The Verdict
You are Keiichiro Toyama, you created Silent Hill, Siren, and Gravity Rush, and Slitterhead is your first swing since walking out of Sony Japan Studio. That history is a blessing and a haunting, because everyone expected another genre-defining nightmare and instead got a fascinating, flawed experiment. The Hyoki body-swapping mechanic, where you leap between strangers mid-fight, is a genuinely original idea that nobody else in horror is doing. That's the bright, beating heart of this thing.
And around that heart, the body is rough. The atmosphere is strong, the soundtrack got real praise, and the central conceit is the kind of thing only a Silent Hill creator would dream up. But a 60 on Metacritic doesn't lie about the tissue around it: repetitive missions, thin enemy variety, and combat that swings with all the weight of a wet paper towel. You can possess anyone in the city and it still somehow feels weightless, which is its own kind of horror.
Then the story overstays its welcome, dragging a clever premise past the point where it stays scary. And instead of letting the work answer for itself, Bokeh publicly pushed back against IGN's review and kicked up a small controversy. Sweetheart, the energy you spent fighting a score would have been better spent trimming the runtime and adding enemies. Defend the game by making it shorter, not by making it louder.
What it nails
- ▲The Hyoki body-swapping combat: hijacking any random person mid-fight is a genuinely unique mechanic critics singled out for praise.
- ▲Atmosphere worthy of its pedigree, exactly the eerie dread you'd expect from the creator of Silent Hill and Siren.
- ▲A soundtrack that earned specific acclaim and carries the mood when the gameplay sags.
- ▲The sheer ambition of a debut studio shipping an original horror concept instead of playing it safe.
What it botches
- ▼Repetitive missions that recycle the same beats until the novelty of body-swapping wears thin.
- ▼Limited enemy variety, so the horror runs out of new monsters long before the credits.
- ▼Weightless combat that undercuts every fight, a fatal flaw in an action-horror built around fighting.
- ▼An overlong story that drags the premise past its scare expiration date, dropping the whole thing to a 60 Metacritic.
Who it's for
Toyama loyalists and curious horror fans who will forgive janky combat for one of the most original ideas in the genre.
Who should skip
Players who need tight, weighty action and tend to bail when a horror game starts repeating its own missions.
The whole story lives on the hub