Hollowbody’s familiar magic doesn’t lie in otherworldly places. It lies in the rubble of the ordinary.
HollowbodyDeveloper: Headware GamesPublisher: Headware GamesPlayed on: PC via SteamAvailability: Out now
Though ostensibly set in a future of flying cars and holographic IDs, Hollowbody’s world is one that most of us would recognise – and I don’t just mean its damp, dark British weather. I could exit my front door right now and take you to half dozen housing estates in my immediate vicinity that boast the same identikit 60s semis seen in Hollowbody. The same block of flats you explore here sits on the skyline of every city in the country.
Is that why Hollowbody unsettles me more than I’d like to admit? Is that why poking around abandoned flats and canvassing empty streets leaves me so on edge? I’ve always had a penchant for horror set against the humdrum. Put me in an H.R. Giger-inspired world, and I’m grossed out, sure, but it’s a setting so, ahem, alien to me, it’s hard to feel real fear because I just can’t imagine ever there.
Drop me into a haunted semi-detached, though? Make me paw through a kitchen where the plates from last night’s meal are still stacked up in the sink, or force me to rummage through someone’s bedroom where a body melts into the bedsheets and the book they were reading sits exactly where it was left, mouldering on the bedside table? That stuff me.