Game review: Hollow (Nintendo Switch)

In space, no one can hear you scream. The idea of horror set in outer space was a fairly unique one when Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic Alien shocked audiences back in 1979. Today, sci-fi horror has become its own genre, not only in films, but in video games like the hugely popular Dead Space trilogy.

The isolation of a space station or remote colony is a wonderful setting to unleash horrors on the poor characters stuck in these horrible places. From gothic Lovecraftian “uh oh, we opened a gate to hell” demonic terror to disgusting body horror found in classics like The Thing and Leviathan, there’s a lot of room for creativity in the genre.

I recently discovered this little title on the Nintendo Switch that checked all the right boxes for me, where your character has to explore a space station where the crew is all missing and you’re desperately trying to find a way out. Last week I reviewed the amazing Hollow Knight, so how does this title simply named Hollow stack up?

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Hollow is a slow-burn first person adventure and while it has elements of an FPS, its more about exploration than combat. You begin the game with a sequence that puts you on a shuttle preparing to dock with the space station you’re headed to. In some ways, it reminded me of the opening sequence of Bioshock, just not nearly as awe-inspiring.

As soon as you exit your shuttle into the space station, you’ll quickly learn that something is horribly wrong. There are no people to be found and audible alerts give you warnings that some systems are offline.

The first thing you’ll notice is how slow your character moves. He has two speeds, “painfully slow” and “why bother”. The first is laughably your fast walking speed, which would get him lapped by octogenarians power walking around the mall. The second is used for moving stealthily when necessary. Regardless, it’s enough to make most people give up on this game right away. A demo of this game would have turned away any potential buyers.

Not only is your movement incredibly slow, its jittery and jarring. You feel like you can’t walk straight ahead as the center of your viewpoint shifts around awkwardly. I honestly felt that I was struggling to keep the protagonist walking straight even when pressing directly in one direction. Its jarring and unpleasant.

Almost immediately you take a bit of damage, which introduces the healing element of the game — syringes. Finding these is rare, so avoiding damage is vital.

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After following a conveniently blocked off path, you eventually find your way to your first puzzle that restored power to current section of the ship, which I enjoyed. This opened up a new path and let me continue shambling to my next goal. Seriously, it felt like I was piloting a zombie.

As you explore, you’ll find logs and notes left behind by a survivor who is trying to guide you to safety and this is the path you’ll follow through the game. I learned how to kick, which functions as a basic attack and can help with some puzzles. The next area I discovered held my first weapon, an awkward gun with very limited ammo. When you’re out of bullets, you’re essentially helpless until you find more. Your kick knocks monsters back, but doesn’t really hurt them. You won’t outrun them, so if you run out of bullets you’re basically screwed. Apparently the PC version has a melee weapon that was removed from the Switch version for some reason — so they created a problem for presumably no benefit.

Before leaving the area, I finally came across the first enemy. The monster was a creepy, naked (aka boobies, which is why I didn’t use any screenshots with monsters in them) humanoid creature that was well designed and unsettling to look at. A few shots and the thing went down. On the path to my next objective I had to fight off a few more of these things. Extra ammo is hidden around the levels, but it too is in short supply. Whats worse is you ammo count is extremely hard to see, hidden in a faded section of the minimal UI.

Eventually you’ll start witnessing hallucinations and piecing together more of the story, but the hard cold truth is the gameplay is so mind-numbingly slow and dull that I lost interest. I never even managed to find a second type of enemy before I finally decided my time would be better spent on something else.

Full walkthroughs of this game suggest the game can be finished in under 3 hours when you know where to go and the puzzle solutions, which would be under 2 if your character walked at a normal speed instead of the sloth-like pace you’re stuck with.

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Hollow has effective aesthetics that draw you into its world, with detailed environments and elements that make the space station feel like a lived-in world. However, after a couple of hours wandering around this place everything started to look the same. Thankfully the game doesn’t let you veer too far off course so you don’t get lost in identical corridors.

The space station is represented with cold, desaturated hues, while sometimes throwing in something vibrant when you find something unique or unnatural. It has the look of the dull gray, blue and brown games that dominated the previous generation. In addition, the textures and visuals are muddy and blurry.

Sound is not bad, with quality voice acting and wonderful atmospheric effects. A Silent Hill-inspired static effect is used when monsters get close, but it kicks in after you see them which kills the effect that worked so well in Silent Hill.

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While I had high hopes for this game and initially enjoyed it (despite the molasses movements speed of the protagonist), it quickly played its hand and fell into mediocrity. The graphics are detailed, but blurry and repetitive. I could live with that if the game was good, but sadly its not.

The gameplay is slow, boring, buggy and not well-designed.

Hollow feels like a concept that started with “we should make a game like the love child between Dead Space and Event Horizon…” and the brainstorming stopped there. Good ideas exist here, but they’re wrapped around a completely mediocre video game.

Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!

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