Bokeh’s urban action horror reveals a nomadic soul

When we first looked at Slitterhead in E368, we glimpsed the terrifying monsters that burst from the heads of human hosts. Shocking it may have been, but this kind of body horror hardly marked a change in modus operandi for Bokeh founder Keiichiro Toyama, writer-director of the original Silent Hill and the Siren games, whose zombie-like shibito were all the more disturbing for retaining a semblance of human function. Still, we remained in the dark as to how this fresh brand of horror would play out, other than that it would adopt a more action-oriented approach. And certainly, as far as comparable experiences go, we didn’t have Stray and The Nomad Soul on our bingo card.

The former slides into our thoughts as we spend the opening moments of the game’s lengthy tutorial in control of a dog in fictional Asian city Kowlong (see ‘Counterfeit city’). Exploiting the canine’s instincts, we follow a scent of faint red swishes, navigating dirty narrow alleys. Yet the notion of ‘control’ here has a sinister undertone since our character isn’t the dog but ‘Hyoki’, a mysterious entity of yellow light that has possessed the animal. Toyama later tells us that interactions with non-human characters are not a large part of the game and came about by accident, but it’s an intriguing introduction. Especially since the headline monsters, inspired by supernatural beings in Chinese folklore that eat human brains, go by the name yegouzi, literally translated as ‘wild dogs’.