Hollowbody is a Silent Hill-inspired cyberpunk game set in a post-Brexit dystopia

There has rarely been a better time in recent memory to be a survival horror fan. From recent releases like Motive Studio dead Space remake and Capcom has its own remake resident Evil 4 much awaited games like Amnesia: The Bunker And alan wake 2There’s a veritable embarrassment of riches to choose from for players who like their regular diet of action-heavy thrills alongside chills.

On Friday, Bristol, UK-based developer Headware Games (aka Nathan Hamley) released a five-minute gameplay trailer for their upcoming survival horror title. hollow body, and from the looks of it, it’s definitely shaping up to be a game to look forward to. Described as a “tech-noir homage to classic survival horror”. hollow body puts players in the role of Micah, an unlicensed shipper (i.e., courier) who works for a black-market syndicate based in near-future Bristol.

The trailer opens with a scene of Mika crashing into a long-abandoned neighborhood on the outskirts of the city’s habitable zone, à la blade runner 2049, With limited resources, no way to contact his employers, and no other options, Micah wanders through the desolate ruins of this quarantined area in search of a way to repair his vehicle or find some other way to safety. Should be made brave.

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Image: Headware Games

However, solving environmental puzzles and scavenging through the rubble of deserted apartment buildings will be the least of his problems. As we see in the trailer, Micah is not alone, and in order to survive, he must endure an onslaught of nightmare after-shocks from a human potentially driven mad by invasive black-market technology.

The gameplay seems clearly indebted to predecessors like 2001 Silent Hill 2 and 1999 Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, with fixed camera angles and brief loading-screen cutscenes accompanied by resource scavenging and scripted events. There are also some cool modern visual quirks, like fading wall animations and on-screen item details rendered as diegetic augmented reality displays. It’s a contemporary tribute to the Silent Hill series, similar in style to last year SignalisThough with a more pronounced emphasis on scripted scares and combat.

The game’s inspiration besides Silent Hill is also interesting. It is based on contemporary issues such as class conflict and wealth inequality in industrialized countries. Hamley told the NME last year, “There are several narrative reasons why I wanted to make the game in a near-future setting.” “But to hit home with the horror elements, I wanted to be able to ground it in something familiar. So I modeled the environments after different buildings and locations in my home city of Bristol. You can A metaphor for post-Brexit Britain, it would not be far off.

hollow body It is scheduled to launch on Windows PC in early 2024.