The next accommodates spoilers for ANATOMY (2016).
Kitty Horrorshow’s first-person “strolling simulator” horror ANATOMY (2016) stays a masterclass in subverting use of area in horror video games. It’s a horror recreation that has a thesis, and a theme! It doesn’t need to distort itself with a prolonged runtime, further characters, or irrelevant monstrosities. Moderately than specializing in the potential monsters that lurk in damaged houses, ANATOMY transforms the house itself – the area and construction and type of online game exploration itself – into horror. The sport is centered round gathering tapes from round the home, and gathering all of them grants you entry to a brief, enjoyable little argument about what the trendy area is.
The sport argues that “[t]he anatomy of the home is such that this analogy is much less superficial than at first it could appear. To hold it additional, if we have been to dissect a home as we’d a human cadaver, we’d discover ourselves capable of isolate and describe its numerous appendages and their features in a decidedly anatomical trend. There’s even a good variety of direct comparisons to be drawn between these organs of a home and people of a human physique” (transcribed by whereismywizardhat).
This direct comparability of the human physique and the areas that we discover is a robust one, and it’s highly effective in ways in which many different creators have examined in numerous attention-grabbing methods. ANATOMY is a well-worn topic of critique. It’s additionally not onerous to think about different video games that use areas on this means – Silent Hill (Konami) is an apparent contender, as is Pathologic (Ice Choose Lodge 2005), and The Void (Ice Choose Lodge 2008). When it comes all the way down to it, the physique we’ve got is, properly, the one physique we’ve got. We would be capable to change it a bit, however it’s the factor that sticks with us for our complete life, and the way we navigate area and society adjustments lots based mostly on our personal understanding of our physique.
ANATOMY’s criticism, initially, is about how areas have the capability to develop into haunted or monstrous based mostly on the period of time they lie deserted. Anatomy’s home turns into bitter and emotions of abandonment and frustration swell up inside it. What did I do mistaken, the home asks, why was I not ok?
The home’s look, at first, is innocuous sufficient. Apart from the actual fact it’s pitch black in its cavernous hallways, it looks like a reasonably common suburban home, with really impressed inside adorning expertise occurring. Photos of skeletal cats hissing at one another, Gothic-era work, and what seems like scraps from a zoologist’s handbook hold from framed footage on the partitions as you wander round. Some doorways can’t be opened till you’ve listened to the best tape. It’s a linear exploration recreation, goading you deeper and deeper into the home, till, because the final tape snaps and hisses to a detailed, the sport abruptly ends.
I’m left reflecting on how areas can inform us about ourselves, can mirror our worst fears. One of many recreation’s blurbs on the shop web page reads:
“I don’t sleep in my home anymore, as a result of I’m afraid of what it’s going to do to me. [… Anatomy] scared me in a means that no online game ever has.” – CoolGhosts, “ ANATOMY: The Greatest Horror Recreation Ever”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j92V4RqnoIY
The hyperlink to that web site now not exists, however their YouTube video nonetheless stands. Is ANATOMY actually the perfect horror recreation ever, because the video title claims? It’s not scary within the conventional horror recreation sense. There’s no grand reveal, or a way of catharsis that comes from confronting a visual monstrosity, one thing that we are able to no less than see as being defeatable. I believe the above quote dips into the hyperbolic – “I don’t sleep in my home anymore”? – but it surely does communicate to no less than a part of what Anatomy is getting at. The home is such a predominant fashionable assemble. All of us have, I believe, our personal relationship to what it’s {that a} home, or a house, means to us. So when that area is unsafe – or no less than after we acknowledge the capability for feeling unsafe in a single’s dwelling – we’re unsettled. Those that have by no means thought of not being at dwelling in a house are immediately confronted with the distress of ANATOMY’s damaged home, that wishes an individual to fill it.
In ANATOMY, an individual’s particular person understanding of the house is more likely to be deconstructed or subverted, and so is one’s concept of the horror recreation as a automobile for jumpscares. ANATOMY strings us alongside, constructing and constructing however by no means ever permitting the stress to deflate with a scripted jumpscare or a hideous however predictable monster. ANATOMY forces you to soak in its dread ambiance. One participant I confirmed the sport to stated that it didn’t look scary when watching, however when enjoying, it was genuinely discomforting. They didn’t need to play anymore after about ten minutes. The real uncertainty as as to if or not one thing is about to occur is upsetting. When replaying it this 12 months, it jogged my memory of CONCLUSE (a recreation I hadn’t considered in years) which is simply slathered in darkness. Each work to make the participant excessively paranoid, wanting nothing greater than to simply stop the rattling recreation earlier than one thing occurs. It’s by no means clear what that one thing is, or even when one thing will occur, however nonetheless, that paranoia is there. Most individuals simply stop the sport or hand it over to a different participant in a gaggle setting. When the sport quits us out, will we dare advance the story by reopening it? The sport decays increasingly as we play, emphasizing the residing destroy that’s the fashionable dwelling, the secure construction slowly sporting away the longer we inhabit (or don’t inhabit) it.
ANATOMY positions the human being inside the dwelling as in the end subordinate to the area’s format. We cluster in the lounge; we’re blood cells within the hallways; we cloister in our bedrooms, remoted and alone with our ideas, and with the home. Area, ANATOMY argues, dominates our ideas and pervades our fears. We now have a tenuous, complicated relationship with the areas we design, the issues that we create – and the ways in which they’ll slowly start to take us over. ANATOMY asks the query – what if there may be nothing at midnight besides our dwelling? It makes us worry the concept areas are sentient in a roundabout way, or that areas can develop past us. It makes us worry that our personal minds can manifest horrors higher than the rest anybody else can think about. The worry of the void, that everlasting enemy, is in all places. ANATOMY capitalizes on that at each alternative, to make us afraid of area and individuals on the identical time, even when we don’t bump right into a single soul.
You may purchase ANATOMY from itch.io.
