Hollowbody review: a haunting homage to PS1 horror that forgets why it evolved

Content warning: this article discusses graphic violence, disturbing imagery, and mature themes in an 18+ game.

Hollowbody is one of those games that feels like it’s been built out of a very specific kind of nostalgia, the slightly uncomfortable memory of late-90s, early-2000s survival horror, where everything was difficult by design, often because the technology was being pushed and flaws became game design, such as those awkward fixed camera angles that made horror games confusing. Nathan Hamley clearly knows that world inside out: Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite Eve, all those fixed-camera, fog-drenched corridors and inventory puzzles defined PS1 and early PS2 gaming. The ambition here is to pull that feeling back into focus, to recreate the mood almost exactly as it was, warts and all, and that’s always going to be a problem.

In a sense, as a piece of recreated gaming history, remade using Unity, Hollowbody absolutely nails atmosphere: rain hammering down on a decaying British housing estate, stairwells lit by flickering fluorescent tubes, corridors that feel too long and too empty, littered only by scrappy detritous and the occasional coprse, and there’s no question this is a game built around tone first, maybe second, maybe even third.

The problem is that it doesn’t just recreate the feeling of playing a PS1-era horror game; it recreates the problems too – clumsy controls, confusing camera angles, simple item-swapping puzzles, predictable enemies – in a way that reminds me why these games moved on from fixed cameras as soon as technology enabled. Suddenly going back into fixed camera hell, where you can’t quite see what you’re doing, swinging a signpost-axe at something that might be in range, or might not, but it's definitely staggering slowly in a familiar pattern; or I'm firing at enemies off-screen because I know they're there, and it all feels clumsy, deliberately so, but that doesn’t always make it enjoyable.

The good, the bad and the ugly

As you can tell, combat in particular is rough, not in a charming retro way either, and while I can respect what solo developer Nathan Hamley is going for – a classic sense of vulnerability and disorientation – it often tips into frustration because I’m not really scared or unnerved by the enemies lurking in these abandoned streets, off screen, oyt of sight, but instead I'm focused on wrestling with the controls and the camera just like I used to in 1998.

Puzzles fare better, at least most of the time, because when Hollowbody slows down and asks you to actually read a room, piece together notes, track down items and build a mental map of what’s going on, it clicks into something closer to classic survival horror design, and there are moments where it works, often wonderfully so when a puzzle clicks and the new area opens up. Even here there’s a tendency for things to overextend or undershare, and there’s a moment mid-game where I was looping through similar spaces, not quite sure if I’ve missed something obvious or if the logic is off (in one battery puzzle, it is, or at least, it felt so to me).

Yet, even with all of that, it’s hard not to keep playing Hollowbody, because the atmosphere really does nail that retro '90s horror game feel, whether it's the sound design, the pacing, the sense that you’re wandering through somewhere that’s seen a lot of nightmarish things happen – little environmental storytelling touches like cadavers that reveal backstories through design as much as the little notes you find – it all holds together in a way that kept me moving forward even when the mechanics and the core design is so beholden to the past it makes things frustrating.

The setting helps too, because Hollowbody's world isn’t the usual anonymous horror backdrop; it’s a very specifically British kind of decay: tower blocks and housing estates that feel recognisable but slightly ‘hollowed out’, and that gives the game a feel and sense of place you don’t see often in this genre. Where most horror games are dominated by Japanese and US lore and environments, it’s quite refreshing to play a retro-styled survival horror with a very UK-focused aesthetic, one that feels a little closer to the mundanity of 28 Days Later films than the shabby Americana of Silent Hill.

There are smart touches elsewhere as well, like the option to shift into a more modern third-person camera for exploration, which genuinely smooths out some of the worst navigational issues, even if it doesn’t completely solve them, and it speaks to a developer that is at least aware of the tension it’s playing with, between old design language and modern expectations, even if Hollowbody doesn’t always resolve that tension cleanly.

You can also see where the fixed camera game design is being used deliberately, not just as a limitation but as design language: the way it hides details, forces uncertainty, frames spaces in awkward ways, makes you disorentated in tight or similar spaces, like a dilapidated tower block, all of that is very much in hock to Silent Hill, and it deserves credit for that, even if the execution occasionally leans more into accidental confusion than sheer dread.

Strong on atmosphere

In the end though, Hollowbody is best understood as an experiment in mood, and in that respect it succeeds, because it absolutely commits to its vision and carries it through from start to finish, but as a game, especially a modern one, it feels caught between eras, wanting to preserve a very specific past while also trying to exist in the present, and those two things don’t always sit comfortably together.

Hollowbody is a game I admire more than I’d recommend, a game made with real care for the classics that came before it and the ambition to create that idea, especially impressive given it’s largely a solo project, but also one that reminds you, sometimes very directly, why survival horror didn’t stay the way it was.