SLITTERHEAD
it'd be easy to think of slitterhead as Siren 4 with the serial numbers filed off. same technomysticism, same structural quirks, same playful approach that sees horror as a particularly goopy, pliant, extroverted genre where coded alphabets, shotguns made of blood, and zergling micro can sit effortlessly alongside spooky colour grading and psychic hauntings. while the particulars are different, the mode of adaptation couldn't be more appropriate: a form for every occasion
inspired by battle manga and prehistoric megafauna hunts, its core action revolves around collective effort where the human body's a disposable resource and continuity persists after death. giant bionicle bugs stomp and howl and delimb while you command a modest army of misfits, homemakers, and salarymen using bodyjumps and bloodplay; rarely sophisticated, but gratifying and inventive enough that it hardly matters. aside from some small issues with the superheroism of rarities (party members) and the obscene utility of the parry, it's a perfectly sound system that aims higher than it needs to and largely pulls it off. what's more interesting tho is everything else
toyama mentioned that a number of environmental artists applied to work at bokeh specifically due to their passion for the setting, and it shows. kowlong's bathed in neon and frot with foreskin monsters and yegouzi -- a melting dream where unvoiced story beats are overdubbed with incongruent barks, the most intimate exchanges take place in spinning grocery store purgatories, and everything's backed by boiler room synthesizers, geological drones, and sultry cantopop. it's a space as much shaped by freezeframes of sulking models smoking cigarettes, massage parlours, noodle houses, tourist t-shirts, and seedy nightclubs as teeth, tendrils, and repulsion. where silent hill (1) drew from places distant and foreign, and siren from places intimate and familiar, slitterhead is the yearning and melancholy of places long since vanished both into and from memory
the narrative threads throughout have the same strange, delicate quality; toyama's returning fascination with causality and connectivity often building toward something much smaller in scale than you might expect. the greater body of lore locked behind ciphers speaks of something more obtuse and unwieldy, but in the moment-to-moment it's a tender, local story of personal grief and collective anxiety. it seems absurd then that I'd want to sum it up as something as acidic as "harlon ellison anime thriller", but slitterhead doesn't really tie up neatly or without contradiction. it's loopy science fiction, innerpersonal horror, wads of gore, rule of cool, neonoir walking sim, diet collectathon, and a couple noun swaps off from arcade racer. you could honestly probably make a case for it being something of a JRPG -- it even has that one dude who joins late out of nowhere, gets no character development, and is inexplicably, cartoonishly broken. maybe someone somewhere can wrap all this stuff up tidily, but I can't. all I know's that it has my favourite yamaoka soundtrack to date, the sickest cutscene I've seen since the race sequence in FFXIII, and it made me & brute fluent readers of a fictitious language
everybody else in the genre better pray bokeh never get a budget