REVIEW – Hollowbody is the kind of indie survival horror where the first rain-soaked street already tells you this was not built as a cheap scream machine, but as a throwback to the slow, dark, uncomfortable games of the PS2 era. Nathan Hamley’s one-person project openly walks in the shadow of Silent Hill 2, but Mica’s rescue mission, the sealed quarantine zone, and the damp, decayed city give it enough of its own identity to avoid feeling like plain nostalgia cosplay. The atmosphere is strong, the pacing is tight, but the combat is exactly the part of old survival horror that probably should have stayed buried.

There is something likeable about a game that does not pretend it has no idea which dusty old horror shelf it came from. Hollowbody is not shy about growing up among Silent Hill 2, classic Resident Evil, fixed-camera survival horror, and the strangely stiff but very effective nightmares of the PS2 era. That is not the problem. The problem usually begins when a game only copies the decoration: fog, locked door, bad corridor, weird noise, and then somehow expects horror to happen. Hollowbody is better than that. It is not a revolution, not a new school, but it understands that slow discomfort can still do more than a whole bucket of prepacked jump scares.

A Rescue Mission Where Every Choice Already Looks Bad

The story begins in a near future that has already taken several ugly turns. After a bioterrorist disaster along the western coast of the British Isles, parts of the region were sealed off, infected cities were pushed behind walls, and orbital strikes were used to erase whatever remained inside the quarantine zone. Sixty years have passed, and the place now feels less like a city than an industrial grave that everyone agreed to forget. Mica, an unlicensed black-market shipper, does not go there to play hero. She goes in because her partner, Sasha, disappeared there twelve days earlier. That personal motive is simple, but it works: not world-saving, just a rescue mission born from a bad decision.

The opening briefly flashes a more interesting cyberpunk-flavored world: flying vehicles, future tech, a digital map, communication devices, and a wider background that could have grown into a distinctive tech-noir horror. Then Mica crashes, and the game almost immediately pulls back into the abandoned city, where the future gives way to a past left behind for sixty years. Atmospherically, it works, but it leaves a slight frustration behind: Hollowbody shows you a stronger, bolder world, then quickly locks it back in the cupboard because it is safer to stay on the familiar abandoned-town horror route.

The City Does the Real Scaring

Once Mica continues on foot, Hollowbody finds its pace. The sealed city is not beautiful, elegant, or cinematically glossy. It is wet, cold, stale, and tired. Rain taps against the asphalt, the dark streets barely show signs of life, and the interiors are full of ordinary objects that make abandonment feel much more disturbing. Apartments, streets, a graveyard, sewers, a train station, and short underground stretches follow one another as controlled locations rather than large explorable spaces. For a survival horror game lasting roughly three and a half to four hours, that tighter structure helps, because there is no exhausting key-door marathon where fear quietly turns into office work.

The fixed camera angles matter a lot. They are not here merely for nostalgia, but because they give the scenes composition, uncertainty, and uncomfortable distance. The game is at its best when it does not try to scare you directly, but simply places the camera somewhere unpleasant and lets your mind finish the threat. On PS5 Pro, the game ran steadily, although this is obviously not a hardware-melting showcase. Hollowbody works not because it pushes polygon counts, but because its dark rooms, underlit corridors, wet streets, and body-horror biomass create an unpleasant mood. The soundscape is one of its best weapons too: it does not shove fear in your face, it slowly sits on your shoulders.

The Mood Pulls You In, the Combat Pushes Back

The gameplay is built on classic survival horror basics: item hunting, locked doors, documents, limited ammunition, simple puzzles, and cautious movement through darkness. The puzzles are few and rarely demanding, but they set the rhythm well enough. That is not necessarily a flaw, because Hollowbody wants to be a compact horror experience, not an escape room with rust on the walls. The real issue is melee combat. Mica eventually gains access to several close-range weapons, but they do not feel distinct enough, hit distance is hard to judge, and enemies often need to be engaged at awkwardly close range. Too often the question is not whether you made a bad decision, but whether the game understood distance differently this time.

Firearms work better, especially thanks to lock-on aiming, but ammunition is limited, so the game naturally pushes you back toward melee. That is where loving Silent Hill 2 a little too much becomes risky: not everything attached to that masterpiece has aged gracefully. The enemy design also lacks variety. There is some body-horror unpleasantness, and first encounters can generate tension, but the creatures soon become obstacles rather than memorable threats. Hollowbody ultimately lands as a solid, likeably old-fashioned little horror game that understands atmosphere far better than combat. It is not a masterpiece and not a genre landmark, but for one rainy evening, it takes you to exactly the wrong place in the right way.

The game was tested on PS5 Pro.

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-

Publisher: Headware Games
Developer: Headware Games / Nathan Hamley
Genre: Survival horror, adventure
Release date: September 12, 2024 (original PC release)