Slitterhead’s gameplay has finally been revealed. One of the wildest announcements at Summer Games Fest 2024, Bokeh Game Studios’ new horror title presents players with an action-horror adventure through a city filled with mutants, monsters, and mystery.

First revealed at The Game Awards 2021 via a teaser trailer, information on Slitterhead has been scant for the last two and a half years. Other than some promises that the game will feature nasty moral decisions, and the occasional reassuring whisper that the game is still in active development, players have heard little information about the game's mechanics and worldbuilding until this year's reveal at Summer Games Fest 2024.

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Slitterhead’s Gameplay Looks Chaotic in All the Right Ways

Revealed via a gameplay trailer to be a punky, pulpy action-horror adventure, Slitterhead’s reveal featured all the parasites, mutants, and bikers using blood magic gamers were promised back in 2021. With shades of splatter films and ultraviolent anime OVAs, the game managed to stand out from the event’s other announcements by simply being radically unique.

With fast-paced, visceral monster-slaughtering action reminiscent of Shift Up’s recently released Stellar Blade, Slitterhead is a unique beast on the horror game landscape---focusing more on brutal, exciting combat than scares, while still being decidedly a horror game. Giving players a bevy of blood-magic weapons and abilities---oddly reminiscent of those wielded by Monami in Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl---Slitterhead tasks gamers with using their body-horror violence to seek out and destroy the grotesque mutated forms of the Yegouzi-possessed citizens of Kowlong.

Taking on the role of the Hyoki---a body-hopping entity halfway between a ghost and a parasite---players are expected to possess the city’s civilians, making use of their bodies and discarding them once they’ve taken too much damage. Caught in the middle of a war between Hyoki and the evil Yegouzi, the citizens are merely a resource for Slitterhead's two mysterious factions.

Slitterhead is Not Silent Hill

Despite being Silent Hill director Keiichiro Toyama’s first horror game since 2003, Slitterhead is not Silent Hill. While a number of the original Silent Hill’s influences are still felt in Slitterhead’s gameplay trailer---such as Robert McCammon’s body-snatchers versus body-mutators alien invasion novel, The Stinger---the game’s tone and gameplay diverge wildly from Silent Hill’s slower and more methodical macabre.

In a recent interview with IGN, Keiichiro Toyama discussed taking influence from various manga, including Gantz, Parasyte, and Tokyo Ghoul, in order to craft both Slitterhead’s world and gameplay mechanics. Toyama also discussed how the body-snatching mechanic is a development on the ‘sightjacking’ mechanic first introduced in 2003’s Siren.

Slitterhead’s Kowlong is Meticulously Designed

Bucking recent game design trends, Slitterhead is not an open-world game. Instead, the game takes place across a series of stages, each taking around 30 minutes to complete---adding up to around 15 hours of playtime in total. Part of the reason for this level-based approach is Keiichiro Toyama’s focus on world design.

Inspired by cities that no longer exist, and filtered through a lens of neon-drenched Hong Kong cinema, Slitterhead’s perpetual nighttime, crumbling high-rise apartments, and cramped urbanism is a self-conscious throwback to the archetypal Asian metropolis of a bygone age. With each level, the player is tasked with exploring a new part of the city, and, over the course of Slitterhead's roughly 15 hour playtime, the game takes the player on a tour across a series of intricately designed districts and landmarks inspired by real, fictional, and imagined locations.

Players Don’t Have to Wait Long to Get Their Hands On Slitterhead

There may have been a two and a half year wait between Slitterhead’s announcement and its first gameplay trailer, but players won't have to wait much longer to explore Kowlong. Slitterhead is set to release on November 8.