izigame.me

This is one of those games where I wish there were a "neutral" for option for Steam reviews. Slitterhead has some interesting concepts that I appreciated, and gameplay elements that I enjoyed, but there is enough things about the game that left a bad taste in my mouth where I would be hesitant to recommend it to most people without some major caveats.
What is Slitterhead?
Slitterhead has you play as disembodied spirit with amnesia that has the ability to to possess humans. You quickly find yourself in conflict with the titular Slitterheads: parasite-like monsters that hunt humans to eat their brains, and will camouflage themselves as people to hide from and to stalk their human prey. The game has you working with unique humans to learn more about and fight the Slitterheads in order to prevent a vision of an apocalyptic crisis. Throughout the game you will find and unlock more of your own memories to find out what you and the Slitterheads actually are.
How Does It Play?
Slitterhead has a mission/level-based system where its primary gameplay is split between two pillars: tracking down and chasing slitterheads through cramped urban environments, and then fighting them once you have caught them. Occasionally there will be some forced stealth sections. All three different forms of gameplay make use of the body swapping/possession mechanic.
Possession: the most interesting mechanic about the game
The early tutorial of the game shows you how to quickly and fluidly swap from one body to another. The game leans into using the NPC humans as an expendable resource (even having you jump off a building as a possessed human, only to swap out of the body of the soon-to-be-dead human right before impact - just so you have a quick way to get down to the street level). The game balances this by having the player's spirit be truly hurt if they inhabit the body when the killing blow is struck. If you jump out of the body right before the killing blow - you are fine. If your host body dies 3 times before you jump out, then you get a game over.
*In the chase sequences, this possession mechanic is used to quickly stay on the tail of the slitterhead you are pursing (e.g. jumping to an NPC head if the current one got caught on an obstacle, jumping to an NPC at a higher elevation out of reach, etc.).
*In combat, the possession mechanic is used to avoid fatal blows while staying in the fight, or to be used to flank or overwhelm enemies as the Slitterhead will still be focused on the old host for a brief moment before realizing you have swapped hosts. If you initiate a combo from one host, you can swap to another to start another combo while the first one continues to swing.
*In stealth, the swapping mechanic is primarily used to jump to another host in order to get past guarded areas, or to hop into a body that is allowed in restricted zones.
*In all 3 above examples, the body swapping is pretty enjoyable to play with as it makes you feel powerful and unstoppable.
Combat
While there are horror elements in this game, most of what you will be doing is fighting Slitterheads in melee-focused combat. Throughout the game you will find 8 special humans called "Rarities" that get unique skills when possessed by the player. When selecting a mission you can bring up to 2 Rarities to use in the mission. Each one has a unique set of skills with their own playstyle (offensive, defensive, support, healing, etc.). So there you can strategize on what set of Rarities you want to bring with you by how they combo with each other. Early on I found myself using a Rarity that summons a horde of humans that she can also mind control to charge headlong into combat, and paired her with a Rarity that could make humans explode like time bombs for massive AoE damage.
Besides unique rarity skills and possession, the core of the combat uses light & heavy attacks, dodging, healing, and a directional parry mechanic (e.g. you move the right controller stick in the direction of the incoming attack at the right time to parry). Parrying refills one of your resource bars used to fuel combat powers and could be used to active a mode that temporarily froze time to get some free hits in. However, the directional parrying was very finicky and I found myself almost never using it because there was no way to cancel actions in order to parry. This is an issue because you cannot parry if you are in the middle of attacking or doing other actions. So you are either attacking an enemy, or standing and waiting for an enemy to swing at you just so you can parry them. What's worse is it is almost always better and more reliable to simply swap to another body to avoid a hit than it is to take the chance of trying to parry. I'm no parry master in games, but I'm usually pretty decent at parrying in most games and I really tried to practice it in this. But I decided why bother spending 5 minutes to fight enemies by waiting to perfectly parry their attacks when I could kill them in 1 minute by being more aggressive (and safer) by constantly swapping bodies.
Criticisms
In addition to not caring for parrying, the major criticisms I have about the game are related to feeling there was far too little game for how long they stretch the runtime. It took me just under 22 hours to beat the game by collecting all the characters, collectiables/costumes, and getting the true ending. However, I feel probably 8-10 hours of that playtime was padding.
*There are only about 4 main enemy types that you will fight throughout the entire game. There are multiple variants of the main slitterhead enemies which have slightly different abilities, but to be perfectly honest - in combat - they all played the same way. Besides 4 unique bosses, I did not find myself needing to change my playstyle to fight the variants any differently. They had different names, but fought the same.
*The game has a time travel component to it where you will play missions over a 3-day period of time. At times, you will go back to a previous day in order to take a different action in order to change the outcome of events to progress the story. This is very interesting on paper if executed right, but in practice this means there are only about 5 or so unique maps throughout the entire runtime of the game. So you will be playing the same missions 3-5 or more times as a REQUIRED part of the main plot. Often with almost no variation between each attempt. If this game made these subsequent visits more dynamic, or if there were more or altered environments on subsequent visits - then I could see this working.
This critique comes with minor spoilers for the endgame:
After you get the first "bad" ending, you can keep replaying missions. But this time you can see how many human NPCs were killed in each of the missions you beat. In order to have access to the "true ending," you have to get the total number of NPCs dead across ALL missions be under 66 or so. So basically, the game's tutorial tells you humans are expendable, use them as cannon fodder, and 2 of the first 3 Rarities you have access to have abilities that either kill or put humans in harms way to defeat slitterheads. Then the game does a rug pull on the player and says "actually, you should have been doing everything in your power to keep humans alive in order to see the real ending." I get what the game is going for from a ludo-narrative perspective (e.g. you as the player have grown from seeing humans as expendable to now wanting to protect them). And to be fair, this did lead me to try different rarities that had support abilities better suited to keeping humans alive - changing up how I played the game. But what this really felt like was a way to squeeze another 3-5 hours of gameplay out of the player to forcibly replay countless missions in order to get their death counter down just to see the real ending.