I've played all of Kitty Horrorshow's Haunted Cities games, so I thought I knew what I was getting into, but I was not ready. Where those games are brilliant, little vignettes into these creepy themes and aesthetics, Anatomy TERRIFIED me.

The movie Skinamarink taps into a lot of similar primal childhood fears as this, of being alone in a really dark house, slowly moving through this space, hoping desperately for something to break the tension and dread. A lesser game would provide you with this cheap catharsis, a jump scare, a spooky little guy. But in Anatomy, the fear is so much deeper. The house is a living breathing organism, and you are a parasite haunting it.

Despite the stripped-down simplicity of this game, in which the only real mechanic per se is finding tapes and playing them,Kitty Horrorshow employs game-specific mechanics masterfully. She knows what you as a player are expecting from this experience, and repeatedly twists that expected catharsis away from you. In one moment, the tape narrates about a man entering the door, walking down the front hallway, towards the room you are currently in, and it's so much scarier peeking around that doorway and seeing that there is no one there. Another little subversion is that the first playthrough, so much of the fear is in the near total darkness, and yet when you can later turn on the TV and the lamp, the light is barely reassuring, relieving none of the dread of this house itself. And do I even have to mention the tape in the upstairs bedroom?

Play this game, and make sure you check the read me to make sure you get the full experience.

When I was a kid, being home alone at night terrified me. I would jump at even the slightest unexpected noise and need to turn several lights on just to make the short journey from my room to the bathroom, the familiar halls of my small duplex suddenly becoming frightening and dangerous to me. I knew there were no monsters in any closets or under any beds, no ghosts haunting the place, but my scared little kid brain couldn’t help but ask… what if?

Anatomy brought that old childhood fear back in a way no horror game I’ve ever played has done, doing so much with so little to create an intensely chilling atmosphere. Exploring this dark, shadowy home with nothing to keep you company besides the tapes found within its rooms, hypersensitive to any and all sounds, the trepidation about what, if anything, is hiding around each corner and behind each door. Just like when I was a kid, I know there’s no monster waiting to jump out of a closet and get me, but I still can’t stop thinking “what if?”

Deeply evil game. There is nothing in this game that can actually do harm to the player character in an explicit or mechanical sense and yet the presentation creates such a powerful sense of constant danger and hostility that despite knowing going into it that I would never round the corner to find a Scary Guy waiting to bash my head in, I was gripped with indescribable dread throughout. There are some truly cruel moments in which the game forces you to do things you absolutely do not want to do in order to progress. Masterful horror. It also feels just deeply, intrinsically trans in a way I really can't put to words? Like I can't point to any specific thing about this game that is particularly trans other than maybe the bit that describes a home invasion in a way that feels more like a sexual assault, but just looking at this game and KittyHorrorShow's other output I was able to correctly guess that she's trans before I got confirmation that that was the case, there's definitely something going on here that I can't quite put my finger on but I feel it in my bones.