Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama made a prototype for an “AAA Siren successor” while at Sony, which became the basis for Slitterhead
Bokeh Game Studio released Slitterhead worldwide on November 8 for the PC (Steam), PS4/PS5 and Xbox Series X❘S. It is the first major project of Silent Hill and Siren creator Keiichiro Toyama since his departure from Sony’s Japan Studio in 2020. In a recent interview with Denfaminicogamer, the creator revealed some insights into the origin of his new indie studio’s body-hopping, brain-sucking horror action game.
“Slitterhead was born out of the idea of What if I were to make Siren 3?” Toyama told Denfaminicogamer. Apparently, while the creator was still at Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), the Siren series saw a revival in popularity, which prompted talks about making a successor. SIE wanted this title to be an AAA game, so Toyama conceptualized a big budget game that had a “Siren-like concept.” He explains that one of the ideas he came up with for this “Siren 3” led to the prototype for Slitterhead.
“Recently, there are more and more games that are labelled ‘horror,’ but I personally think that the horror genre and AAA game development don’t go well together,” Toyama admits. Working around this mismatch, he came up with the idea of making the stage of his Siren successor an open-world 90s Hong Kong. “I thought that if I chose a place that I really felt like visiting and experiencing, there would surely be others who felt the same way.”
However, while Toyama was in the midst of conceptualizing the game, “various circumstances” led to his leaving SIE and going indie. As this meant his new project would no longer be a triple-A game, the creator had a lot to reconsider. Despite this change in circumstances, he ultimately decided against discarding the idea, and the rest of Bokeh Game Studio voted for developing it.
The result was Slitterhead, a gritty indie game in which a formless spiritual lifeform navigates a neon-lit, fictionalized 1990s Hong Kong. In a blend of horror and action, the game’s Siren-reminiscent mechanics emphasize speed and fluidity, leveraging the protagonist’s ability to possess human bodies to battle parasitic monsters.
No longer being part of SIE meant that Toyama was able to make Slitterhead with a high age-rating (17+ in the US, 18+ in Japan) in mind from the start. “This would have been difficult to achieve during my time at SIE, so this time, I thought I’d take on a daring challenge.”
Slitterhead is available now for the PC (Steam/Epic Games Store), PS5/PS4 and Xbox Series X|S.
