I’ll have to write about this in more detail once the full game arrives, but from what I’ve played so far, Hollowbody seems to be set inside one of my own personal worst nightmares. Mechanically it resembles classic Silent Hill and Resident Evil, a limited-ammo, fixed-camera survival horror game with tough combat and exploration-based puzzles, but visually it’s closer to Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City – or at least Night City’s bleakest, most decrepit little corners. Surreal and scary, Hollowbody is one of the best new horrors I’ve tried so far this year, and now the complete game is arriving on Steam soon.
In a severely dystopian cyberpunk future, you play a package courier whose partner has gone missing in the dreaded exclusion zone. Hollowbody imagines a destroyed, post-cataclysmic version of modern Britain, where suburban homes, apartment blocks, and pleasant little culs-de-sac have been obliterated by a mutagenic contagion.
There are flying cars and slick computer interfaces, but at the same time, old gas cookers, CRT televisions, and rotary phones. In the same way that Fallout becomes a nightmarish pastiche of ‘50s Americana, Hollowbody is the reanimated corpse of cigarette-stained, woodchip ‘70s Britain, a survival horror game set in the putrefactive memories of days gone by.
I tried Hollowbody earlier this year when Headware Games, the studio name for the game’s solo developer ‘Nath,’ launched a demo on Steam. A wonderful slow burner complete with some of the grimmest, most hideous environments in recent gaming – and I mean this in a good way – this could be one of 2024’s best sleeper hits.
Although the demo has since been removed, if you want to play Hollowbody for yourself, you don’t have to wait long. The Hollowbody release date is confirmed for Thursday September 12, and it will launch on both Steam and GOG. If you want to wishlist it, just head here.
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