A lot as videogames are mechanical objects, the place the objective is to do issues, unlock issues, and advance via successive obstacles and challenges, essentially the most horrifying prospect, when enjoying the sport, is that you just could be unable to progress. Darkish Souls and Elden Ring play on this concern persistently – the specter of Malenia is just not solely that she’s extraordinarily arduous to defeat, however that you just may not be capable of defeat her in any respect; that the sport would possibly one way or the other completely beat you. It’s a delicate, unstated terror that was particularly current within the earlier Resident Evil and Silent Hill video games.
Given that you just had a (seemingly) restricted quantity of ammunition and a small variety of ink ribbons for saving your progress, it at all times felt potential – possible, even – that you’d attain some extent the place you merely couldn’t go on any longer. It’s the specter of ‘loss of life’ – loss of life in a extra tangible, everlasting sense. You don’t get killed by an enemy and restart. You lose all risk of with the ability to progress. It’s your playthrough, your save sport, that ‘dies.’
Created by Nathan Hemley, Hollowbody is a brand new survival horror game impressed closely by Silent Hill, basic RE, and the grim futurism of Cyberpunk 2077’s Evening Metropolis. As Mica, a younger girl stranded in an deserted British city that’s been destroyed by a mysterious plague, you’re ostensibly geared up with all of the instruments mandatory for survival: gun, well being package, map, and so forth. However what the bodily area of Hollowbody produces is a discrete sense that you’re alone; that the world round you is ignorant to your ordeal.
Usually in survival horror, environments – particularly interiors – really feel like complicated, multistoried puzzle bins. From the Derceto mansion within the unique Alone within the Darkish, to the Spencer Property, the RPD, and Silent Hill’s elementary colleges, hospitals, and amusement parks, nearly each room in these buildings incorporates one thing that’s conducive to your progress.
In some instances, what you discover helps your progress in a literal sense, like extra bullets, a brand new weapon, or a key. In others, you uncover information and different lore-conveying gadgets that assist you to to raised perceive what’s going on narratively, in-turn bestowing you with a better data, and by extension dominion or energy. We concern what we don’t know. Whenever you uncover the file which, for instance, explains how the Raccoon cops have encountered the Licker and deduced that it’s utterly blind, and solely reacts to sound, you develop into laterally much less weak.
What distinguishes Hollowbody is its dedication to decrepitude. Usually – and particularly within the opening part, within the residence constructing – you’ll enter rooms, homes, or different areas and discover…nothing, that’s to say, nothing that’s mechanically helpful as a participant. As an alternative, it’s a useless physique or a scene of some long-ago horror, a picture that insists the sport’s desperation and loneliness.
If each time you search someplace in a survival horror sport you discover bullets, weapons, notes, and keys, the world begins to really feel an excessive amount of prefer it’s designed round you; prefer it’s ready to make sure you are taken care of; you have got what you want; you’ve bought the whole lot mandatory so that you can progress and to succeed.
By creating a lot, because it have been, ‘non-mechanical’ area, not solely does Hemley emphasize the destitution of Hollowbody’s setting and the fear that naturally happens from feeling that you just’re by your self someplace harmful; the developer additionally creates a way that the sport is detached to you, that not the whole lot right here is created to facilitate and smoothen your expertise.
And that, in flip, accentuates your feeling of vulnerability, the concept that the sport and its maker are usually not primarily searching for you – and that in case you’re not cautious, with each step, there’s an opportunity you may attain an deadlock; that you just could be unable to progress; that you may, within the videogame mechanical sense, ‘die.’
