The first hour of Hollowmere is as good as survival horror gets. Ranger Ada Kell walks out onto a boardwalk into fog so thick the lantern barely reaches her boots, and the only sounds are her footsteps, dripping water, and something heavy shifting below the planks. Nothing attacks you for a long time. You simply wait for it to.
The price of light
Bracken & Bone’s smartest decision is tying everything to lantern oil. Oil keeps your lantern lit, which keeps the fog at bay and reveals the boardwalk ahead. It is also the ammunition for your flare gun, the only reliable way to drive back the things living in the water. Every flare you fire is light you will not have later, and every shot is loud enough to draw more attention. I spent a lot of Hollowmere crouched in the dark, doing arithmetic. Resource placement is cleverly mean. Oil cans tend to sit just past the edge of your light, so reaching them means stepping into the dark for a few seconds, and the marsh is very good at making those few seconds feel like a minute. The sound mix sells all of it, with distant splashes panned precisely enough that I learned to read them like a map.
Saving is handled in ranger cabins, each with a single ledger and a woodstove that slowly burns out while you are inside. It is a lovely, anxious little system. The cabin is safe, but only for as long as the fire lasts.
Log entry, day four. The boardwalk doesn’t go where it went yesterday. I’ve stopped writing down where it goes.
In-game document, Survey Team Log
Lost in the marsh
The problem is the marsh itself. The boardwalks shift between visits, which is a terrific idea in the abstract and a frustrating one in practice. The hand-drawn map fills in as you explore but is redrawn when routes change, and by the midpoint I was spending long stretches retracing the same handful of paths to find which one now led to my objective. Tension does not survive that much repetition; dread turns into tedium.
When you cannot avoid a fight, combat is stiff. Ada swings a boat hook with all the grace you would expect from a park ranger, which is thematically appropriate but rarely fun. The final act also stumbles, piling on revelations about the survey team that contradict earlier documents and ending abruptly.
On Xbox Series X, Hollowmere targets 60fps and mostly hits it, but at launch I saw noticeable stutter when crossing between marsh zones. Accessibility options include subtitle sizing and backgrounds, a toggle for directional audio cues shown on screen, and an option to disable the camera shake during scares.
Update, October 10: The day-seven patch has largely eliminated the zone-transition stutter on Xbox Series X and added a map option that marks your most recent route. It helps, but it does not fix the underlying backtracking, so the score stands.
Horror fans who prize atmosphere above all will find plenty to love in Hollowmere’s first half. Just know that the fog never quite lifts on its design problems.
