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!
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| 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.
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| 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.”
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| 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.
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| 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.
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