A lot as videogames are mechanical objects, the place the purpose is to do issues, unlock issues, and advance by way of successive obstacles and challenges, essentially the most scary prospect, when enjoying the sport, is that you simply is perhaps 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 exhausting to defeat, however that you simply may not be capable of defeat her in any respect; that the sport may someway completely beat you. It’s a refined, unstated terror that was particularly current within the earlier Resident Evil and Silent Hill video games.
Given that you simply 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 a degree the place you merely couldn’t go on any longer. It’s the specter of ‘death’ – loss of life in a extra tangible, everlasting sense. You don’t get killed by an enemy and restart. You lose all risk of having the ability to progress. It’s your playthrough, your save recreation, that ‘dies.’
Created by Nathan Hemley, Hollowbody is a brand new survival horror recreation impressed closely by Silent Hill, traditional RE, and the awful futurism of Cyberpunk 2077’s Evening Metropolis. As Mica, a younger lady 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 advanced, multistoried puzzle packing containers. 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 accommodates 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 recordsdata and different lore-conveying gadgets that enable you to to raised perceive what’s going on narratively, in-turn bestowing you with a larger information, and by extension dominion or energy. We concern what we don’t know. While you uncover the file which, for instance, explains how the Raccoon law enforcement officials have encountered the Licker and deduced that it’s utterly blind, and solely reacts to sound, you grow to be laterally much less susceptible.
What distinguishes Hollowbody is its dedication to decrepitude. Usually – and particularly within the opening part, within the condo 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 a substitute, 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 recreation 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’ve gotten what you want; you’ve obtained every little thing 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 phobia that naturally happens from feeling that you simply’re by your self someplace harmful; the developer additionally creates a way that the sport is detached to you, that not every little thing 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 should not primarily searching for you – and that if you happen to’re not cautious, with each step, there’s an opportunity you possibly can attain an deadlock; that you simply is perhaps unable to progress; that you possibly can, within the videogame mechanical sense, ‘die.’
