Do you want Silent Hill but set in a dystopian future and in England? Do you want a nostalgic hit of PS2-era survival horror, tank controls and all? Then boy howdy, Hollowbody might be exactly what you’re looking for.
This third-person survival horror game sees you take control of Mica, a woman trying to make her way through an abandoned city in search of her partner (it’s never explicitly stated, but the vibe is that this is a romantic relationship). Mica will navigate deserted streets, claustrophobic tower blocks and oppressive sewers while avoiding the creatures that remain, and eventually coming face to face with a bigger threat than she was bargaining for…
Originally released on PC in 2024 and now making its way to console, the game wears its influences on its sleeve from the start. Within the first few minutes, it’s already recommending that I use a controller. I’m playing on PS5. What else am I going to do, plug in an old EyeToy and start flailing around my room? Those of you who don’t remember the EyeToy are fortunate enough to have missed an era of gaming accessories that often had brilliant ideas but were let down by technology that hadn’t quite caught up yet. Oh, you sweet summer children.
Nostalgia is really the first thing you get from Hollowbody. Silent Hill and Resident Evil heavily inspire it, and it doesn’t really try to hide it. The UI, fonts, and general presentation are all very reminiscent of old PS1 and PS2 games. The Silent Hill comparisons are constant and, honestly, unavoidable. The only thing really missing is the fog. The fixed camera angles and the inclusion of tank controls only strengthen that retro survival horror vibe. However, new for the console release is a modern third-person camera option as well, which I quickly switched to after remembering why I never really got on with early Resident Evil games.
There’s also a sense that this isn’t just imitation but reconstruction. While Hollowbody borrows heavily from PS1 and PS2-era survival horror, it smooths over some of the rougher edges. Tank controls are optional rather than mandatory, autosaves sit alongside traditional save points, and systems like the map and auto-aim reduce some of the frustration that older games often mistook for challenge. It still wants you to feel slightly lost, slightly under-informed and slightly uncomfortable, but it’s less interested in punishing you for it.
The setting, though, is where things start to stand out. It’s a dystopian vision of a fictional abandoned city in the west of England; it actually feels like an English city with post-war terrace housing, brutalist tower blocks looming over everything, and a legally distinct but immediately recognisable corner shop brand. It all clicks in a way that many games set in the UK don’t quite manage. The fully British cast helps too. It’s genuinely refreshing to hear accents that feel like they belong, especially after so many games where “British” accents feel like a rough approximation built in a lab. I live in the southwest of England, so it was nice to hear a southwest accent in a West England city that wasn’t a caricature.
Narratively, Hollowbody leans into a familiar survival horror framework but filters it through a more grounded, contemporary lens. The exclusion zone setup, the sense of a sealed-off disaster area, and the transition from a futuristic city with a faint Blade Runner-style sheen to it, all neon distance and sterile height, into an abandoned urban space, all reinforce a layered sense of collapse rather than a single catastrophic event. Documents scattered throughout suggest economic decline, broken promises, and communities left behind, giving the world a sadness that sits beneath the monster encounters. At one point, I found myself thinking the most horrifying thing in the game might actually be the implied fall of the NHS into privatisation. Hopefully, I’m just projecting.
Gameplay-wise, it’s familiar survival horror territory. Two difficulty settings keep things simple, and there are three endings in total: two standard endings depending on your choices and a secret ending locked behind 100 per cent completion. Once you finish the game, you get stats and unlockables, which add a bit of replayability if you’re inclined to go back in.
The broader structure of the game reflects that modernised approach. It’s shorter and more focused than many of its inspirations, with exploration that is still methodical but less likely to grind to a halt over obscure progression bottlenecks. The in-game map in particular is quite generous, sometimes almost too helpful, guiding you forward in a way that reduces uncertainty. It prevents some of the frustration that defined older genre entries, but it can also slightly blunt the tension.
Enemy variety is limited. You’ve got small zombie-like dogs, standard zombie-like enemies, larger mutated creatures with tentacles, and a boss that looks like a mix between Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors and the Antlions from Half-Life 2. They create plenty of pressure, but the roster never really evolves beyond those core archetypes.
Combat sits in a similar space between homage and refinement. It is clearly inspired by the slower, more deliberate encounters of classic survival horror, where avoidance is often preferable, and ammo is never something you can afford to waste. However, modern touches like a reliable auto-aim system and quick weapon switching make it more readable than its inspirations. You can equip one melee weapon and one firearm, and swapping between them is fast and clean, which keeps encounters tense without tipping into awkwardness.
It’s also a short game but a satisfying one, coming in at around 5 – 8 hours long. Considering it was largely made by one developer, it’s impressive how solid the core gameplay is and how strong the atmosphere remains throughout.
Sound design does a lot of the heavy lifting here as well. A constant low hum underpins much of the experience, occasionally interrupted by sharp musical cues that puncture moments of safety. Silence is used deliberately rather than as absence, which helps maintain tension even in otherwise empty spaces.
There are issues, though. The game is a bit glitchy, with a few moments where the world wasn’t sure if it wanted to exist or where items simply didn’t appear. In one case, I was standing at a dead end, and when I checked my map, it showed I was inside an obstacle. I’ve looked it up since, and I know what was meant to be there, but because it didn’t spawn, I couldn’t 100 per cent the game and unlock the secret ending. Frustrating, but hopefully something that gets patched out over time. Again, this is basically a one-man project, including the console port, so a bit of roughness is understandable.
Visually, it could have used more colour. If the intention was to make lighting pop out against a grey, oppressive world, then leaning further into that contrast might have helped. It’s a small nitpick rather than a major issue.
Taken as a whole, Hollowbody feels like both a tribute to and a refinement of the survival horror games of the 90s. It occasionally leans a little too heavily on those influences, and the technical issues can be frustrating. Still, its atmosphere, setting and understanding of what made those games memorable carry it through. More importantly, it manages something many nostalgia-driven projects fail to do: it captures the feeling of a bygone era without being trapped by it.
