I'm not sure if it was supposed to be foreshadowing, but I appreciate the fact that Julee's the one with the best healing/life saving ability, mirroring her desire to save lives, while the literal fucking Doctor's abilities are about causing as much collateral damage as possible by using other people's lives as weapons.
I really hope that the game sold well enough that Bokeh can keep making games, too. I had a great time with Slitterhead, both my own playthrough and through your LP, and I'd love to see whatever Bokeh does next.
the body-swap mechanic gave the fights a frenetic feel which i greatly appreciated. the story itself was a bit too undercooked for my liking, needed more worldbuilding to flesh things out. but the vibes of game, walking and fighting through a gritty urban environment, are immaculate. i really hope this gets a sequel with a higher budget, that allows the devs to smooth out the technical limitations and expand on the lore.
Oh the worldbuilding is there... but like with siren it requires a bit of legwork Namely translating the menories to get a lot more context to the entire thing And also sequel bait.
There's plenty of lore but it requires solving the alien language cipher NO sometimes talks in. Anyway, here's the backstory. SPOILERS NO comes from a future where slitterheads conquered earth. Humans are kept on farms as livestock and all resistance to slitterhead rule has been stamped out. But there remains a small town of free humans where those that escape gather. NO is a free human and the town suffers from famine, devastating the free human population. In desperation, the free humans begin building a dimension travel device to escape slitterhead earth and start over somewhere else. But they don't have the means of transporting their physical bodies across dimensions, so the device sends their minds as data across dimensions and they're meant to parasitize the humans in the new dimension and use them as host bodies. NO has doubts over the entire plan and is jailed while the rest of the town goes through with it. He's left behind in the abandoned town and realizes something went wrong. The device is a time portal, not a dimensional portal. It allows access to a new dimension by sending people into the past and changing the timeline. When the townspeople were sent into the past, their minds were compressed together and sent as a single entity. This weakened their ability to parasitize humans and they were forced to parasitize animals with low sapience. The free humans became the first generation of slitterheads. Slitterheads eat humans because it helps prevent them from going feral due to their new animal nature. NO realizes that causality is trying to heal itself. Slitterheads are meant to rule over earth, so causality is setting things up so it's inevitable. NO enters the portal on a mission to kill all slitterheads, hopefully freeing future earth from their rule.
The game started out feeling like The 3rd Birthday, and ended with the "Quick, the plane is going to crash on the building you're standing on, do something NOW" moment from Parasite Eve 1.
Back at the start of the game, when Night Owl lost all his memories, all he had left was "A feeling that I have to kill them all", which is what Alex is all about by the end. I thought Alex would go "It's not enough, go back farther." and Night Owl pushing himself to go so far back in time is what shatters his memories. Then, something would happen to make Night Owl realize he can't let Alex get control, and that divergence is what would lead to the true ending.
Yeah, I'm kinda curious if there's another ending if you regain all your memories before a certain point in the game, kinda weird that the game doesn't really harp on that a lot.
I liked the game for the most part, but I feel like in reality aside from Julee and Alex (and partially Anita?) the characters feel like "tools" rather than characters. Feels like a lot is up for interpretation, like how every single rarity has a tatoo or some sort of scar somewhere on their body is an interesting design choice but you never really get to ask or hear about some of the more interesting ones. I'm hoping in a year or two this game can get the SIREN treatment of getting a lorebook like the Siren Maniacs. Toyama and Sato recently were on some stream where they did live commentary and talked about production, but it has no subtitles.
This game is, if nothing else, always interesting, and at its best (like the final Lisa fight) this game's combat is great at encouraging rapid offense and human swapping while still punishing players that lack situational awareness. But, when I compare this to other Toyama games I've played like the original Silent Hill, Forbidden Siren, or even Blood Curse, it's clear this game did not have the budget to realize its ambitions, and it really does suffer for it. A lot of the stories seem undercooked aside from the Alex/Julee stuff, most of the cast is barely developed (basically you have Julee, Alex, Night Owl, maybe Anita, maybe Lisa/Slitter Lisa, and maaaybe Yin Yue), and the game barely being able to stage a cutscene or voice act means events are going to have less impact than they otherwise should. And while I do like the combat - and appreciate that it mostly avoids the pseudo-turn based problem of a lot of 3rd person action games - there is a dire need for more slitter types to fight, and the game can quickly degrade into rapid swap/attack/swap/attack/maybe heal/ to win with what little content it has. It's frustrating. I know how hard it can be to make something on a puny budget, and I do like a lot of what is here. But I also imagine what this game could have been with a little more time and money. THAT game could have been something great...
The Shiro/Jimmy comparison feels very apt. Except maybe that you could see Jimmy’s downward spiral coming, whereas it was impossible to predict what Shiro was going to do at any given time
Nice that they made something that feels like it belongs on the PS2/3, but I cannot help but get the impression that pretty much everything but the boss fights was left largely unfinished or rudimentary. Especially given the body swap mechanic I'd hope they'd make it more like Hitman, Tehnchu or Siren1.
Awww i kinda wanted this to last a little longer (like Yakuza or GTA stuff like theres still so much to do kind of thing) it was interesting, and for the first time in a long time nothing sexual happened, and that's rare.
I do admire the balls of this game to make you go back and do the missions you have already done (in some cases like 5-6 times), but do it BETTER this time to get a slightly different ending. Basically all of the reviews hit the game on how repetitive it is and I would absolutely agree. It also felt like the story really slowed to a crawl when you keep having to repeat the Alex missions several times. I'm also still not sure what the hell the Master was.
Now the uninitiated might think Alex is so angry because Night Owl forcibly separated him and Lisa, but it's actually because Lisa got the kids in the divorce
I always feel western storytelling dumbs things down for its audience, but it feels like a lot of Eastern storytelling could really do with trimming the fat.
Agreed, just really not getting why anyone thinks this is even good other than maybe some cope that they wanted a spiritual successor to Siren. To be honest it started getting repetitive for me within the first episode or two. Really to me it comes down to deciding to make this a hack n slash game which really just doesn't fit the horror genre at all, when they could have focused on the other elements much more. I'd argue it has even less overall enemy variety than Silent hill 2 and that is just as bad here as in the remake. Then you've got all the story beats and characters that just don't go anywhere and you've got a meh game as a result. I'm sorry, you can talk about what the game could have been all you want, but it doesn't really matter when the end result is a slog and a mess.
![Uncharted 3 - PS5 PRO Gameplay [4K 60FPS]](/img/n.gif)
I'm not sure if it was supposed to be foreshadowing, but I appreciate the fact that Julee's the one with the best healing/life saving ability, mirroring her desire to save lives, while the literal fucking Doctor's abilities are about causing as much collateral damage as possible by using other people's lives as weapons.
You say unvoiced cutscenes, but Blake hitting up that Roight! Oi! Roight! every sentence was glorious.
I really hope that the game sold well enough that Bokeh can keep making games, too. I had a great time with Slitterhead, both my own playthrough and through your LP, and I'd love to see whatever Bokeh does next.
Yes, I believe. And we will.
_Roight!_
the body-swap mechanic gave the fights a frenetic feel which i greatly appreciated. the story itself was a bit too undercooked for my liking, needed more worldbuilding to flesh things out. but the vibes of game, walking and fighting through a gritty urban environment, are immaculate. i really hope this gets a sequel with a higher budget, that allows the devs to smooth out the technical limitations and expand on the lore.
Oh the worldbuilding is there... but like with siren it requires a bit of legwork
Namely translating the menories to get a lot more context to the entire thing
And also sequel bait.
There's plenty of lore but it requires solving the alien language cipher NO sometimes talks in. Anyway, here's the backstory.
SPOILERS
NO comes from a future where slitterheads conquered earth. Humans are kept on farms as livestock and all resistance to slitterhead rule has been stamped out. But there remains a small town of free humans where those that escape gather.
NO is a free human and the town suffers from famine, devastating the free human population. In desperation, the free humans begin building a dimension travel device to escape slitterhead earth and start over somewhere else. But they don't have the means of transporting their physical bodies across dimensions, so the device sends their minds as data across dimensions and they're meant to parasitize the humans in the new dimension and use them as host bodies.
NO has doubts over the entire plan and is jailed while the rest of the town goes through with it. He's left behind in the abandoned town and realizes something went wrong. The device is a time portal, not a dimensional portal. It allows access to a new dimension by sending people into the past and changing the timeline.
When the townspeople were sent into the past, their minds were compressed together and sent as a single entity. This weakened their ability to parasitize humans and they were forced to parasitize animals with low sapience. The free humans became the first generation of slitterheads. Slitterheads eat humans because it helps prevent them from going feral due to their new animal nature.
NO realizes that causality is trying to heal itself. Slitterheads are meant to rule over earth, so causality is setting things up so it's inevitable. NO enters the portal on a mission to kill all slitterheads, hopefully freeing future earth from their rule.
I can't believe we've slitter last head
The game started out feeling like The 3rd Birthday, and ended with the "Quick, the plane is going to crash on the building you're standing on, do something NOW" moment from Parasite Eve 1.
Idk I really enjoyed this game throughout! The characters are interesting and the way the missions change just a little bit is really cool!
Back at the start of the game, when Night Owl lost all his memories, all he had left was "A feeling that I have to kill them all", which is what Alex is all about by the end. I thought Alex would go "It's not enough, go back farther." and Night Owl pushing himself to go so far back in time is what shatters his memories. Then, something would happen to make Night Owl realize he can't let Alex get control, and that divergence is what would lead to the true ending.
Yeah, I'm kinda curious if there's another ending if you regain all your memories before a certain point in the game, kinda weird that the game doesn't really harp on that a lot.
I liked the game for the most part, but I feel like in reality aside from Julee and Alex (and partially Anita?) the characters feel like "tools" rather than characters. Feels like a lot is up for interpretation, like how every single rarity has a tatoo or some sort of scar somewhere on their body is an interesting design choice but you never really get to ask or hear about some of the more interesting ones. I'm hoping in a year or two this game can get the SIREN treatment of getting a lorebook like the Siren Maniacs. Toyama and Sato recently were on some stream where they did live commentary and talked about production, but it has no subtitles.
This game is, if nothing else, always interesting, and at its best (like the final Lisa fight) this game's combat is great at encouraging rapid offense and human swapping while still punishing players that lack situational awareness.
But, when I compare this to other Toyama games I've played like the original Silent Hill, Forbidden Siren, or even Blood Curse, it's clear this game did not have the budget to realize its ambitions, and it really does suffer for it. A lot of the stories seem undercooked aside from the Alex/Julee stuff, most of the cast is barely developed (basically you have Julee, Alex, Night Owl, maybe Anita, maybe Lisa/Slitter Lisa, and maaaybe Yin Yue), and the game barely being able to stage a cutscene or voice act means events are going to have less impact than they otherwise should. And while I do like the combat - and appreciate that it mostly avoids the pseudo-turn based problem of a lot of 3rd person action games - there is a dire need for more slitter types to fight, and the game can quickly degrade into rapid swap/attack/swap/attack/maybe heal/ to win with what little content it has.
It's frustrating. I know how hard it can be to make something on a puny budget, and I do like a lot of what is here. But I also imagine what this game could have been with a little more time and money. THAT game could have been something great...
The Shiro/Jimmy comparison feels very apt. Except maybe that you could see Jimmy’s downward spiral coming, whereas it was impossible to predict what Shiro was going to do at any given time
This feels like an odd place to end the story to me. It feels like we just finished a sidequest.
Nice that they made something that feels like it belongs on the PS2/3, but I cannot help but get the impression that pretty much everything but the boss fights was left largely unfinished or rudimentary. Especially given the body swap mechanic I'd hope they'd make it more like Hitman, Tehnchu or Siren1.
Lots of great ideas here. Shame about the limitations
I think you get the true ending by having your total casualty count under 66.
Awww i kinda wanted this to last a little longer (like Yakuza or GTA stuff like theres still so much to do kind of thing) it was interesting, and for the first time in a long time nothing sexual happened, and that's rare.
What if there's an extra true ending from zero casualties?
John Slitterhead personally resigns as president of the Slitterheads, and shoots himself with a bad CGI effect while Kowlong cheers just off camera
surprise Playstation demo woo!
I do admire the balls of this game to make you go back and do the missions you have already done (in some cases like 5-6 times), but do it BETTER this time to get a slightly different ending. Basically all of the reviews hit the game on how repetitive it is and I would absolutely agree. It also felt like the story really slowed to a crawl when you keep having to repeat the Alex missions several times. I'm also still not sure what the hell the Master was.
The repetitiveness did cut into the game by the end, but ultimately, pretty cool new story!
Now the uninitiated might think Alex is so angry because Night Owl forcibly separated him and Lisa, but it's actually because Lisa got the kids in the divorce
man what a boring games to watch, it was fun in the begining but now is has so much repetition and a truly sudpar anime story. 😴
I always feel western storytelling dumbs things down for its audience, but it feels like a lot of Eastern storytelling could really do with trimming the fat.
Agreed, just really not getting why anyone thinks this is even good other than maybe some cope that they wanted a spiritual successor to Siren. To be honest it started getting repetitive for me within the first episode or two. Really to me it comes down to deciding to make this a hack n slash game which really just doesn't fit the horror genre at all, when they could have focused on the other elements much more. I'd argue it has even less overall enemy variety than Silent hill 2 and that is just as bad here as in the remake. Then you've got all the story beats and characters that just don't go anywhere and you've got a meh game as a result. I'm sorry, you can talk about what the game could have been all you want, but it doesn't really matter when the end result is a slog and a mess.