Slitterhead is an upcoming horror game from Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama. His studio’s just shown off some (very) early gameplay…
We’ve known for a while that Silent Hill designer Keiichiro Toyama has a new horror game in the works, but we haven’t seen what Slitterhead actually looks like – at least until now.
Bokeh Game Studio’s new dev diary (via Games Radar) is ostensibly about playtesting, but it also provides a few early glimpses of Slitterhead in action. And ‘action’ is the operative word here, as it looks as though Slitterhead will be a fairly combat-heavy game. Although the project is still clearly in an early state, Bokeh has clearly spent a fair bit of time designing and modelling some particularly gribbly-looking monsters that players will have to fight with a mixture of guns and more organic-looking weapons.
There also appears to be a section where the player gets to pad around as a dog, using its canine senses to sniff out what looks like a crimson, supernatural scent. What’s that, boy? There’s a Lovecraftian monster in my closet? Damn.
Slitterhead was first announced at The Game Awards in 2021, with its reveal trailer showing off a contemporary Japanese setting and a breed of creature capable of disguising itself as human before erupting into screeching masses of flesh and bone, like John Carpenter’s The Thing (or maybe the wonderfully salacious 80s anime, Wicked City).
Toyama founded Bokeh Studio one year before that reveal, with the studio also taking in such veterans as Junya Okura (Gravity Rush) and Kazunobu Sato (Puppeteer). Slitterhead was originally pencilled in for release this year – one 2022 report suggested that “Slitterhead is nearing its climax”, but this may have been a mistranslation.
Evidently requiring a good year or so before it’s ready, Slitterhead nevertheless looks like a promisingly grotesque action-horror opus.
Read more: Silent Hill | In pursuit of the lost story we’ll never get to play
