Hollowbody Review — Lost in the Grey

I wasn’t prepared for Hollowbody.

Gritty, somber, and deliciously dark, Hollowbody is a horror game set in the dystopian future. Full of scares and absolutely drooling atmosphere, Hollowbody is simultaneously an excellent homage to a classic age of horror video games and something unique and breathtaking. Shockingly developed by a single person, Hollowbody will surely leave you impressed, invested, and utterly terrified.

The game has quite easily become one of my new favorite horror games.

Hollowbody begins by explaining a past tragedy that led to widespread infection, walling off, and eventually bombing out the so-called western cities of the United Kingdom, which then also forced most of the population into living on a man-made island city off the coast.

You play as Mica, and your partner Sasha has gone missing in the zone beyond the walls during an expedition designed to find answers behind the cause of the tragedy. After a few black market deals, you head beyond the walls yourself to find her, only for your hover car to mysteriously crash, leaving you stranded in the grey streets of the cities that were.. surrounded by death, horror, and the answers to questions you didn’t know you had.

From the get-go, Hollowbody is a masterclass in horror game tension and atmosphere. The beginning is so strong, instantly hooking you on the narrative and keeping you on that hook throughout, dragging you from incredibly designed scenery, viciously tense moments, and expertly written lore that slowly unveils more about the world around you.

I cannot stress enough that the word atmosphere feels as though it could be defined by Hollowbody. Everything from the set design to the pacing of levels and information drip-fed to the player to the phenomenal soundtrack all make Hollowbody ooze with vibe and scratch those primal parts of you that fear the dark and have a need to explore the unknown.

It is very rare these days that a horror game gets me scared. Cheap jump scares aren’t what I’m talking about, either. Not only did Hollowbody genuinely, at multiple points in the game, have me dreading entering the next room or finding the source of a sound, but it did it through genuinely well-paced buildup of tension. A sound coming form the next room, a trail of blood down the hallway, the uncomfortable realization that your next objective is behind whatever unseen, imagination-tormenting source of that noise down the hall… followed by the dramatic confrontation with said creature.

Every scare in the game felt well-deserved, which isn’t something I can say about every horror game I’ve reviewed.

Hollowbody feels like an excellent homage to an earlier generation of horror gaming. With its resource management system, grim setting, color choice, and fixed camera angles, Hollowbody invokes the same feelings of classic Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and other titans that built the genre the game now inhabits. It isn’t easy to design a game like these older titles without making something that is accidentally frustrating, especially when it comes to the fixed camera angles schtick. Hollowbody, however, pulls it off well, invoking that classic nostalgia without those familiar feelings of frustration.

My one criticism of Hollowbody is that, like in the classic games, it pulls inspiration from, and you can often find yourself getting lost. I spent a good portion of my early time with the game trying to figure out how to progress in a very, in hindsight, simple location. The one issue with Hollowbody’s environmental puzzles is that, at times, the solutions can hide behind interaction prompts that don’t quite trigger at the right angles or distance or are objects that are physically hard to see in the game’s dark corridors and fixed camera angles.

While getting stuck certainly wasn’t the most fun part of the game, Hollowbody’s excellent pacing and phenomenal tension kept me invested long enough to find these solutions and move on. I never quit the game because I was frustrated or gave up out of boredom.

It helps that the game is only about 3 to 4 hours long, which may sound short to some, but I personally consider it about the perfect length for a good horror game. A lot of horror games can overstay their welcome, spoiling the scares through the necessary overexposure that comes with artificially extending their playtime. Hollowbody will never overstay its welcome and will keep you wanting more in the end, as any great piece of media should.

What blows me away the most about Hollowbody is that the entire game is apparently developed by one person. Nathan Hamley is responsible for all of Hollowbody’s art, graphical design, music, writing, and, of course, coding, with presumably only the voice acting being the bit other contributors were brought in for. It is a remarkable, nay, outstanding feat.

Hollowbody is more than an impressive little indie game. It is a masterpiece of horror, paying homage to the genre’s roots while doing its own thing and doing it quite well. It’s full of remarkably well-done environmental puzzles, incredible scares, excellent writing and some of the best atmosphere I’ve ever seen in the genre. I don’t just recommend Hollowbody; I think horror fans everywhere would be doing themselves a disservice by skipping out on this game.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Hollowbody is available on Steam and GOG.