Slitterhead is set in Kowloon Walled City, in the recent past. Players take control of Hyoki, a spirit with amnesia who ends up in the city. They have only one goal: Find and destroy the Slitterheads, parasitic brain-eating organisms that can mimic human shape. Their only hope for success is to find and bond with special humans whose powers allow Hyoki to make them unstoppable fighting machines. Hyoki only has about three days to find and destroy the Slitterheads by possessing bodies and traveling back in time to stop the apocalypse.

I got Slitterhead's true ending, and I still am not entirely sure what happened. I have the basic structure of the plot, but even that is incredibly convoluted. The game features multiple kinds of time travel, body swapping, alternate dimensions, twisting narratives, magic, science, secret organizations, and unreliable narrators. All of them mix together into this strange mélange of almost raw nonsense. Dialogue is so strange that I can't tell if it's just oddly written or badly translated; events happen and are forgotten; and things come out of the blue for no reason and then vanish entirely. Even the ending is bizarre and abrupt, and when I did what was necessary to expand it and get the real ending, it became only slightly less bizarre and abrupt.

There's an undeniable compelling "what comes next" to the plot that keeps it from being boring, but it frequently left me confused. Slitterheads and how they behave changes from chapter to chapter. The tone shifts from brutal violence to playing as a charming good-natured housemaid who fights with oven mitts. Events sort of happen without explanation — and overall, it's just bizarre. There are some genuinely cool or compelling moments, but they feel mixed in with so many other things that they never get to breathe. There's nothing else like this on the market, but I can't say that's a good thing.

Rather than playing as a specific character, you control the body-possessing spirit Hyoki. You can instantly swap to the body of any nearby compatible human and take direct control of them, with no actual cooldown. When possessing a body, Hyoki grants special skills, such as forming a "Blood Weapon," which uses spiritual energy to perform special attacks. For the majority of people, this means they can create a crude club, but  there are rarities who can use special superpowers and get unique weapons. Rarities are unique characters and you can bring two into each stage, while the weaker bodies are just present.

Combat boils down to using all of your surroundings to properly defeat enemies. Hyoki can swap at any time, and using swaps is central to fighting the Slitterheads. You can hop to a body behind the Slitterhead to attack them from behind, hop from a damaged body to a healthy one, or use a body swap to cancel out of the damage animation when you're knocked down. The first time you're in a body, that body gets a damage buff and health bonus, so you're strongly rewarded for swapping into different forms. Different bodies have different skills. Each rarity has two skills and one common skill that is shared among everybody you possess in a specific stage. Common bodies all share the ability to throw a blood bomb and to do a "War Cry" that draws enemy aggro.

Slitterheads attack rapidly, and to counter them, you need to parry their attacks. Repeated parries allow you to enter a period of slowed-down time during which the enemy is immensely vulnerable to attacks. Parry windows are pretty tight, and missing a parry not only means you eat damage, but it can also cause your character to lose a limb. This means they're unable to attack until they can find and reattach their hand or cause it to regenerate.

The combat is a collection of really cool, half-baked ideas. The core combat where you jump between bodies becomes a constant barrage of mooks attacking a single strong foe; it's a cool idea in theory, but in practice, there isn't enough variety in the enemy types to keep it interesting. The fact that anyone who isn't a Rarity has the same boring move set means you're not going to want to spend much time in those bodies. It feels really cool when everything clicks and you're constantly swapping, smashing and retreating, but it quickly loses its luster, and I found myself bored of fighting Slitterheads long before the game ended.

Even the variety in rarities doesn't do much because the game practically demands you deploy certain characters. For example, Julee is the only character with the compassion skill, which prevents your attacks from damaging surrounding NPCs, even though it's mandatory. (To get the true ending, you need to finish stages with minimal casualties.) Alex, the other main character, is forced to deploy so often, frequently by himself, that you might as well just be playing as him. Most of the other rarities feel like afterthoughts, especially once you recruit Blake, whose skill is firing an insanely powerful machine gun that buzzsaws everything.

There's not much variety to enemies. You basically face Slitterheads, Transformed Slitterheads, and these gross parasite things that are cannon fodder. The game briefly introduces concepts like humans with anti-Slitterhead weapons, but they vanish quickly. Once you've fought one Slitterhead, you've basically fought them all because they all fight in the same way. The game tries to mix up things by adding Slitterheads that poison the environment or slow down your character, but they just make the fights more tedious instead of more tense. Even the boss fights don't feel notably different, but they have some neat gimmicks.

Unfortunately, everything else outside of combat is also a case of really cool, half-baked ideas. For example, when you know a Slitterhead is nearby, you might need to track it down by playing a game of hot-and-cold using colored auras and the ability to "sight-jack" the Slitterhead to find them. The first time this occurs, you get a tense sequence that you have to figure out in a time limit, and then it never comes up again. Most Slitterhead-hunting sequences feel like forced sequences. There are times the game has optional objectives, but they're poorly signposted and frequently confusing, and they mostly seem to exist to make you replay stages you've already finished. One particularly odd one involves you having to find and meet an old lady in every stage; this unlocks her as a character who does nothing for the rest of the game, despite it being mandatory to recruit her.

The game lets you revisit and explore earlier stages to find hidden costumes or bonus skill points, but it's a gigantic chore. Kowloon is a giant mess of nearly identical corridors and walls that is onerous to navigate. You can zip up to the rooftops, but they're not much better. Trying to keep track of where you are and where you might have previously searched is annoying at the best of times. Pretty much any time the game goes outside of its linear path, it emphasizes the dull and confusing surroundings.

There are so many cool concepts in Slitterhead, but none of them really get the focus they need, so it leaves everything feeling disjointed. It doesn't help that the time loopy nature of the game means you're functionally repeating the same things over and over. It jumps between concepts and plot beats, but all of them feel unfinished. There are still moments of genuinely compelling or interesting gameplay, but it is even more frustrating that cool concepts get used once and then vanish.

Slitterhead is not a good-looking game. The character models are simple and quite ugly, the animations are awkward, the Slitterheads look more comical than frightening, and the environments are repetitive. There's an air of PS2-era design to the whole thing, which is almost surreal in a game made in 2024. The audio aspect is a bit better. The soundtrack is quite good and contains a lot of nice, tone-setting surreal music. However, the voice acting is strange, with most lines going completely unvoiced. Some cut scenes have voice acting, but there's no telling which ones do and which ones don't; I genuinely thought the game was bugging out and not playing audio until I finally got a voiced scene. To its credit, the rare voice acting is reasonably good.

If you can get past the jankiness, Slitterhead has a certain quality that makes it oddly compelling. Everything from the plot to the gameplay and the graphics is a strange combination of insanely dated and bizarrely structured. It's a bizarre, shambling mess of a game that has a flavor all its own, but it never quite manages to come together into something cohesive.

Score: 6.5/10