Ex-Silent Hill devs show horror game Slitterhead at Summer Game Fest

The team of ex-Silent Hill developers known as Bokeh Game Studio gave horror fans a lengthy look at their new game Slitterhead on Friday at Summer Game Fest, revealing something fans might not have expected. Slitterhead looks like less of a creeping, psychological horror game in the vein of Silent Hill or Siren, and more of an action game involving swords and guns.

The intriguing twist, though, is that the weapons players will use to battle horrible mutations in Slitterhead are made of blood, bones, and viscera extracted from the characters you play as. And the characters you play as appear to be possessed by a tiny parasitic brainworm, which you control. As that worm, you can seemingly possess every man, woman, and dog on the street, leaping from organism to organism in a kind of parasitic parkour. Traversal through the world of Slitterhead is guts-based, too; we see characters swinging through the game’s city on grappling hooks made of gore.

Slitterhead also looks a little janky, in the way that PlayStation 2-era games could be. But that doesn’t appear to detract from the game’s overall compelling gameplay mechanics, which evoke busted-but-beloved games like Tokyo Jungle, Driver: San Francisco, and Messiah, with plenty of The Thing-style body horror thrown in. At one point in Slitterhead’s first gameplay trailer, we see a guy get his arm sliced off, then grab it with his own veins and reattach it, which absolutely kicks ass.

Bokeh Game Studio will release Slitterhead on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X on Nov. 8. The game studio was founded in 2021 by former staffers of PlayStation’s Japan Studio, where they developed the Siren and Gravity Rush games.

Bokeh is led by game designer Keiichiro Toyama, who co-founded the studio with game director Junya Okura and producer Kazunobu Sato, both of whom worked on the Siren series.