Hollow Head: Director's Cut

“I'm not your friend. You have no real friends.” The man backs away from the door. He doesn't know why his neighbor would say something like that. Just a few hours ago, he didn't think he had any enemies. But that was before he heard the screaming coming from the garbage room. Before he was met with amused hostility when he tried to report it to the proper authorities. Before he started getting mysterious messages warning him not to return to his apartment, lest “they” be waiting for him there. “You didn't do anything wrong. There's no logical reason for them to do this.” Hollow Head is the story of an unnamed protagonist who wakes up in the early morning to find his apartment has, quite literally, gone to hell. Stairwells lead to nowhere. Hallways are clogged with furniture where they aren't walled up. Neighbors have become surly. A strange being crowned with a toothy mouth roams the building, hunting anyone who leaves their room. And the protagonist can't shake the lingering feeling it's somehow all his fault. The story part of this game is excellent, but it's also likely to leave you with more questions than answers. The immediate narrative is driven by the question of whether or not the protagonist will find the means and courage to confront “them” instead of trying to escape, since you quickly discover trying to escape never leads to anything but the gruesome death of the would-be escapee. This leads to bizarre scenes, like the one where he must [spoiler]convince a dead woman to unlock a door for him[/spoiler] or [spoiler]try to jump off the roof, only to be talked down by a faceless horned giant.[/spoiler] It plays fine, too. You explore the apartment complex in first-person, picking up key items that (of course) break and are auto-discarded after you figure out where you're supposed to use them. There's no combat and only one boss, a puzzle boss you “beat” by avoiding him via sound as you turn valves to open the door to the next area. You're mostly there to soak up the visuals and atmosphere. And that's the biggest draw, the thing I most recommend Hollow Head for: the visuals and atmosphere. It doesn't merely imitate the look of PSX horror games, instead using the low-poly graphics to create a world that looks like it is, behind its distorted facade, being slowly eaten away. The only being with a visible face is Hollow Head himself; everyone else's, including the protagonist's, is smooth and blank. The weaker your light sources get, the blockier they become. Doors are subtly color-coded to show whether they're functional or decorative. Add the atmosphere of encroaching paranoia- the more people you encounter, the more you start to feel like anyone who acknowledges your presence is inherently untrustworthy- and you get a game that'll have you looking over your shoulder, wondering if what you see is real, long after you've stopped playing it. “The universe is ultimately good. Right?” I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed everything about Hollow Head, but at the same time, the parts I did not enjoy were survival horror genre tropes I find irritating, and they're actually far more tolerable in Hollow Head than they are in other games. For instance, I hate backtracking. I especially hate backtracking in a horror game that has spent time and effort making me feel like I'm being drawn slowly but inexorably to my doom, only to bring all that forward motion to a grinding halt by forcing me to walk down the same hallway twenty times fetching scattered pieces of lint for some incorrigible NPC. And I especially, unequivocally hate having to pick up exactly one piece of lint and take it back to the NPC before I'm even allowed to look at the next one. It's like that part in The Phantom Tollbooth where the Terrible Trivium forces Milo to move a giant pile of sand one grain at a time with a pair of tweezers. Hollow Head has an area where you have to do this. It's much smaller than most areas where you have to do this, the NPC making the requests is actually kind of nice, and there are no nasty tricks like the game killing you between items so you have to restart, so it was over before it could deflate the suspenseful atmosphere. It still wasn't something I actually liked doing. Second, I'm not terribly enthusiastic about jump scares, so when after a game's worth of build-up, the final boss weaponizes one, I just wasn't feeling it. I know this is an individual preference and some people will like the part where Hollow Head jumps out and screams in your face, but I was personally far more unnerved by the earlier chase sequence where you don't see him at all, or the post-confrontation sequence where he's standing completely still and staring you down, unwavering. But the jump scare segment, like the backtracking segment, passes too quickly and painlessly for it to lower my opinion of the game as a whole. So with so much surreal goodness and such minor (and possibly down to taste) flaws, I can't help but give Hollow Head a thumbs up. Just remember... “You cannot trust your own thoughts here.”

starts out promisingly enough with some nice low-fi atmosphere, but very quickly degenerates into trudging back and forth through tedious mazes and trying/failing to avoid poorly telegraphed instakill monsters. don't really get the praise for this one

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I had a blast playing this. Usually when I buy these cheaper indie horror games, I'm usually just disappointed but this one actually scared me in a great way. My heart was pounding throughout most of the playthrough and I honestly got so stressed at one point that I wanted to quit. That's the mark of a great horror game. For the price you really can't beat it: it's cheap, it's fun, it's scary. If that sounds interesting to you then go ahead and check it out. If you're still on the fence, go ahead and check out my video to decide for yourselves if this is something that you think you might like. If it looks interesting to you though, I do recommend that you stop watching the video and play it for yourself so that you don't spoil it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqbGa1qbGo0

Hollow Head is a game I wasn't sure I'd like. I played the early alpha, and found it enjoyable but kind of one note. This expanded edition puts you in a bigger, scarier world. You'll explore the dark corridors of an apartment building as the situation around you becomes stranger and more dangerous. What happens when the place you live, the place that seems so safe during the day, becomes a waking nightmare? I did notice a bit of slowdown in some areas and i'm not sure if that's a design decision or a bug. Either way it added to the gameplay and I didn't really mind it.

Com um gráfico bastante pixelado e um ambiente sombrio, os sustos estão garantidos nesse simulador de caminhada misturado com terror. O jogo é bastante simples e curto, mas excelente. Poucas falas e pequenos puzzles, de acordo com suas escolhas você pode presenciar mais de um final diferente. Recomendado!

it's short (30 minutes a playthrough) and you do a lot of back and forth for no reason. partway through they delete your decent light source and force you to have a bad one. the end segment is kinda ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥: you have these thin hallways and unless you have really good reaction time, the creature will just kill you if you get spotted.

This game is awful. The first part isn't too bad, but there's no discernible story, so you have no idea what you're doing or why things are happening. That's not necessarily bad if a story begins to unfold, but it never does. Near the end, a monster begins killing you. It appears randomly, and there's no way to know where it is, no way to avoid it, and no way to fight it. It just appears and kills you. You may die within seconds of respawning, or you may last a few minutes, but it will get you, and it's annoying as ♥♥♥♥.