Slitterhead is a game that isn’t quite in my wheelhouse (I’m not a horror guy by any means)…but where it is set absolutely does. When I saw the title at PAX West, the moment I saw the buildings and the streets where the demo took place, I uttered aloud…this takes place in Hong Kong, doesn’t it. To which the rep manning the booth corrected me by stating it takes place in “Southeast Asia”. Well it turns out my gut instinct was right as the game’s developer Bokeh Game Studio released today, a mini-documentary which illuminates the inspiration for setting of their upcoming horror title.
The clip titled “Kowlong Express: Bringing Forgotten Fragments into Slitterhead” details the studio founder Keiichiro Toyama’s fascination with a bygone period of the once British Colony. Toyama (who doesn’t address who he is in the clip…at all!) goes on to say how he sees how Kowloon with its claustrophobic Kowloon Walled City help inspire cyberpunk works such as Ghost in the Shell and games like Kowloon’s Gate. He sees the dichotomy of the bustling business districts mirrored with the unseen alleys where unsavory things can occur. Another point he makes in this travelog is that the advent of smart phones means you really can’t get lost anymore, but a city like Hong Kong is hiding all sorts of sights and sounds waiting to be found.
I am genuinely intrigued to see how the team at Bokeh Game Studio will be able to replicate the town during the early 90s in their game. I might have to kill some parasitic monsters, but I’ll gladly take a journey into a town during a period I couldn’t be acquainted with (I immigrated from Hong Kong in 87, when I was 6).
Slitterhead is set for a November 8th release on PC, the PlayStation and Xbox platforms. XSEED Games will be selling a physical Day 1 edition of the game only on the PlayStation 5…I might need to grab a copy just for posterity sake.
Kowlong Express: Bringing Forgotten Fragments into Slitterhead
