Slitterhead

Hammer presents:

One consequence of being as deeply entrenched in the cycle of video game news as I am, is that you start to read into offhand vagueness a lot more than you really should. More than anyone in any profession should, short of like a cut-price private detective, I guess. I think it stems from this weird antagonistic position that our industries' chief benefactors, the developers and publishers, take against the community which clothes falsehood and trickery behind smoke and mirrors. We need to be able to seem through the glittery cloaked set-dressing to recognise the traps and bottomless money pits that seem to be wrapped up in just about every game on the planet. Of course, this vigilance all to easily slips into paranoia at the most embarrassing of times. Still, a gamer is so confidant in their clandestine-eye that most believe themselves more than capable of ludicrous 'Sherlock Holmes' level deduction to the tune of dissection someone's words to deeper intentions beyond even the speaker's waking ken. A typical gamer probably believes themselves fully capable of mapping out your entire daily routine simply from observing the way you get out of your car. (Although maybe there is something to that. After all, you do eat when you get back in the evenings, don't you? Spooky, I know.) What I'm trying to say is that we don't always get it right.

Such was proved to humiliating effect during last December's Game Awards after one of the customary mainstream take-over moments which personally makes my skin crawl. (Why can't movies and television just stick to their own damn lane?) Kojima invited his BFF Guillermo Del Toro (Better known to me as simply: Deadman) to debut a trailer to his newest movie during the event and waste all of our collective time. Of course, Del Toro took the opportunity and went one step beyond in having a little natter outside of the trailer. He spoke a little bit about games and even mentioned one in particular that he likes the art direction of: Silent Hill. "I hope we get a new one of those". Now common sense would dictate that this is obviously a reference to the Silent Hills game that he once worked on alongside Kojima before it was cancelled, but you know what happens when 'gamer senses' kick in, don't you.

I was watching realtime when this moment happened, so even though I clocked the original intent straight away, the excitement of speculation whirled me away and suddenly I was thinking crazy, stupid things- I was thinking that Kojima and Del Toro were about to announce Silent Hills again! Which is stupid because of every single factor around that solidly dead game. For one Konami still holds the franchise rights and their management probably still uses a picture of Kojima in lieu of a dart board on the office wall, actor Norman Reedus had his contract fulfilled making Death Stranding instead of Silent Hills, and there's been no indication that Konami have any interest in moving away from their money-printing strategy of bastardising their existing franchises for quick cash injections. (Honestly, it feels like Konami management are building their nest to make a quick exit from the gaming industry altogether in the near future.) But me and the 'gamer investigators' ignored all of that, and fed into entirely self-fuelled delusions and built up expectations.

As such, when a trailer began telling us the history of Keiichiro Toyama, the director of Silent Hill, well let's just say it was a perfect storm of misunderstanding. We were expecting it, here was a trailer apparently giving it, and anticipation shot to the absolute roof. What I'm trying to establish is the mood everyone with investment to Japanese horror was in when this trailer descended upon us, and really trying to make you understand the imagined stakes we had placed upon this footage entirely undeservingly. Understanding all that doesn't change the way we feel, as first impressions do tend to stick (as we're always being told) but maybe that'll make it easier to comprehend why I and some others absolutely bitterly hated the trailer for this game which turned out to be Slitterhead.

It didn't help that this just so happened to be a horror game too, further feeding into the delusions. But once the lounge band started up and this trailer turned into an action-horror hybrid title somewhat reminiscent of Bethesda's advertised-game Ghostwire, that illusion unravelled itself. Although to be fair to the game, when divorced from the disappointment of the night, I do think that what we've seen looks decent. As it happens the biggest jarring element from me is the fact that all the footage seen appears to have been rendered in-engine, with assets that really look like they belong in the last console generation. I don't expect sparkly eye-pleasers to be the norm of every single game that comes out in today's age or anything, but Slitterhead looks rough. And rough during it's cinematic teasers, which is the time when you practically have a free licence to fabricate as much as you want for the pizazz of the crowd. (It's just what we tale for granted at this point.) All of which makes me think this is a lower budget game with a smaller team than just about everything else we saw during the awards.

There's something to be said for light-horror and what it does for the tone of your game. Personally I think the genre is a smokescreen for just dark comedy with more morbid gross-out moments, but it does manage to sell a lower-tier looking game like this one just that tiny bit better. And that's another special little thing, because the spirit of humour is so low key and not focused on in this trailer, and yet I can tell that it's there. In the heart of this game I can tell there's a feather-touch and a mocking Cheshire grin, without a single joke being explicitly told. Amazing the way a personality can mark itself on a project almost unintentionally. Some part of me likes it too, because not many big horror games have the courage to make things light for fear of how that will effect their more serious moments, and to advertise that in a silly-toned trailer is almost unheard of, so for diversity alone I have to give props. But it's also not at all what I'm looking for so...

Slitterhead suffers from a shadow it doesn't deserve to be under, although it's that very same shadow which highlighted this project to begin with. Whatever happens to this game and however it evolves, it will be seen as the 'spiritual successor' to Silent Hill (despite that title already being given to The Evil Within) and that will be the standard it's held to as well. This game could be an action slasher horror, for all we know, and in fact the tone of the trailer maybe even supports that, but the parallels will be drawn up all the same, no matter how ill-fitting. It's just as well, then, that Toyama doesn't hide from that and is instead actively trying to drum up interest with his name. I can respect the savvy marketing in such a move at the very least. And Akria Yamaoka is teaming up with him as well to helm the music for this project, whether that's in order to create more Hills like iconic ambience or to play more upbeat 90's Cabaret club beats like in this trailer, remains to be seen.

I'm be honest with you that I don't like Slitterhead. I think it looks like a more generic version of Ghostwire: Tokyo, and I didn't even think that game was a show stealer or anything. The creativity of the monster designs is all that's really keeping my interest in this project, because becoming a modern day monster hunter badass just sounds like the premise of a bad action anime, it doesn't do it for me. But that is the beauty of a community as diverse as gaming, because I already know there's people out there falling over in love with this game and I 'm happy that they're happy. Of course, if we were to get an actual Silent Hill game from Konami as well as this game, well then we'd both be happy, wouldn't we? Dammit, Deadman- why'd you have to get my hopes up?