy but a game I kinda liked but felt very disappointed by isn't a compelling package.
HWG if you read this, I have a immense respect as an amateur dev myself, there's great stuff here. Next title? I will be there no matter what lol