My Models, My Models, And Me: A Small Blog About Warhammer

In 2023 I got back into painting little teeny tiny models after about fifteen solid years of absence. I left Warhammer for a whole bunch of reasons; I’d indulged too much in it, I couldn’t really enjoy it under the withering (and often… accurate) gaze of my disapproving parents, and as I grew into my awkward late teens I started to properly realise that I didn’t really know what I wanted out of it.

Like regularly tuning in to watch new episodes of The Simpsons, Warhammer just became something in my life that stopped happening - a natural drifting away that occurred with little fanfare or drama as my values and goals adjusted away from models and 28mm scale battlefields towards building myself into a successful and self-actualised adult. 

Whoops! Fucked that up a little! 

So now we’re back at the models!

In searching around for something to do, I rediscovered my pile of Old Warhammer Stuff at the back of a cupboard inside a steadily mouldering cardboard box. Not too many models (other than a handful of soft-metal characters), but a treasure trove of old White Dwarf magazines and source books alongside a notebook that contained hundreds of little army lists* and stories that I had made with my friends. 

One thing spilled naturally into another, and the youtube content that I was already consuming morphed from cool, distant projects that other people were doing into step-by-step tutorials that I could maybe apply to the stuff that I had excavated from my past. 

You know, as a joke. To see if I like it. Nothing serious though!

Here is the first White Dwarf I ever bought. Honestly I am surprised it even looks this good - I used to carry this around like a talisman. 

Let's take a peek inside...wait, this isn't right, why does a WD from 2002 have a painting guide for a major character model still sold in 2025 for an immensely popular faction? Weird. Must be some sort of glitch.

Since then, it has become this dual exercise in childhood wish-fulfilliment and conscientious goal setting. Each model contains as many or as few goals as I grant it, each faction contains as many or as few goals as I grant it - it’s like a plastic garden where I have allowed myself to exert control over expectations and outcomes. At worst I paint a model, at best I paint a model that I’m slightly happier with. Not exactly life-or-death. 

The rediscovery of my old notes, lists, and models broke my heart a little, I think as a kid I used to be so terrified of imperfection that these projects never really left the starting line. I remember spending so much time coming up with endless stuff - what a unit would look like, why they would be armed like this, what purpose did they have, how they met the main force - making it all make sense on the page, and then when it came to putting it into action the models would remain a sad grey, or coated in a simple primer, unable to handle the weight of all these tiny dreams. 

As I keep on engaging and persevering in my hobby projects I’m acting out the passions that went into my old notebooks. With significantly more discernment, I might add; the younger version of me gets a pass on a lot of things, but he would never have wanted the BloodBowl Gnome team because he was dumb as fuck. There’s a surprising element of self-forgiveness and self-reflection involved (matters of taste aside) in doing something that your younger self was too afraid to do, and coming to terms with that has been more difficult and heavier than I would have thought for painting little plastic soldiers. 

These fuckers are SO fun go play BloodBowl be a lil freak get some sports in ya.

As an adult (loath though I may be to admit adulthood) re-engaging with the hobby has provided me with an incredible sense of stillness and focus. I like the feeling of sitting down to finish something, it feels like a magic trick where I wave my hands and grey nothing transforms into a pile of goons, henchmen, and associated flunkies. I understand that I’m not necessarily creating anything by doing this, but what it allows me to do is re-engage the parts of myself that stall and rust the longer I go without an outlet. I’m solving creative problems, and I’m doing it in a cloistered, controlled environment - models don’t suddenly grow limbs and change shape, I’m in a fixed space where the instruction manuals are (mostly) clear, and the paint goes on the parts you are subtly guided to paint. Easy. 

I'm not gonna go into it here, but I adore what's happened since I've been away. I love the new AoS stuff so much, I love the broad design and narrative space, and I love my weird vampires (but not enough to paint some base rims apparently).

Painting and modelling has, in an incredibly gentle way, let me carve out a space where the only input is creative, the only actions are creative ones, and the output is something for me alone. There’s no room for anything else in this space other than paint, glue, process, and inspiration. My body becomes a machine that turns tiny plastic sprues into painted figures, and while I will never engage in this hobby with the same fervour as when I was younger, I am using it to slowly help rediscover a version of myself that was ever able to feel with such genuine intensity. A person that could read a Codex and immediately envision an army with a theme and lore to go with it, and would take the time late at night to give each hypothetical unit yet another bullshit Latin-esque name and figure out their battle honours, their wins, their losses, and what could be done to reflect this.  

Each time I sit down I catch a small glimpse of the creative, fulfilled person I wanted to be when I was a kid, and the feelings that need to be there to believe in that person again. I keep on getting caught by currents that drag me into terrifyingly deep waters, and I have to spend all of my strength swimming back to shore only to repeat it again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. For so much of my day I cannot imagine a world where exhaustion is not a constant, but when I clear my crowded desk and set up my slightly too bright lamp, for an hour or so I get to tangibly feel that this wasn’t always the case, and that this doesn’t always need to be the case.

I might drift away from Warhammer again - I probably will! - but for now coming back to this hobby and covering my plastic skeletons in dirt and rust has given me a truly valuable space. An absolute goldmine of feelings and focus. A priceless plastic port in some truly troubled waters. 

Wait, wait, wait, wait no, no hold up Games Workshop don’t read this please, god, don’t put the prices up I was kidding, I was kidding - the port is looking extremely premium for what I’m getting if we’re being honest here.

*So ok explainer at the end of the article - your units have point values, and you have like fit your army into a certain value like 750 points or 1.5k points (bring this one back) or 2k points (current standard) etc. etc. etc. This would be your army list! Previously you also had really strict force restrictions, so you would have to take x amount of y units, or a special upgrade would let you take restricted units, so if you wanted to theme things you would have to be a bit creative around what the book would let you do. Also the wargear section used to be bonkers.

Kowloon Genetic Romance: A Slitterhead Review (Sorta?)

 

There’s an increasingly rare style of game that I would probably call the ‘accidental rental’ or the ‘friends’ older brother's game’ or the ‘game I sort of half remember playing that was on a demo disc that I might have borrowed but now in trying to recall it I sort of sound like I’m making it up’.

These games are the equivalent of horror movie sequels that you constantly tell your friends are good - the odd ducks at the back of the pond that show glimpses of ideas that stick with you forever, no matter how janky or uneven the delivery or total package. 

A real highlight of this genre for me has to be Forbidden Siren*. I remember encountering it initially from (I believe) an Official Playstation Magazine UK demo disc and just being completely captivated by the whole experience. I had no fucking idea what was happening, but it was compelling, interesting, and so acutely odd. 

I’m honestly fortunate that Forbidden Siren became a cult hit and has re-releases and devoted fans (and games inspired by it - go check out Atama on Steam), but the PS2 was lousy with these kinds of odd experiments in navigating 3D spaces inside this odd sliver of time before we locked down accepted practices and standardised controls. 

Does the second analogue stick control the camera? Maybe. Is X accept and O cancel? Mmmmmmaybe. Are the triggers going to be used for anything this time? Maybe!

An artist's impression of what it was like to encounter the fabled Blue Disc of Infinite Value.

There was (for me at least) a level of joy to be found in accepting and expecting confusion inside every demo or odd little rental in this era. With the amount of games available and the limited amount of recognition and coverage around those games, a lot of the time you were challenged to give up having preconceptions of what a game should be and instead engage with the game that you got and hope that something would click and/or that the demo you eagerly replayed would get a release in your region. Or a release at all. 

I don’t want to over-romanticise the past too much - different people have different experiences of the PS2, and I had the benefit of a neighbourhood full of eager and active pirates which made my own gaming cost significantly less, but for me this era was particularly special, and it was special because you could constantly engage in Peak Garbage (complimentary). 

This is all to say that I played Slitterhead and I fuckin loved it. 

I could spend all day talking about (and taking screenshots of) so many of the design elements in this game, they're completely out of control levels of cool.

If you have never encountered Slitterhead or heard of Slitterhead I would recommend this game without hesitation. It’s weird, it’s silly, it has some slightly iffy politics, you probably won’t enjoy it all that much, and when you describe it you’ll sound fucking stupid. 

“You change bodies to solve puzzles but you don’t really need to!”, “You’re gonna want to track down all of the secrets because you can dress up a nerd in two jackets and make him look silly.”, “Queen Elizabeth the 2nd is a secret character and she’s borderline broken, she’s maybe the strongest in the whole game.” 

Didn't believe me? Bam - two jackets, one for the head one for the waist.

Here’s the elevator pitch: you’re a ghost with no memories in not-Kowloon and you gotta take over peoples’ brains to use them to eliminate the Slitterheads; weird creatures that prey on humans. You jump from person to person to solve puzzles and move around the world, but your main points of contact are a handful of key humans with extra special blood weapons and blood powers - these key humans have information and goals that will help drive the story forwards and help you with your overarching goal of stopping a Slitterhead-related apocalypse. Uncover the mystery and go buck wild, just enjoy yourself, go nuts. 

Oh you thought this was a fucking game? Here she is: she's called Betty, she uses a blood umbrella, and she's a fucking menace. Real Slitter-heads know what's up. 

As you progress you uncover bits of story presented with minimal voice acting, little glimpses of clarity through a curtain of ignorance as you loop time in an attempt to un-fuck things. Of course, as with all good time travel stories, your looping and disregard for regular causality fucks things up even more, and we’re dragged into a pretty depressing web of action, reaction, and regret for action. 

So much of the game is kept from you - your core ghost memories, displayed in-game as glowing golden clouds to optionally collect, are hidden behind a separate fictional language, the hazy drama that brought you to this moment a (mostly) unanswered series of questions. At its best the game is suffused with this heavy sense of blame, every human you cast aside a reminder of your selective priorities - the guiding light of the game an appeal to the dignity of life set against the packed neon core of not-Kowloon. 

And you’re also just sort of smacking creatures with weapons and powers, just wailing on them, just beating the shit out of them. 

Slitterhead is odd, but it’s charmingly odd. From the music, to the menus, to the setting there remains this indelible Slitterhead-ness about the whole experience. You are playing a game that isn’t trying to be anything else; yes, it does draw from a dozen other games in crafting its gameplay stew, but it isn’t trying to be a Soulslike, or a survival horror, or the true return of Silent Hill, or Persona for adults it’s trying to be… Slitterhead. Does this mean that it is good? Not really!

What it is is undeniably itself. Yeah it takes scaffolding from Forbidden Siren and For Honour (lmao) but like every good Young Adult protagonist, Slitterhead tries to be itself even if the itself it ends up being is a bit grating and occasionally repetitive. There’s real fucking heart here, and there’s a genuinely compelling 6/10 video nasty quality to it all that made me misty eyed for that demo-disc era of games taking their tenuous steps into a world that was exploding in a wave of innovations and failed experiments.

Even if you aren’t really feeling Slitterhead I’d encourage you to go and find something like it - something new, something weird, something novel. If nothing else I want to emphasise how refreshing it felt to play an old-feeling new game like this, how great it is to not know what is going to happen next or what steps the game is going to take. We used to have games like this! It makes me want to replay Silent Hill 4: The Room! Companies used to throw random amounts of money to make these games, games that have only the vaguest understanding of things like ‘metrics’, ‘key verticals’, and 'sales targets'!

Go get challenged by something that might suck, go find the next Tokyo Jungle and hype it up before someone else does and make a Youtube career out of it, go replay The Last Guardian and get mad that people aren’t talking about it constantly, maybe try Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess that’s a pretty good new one or To a T.

Just go find a game that really makes you feel something new or experience something new that you might not like or understand. Games like Slitterhead are an essential part of a healthy, balanced diet because they help you expand your vocabulary and your palate - you get to better understand what 'good' means to you, or what 'bad' means, or what 'interesting' means, and that's an incredibly rare feeling in games at the moment.

*I should’ve looked this up before writing this, but like the vast majority of Bokeh Game Studio did work on the Siren series. I also should note that I’ve been saying (and typing) Forbidden Siren for years, not knowing that this was the PAL-exclusive title lmfao.