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.

For some reason I had a really hard time getting used to the control scheme (any of the control schemes really) and would play the practice level over and over again and get really frustrated. Eventually it just clicked and I had a lot of fun breezing through the levels. There are still a lot of issues, notably framerate problems and obstacles popping up out of nowhere right in front of your arwing. You really get the feeling that this was pushing the SNES hardware to the absolute limit. But despite, or maybe because of all that, there is an irresistible charm to the abstract geometric aesthetic. It really feels like those retro-futuristic 80s sci fi targeting computers and shit in Star Wars. And the soundtrack and sound effects really elevate that aesthetic.

Obviously no one should have high expectations for a cute little April Fool's visual novel, but the fact is there really isn't any deduction happening in this game. You basically just click through dialogue, click on the clue you found in the room, and then play a little Sonic minigame that stands in as you "thinking." The handful of actual choices you can make are solvable just by brute force guessing down the list of people. I guess it probably would be cuter if I had a connection to these characters.

I really really wanted to love this. It has so many things going for it that normally I'm all for: letting the player explore freely without holding their hand; allowing the player to encounter difficult and punishing scenarios right off the bat; a serious exploration of the morality of different factions and moral quandaries that go beyond 'good' and 'evil' choices... but unfortunately the frustration and the bugginess of it all proved too much for me. There is so much that doesn't get explained to you- I died so many times in the first cave to literal rats because I straight-up couldn't figure out how to attack or access my inventory. Later on, it turns out the way to resupply your companions' ammunition or change their weapons is to use the "steal" function and place those items in their inventories. You frequently end up in combat situations that you are almost impossible to survive, but instead of feeling immersed in a dangerous world full of death and hard choices, the meaningfulness of death just dissipates as you learn to save scum before any challenging encounter.

All of these are difficult game design choices that balance player freedom and frustration, which are all understandable. But what really drove me over the edge was the simple fact that your companions block your path. How many times do you walk into a small room, only for fucking Ian to follow you in and then just stand unmoving in the doorway, blocking you from ever leaving? The final straw was when I got finished talking to the Gunrunners, went to leave the island, and found the guy just standing at the other end of the bridge, blocking the path. Nothing you say to him can get him to move, and what's worse is my party members had followed me onto the narrow bridge, blocking my way back onto the island. Sure, I could always load an earlier save from a couple hours earlier, but the thought of it just fills me with dread. I think canonically my character is just forever stuck on a thin bridge over a pit of toxic waste, blocked in by two idiots who won't get out of the way.

I'm in the middle of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea right now and I saw a notification that this was on sale on Steam so I figured that was a sign. I'm a naturally claustrophobic guy so the idea of being on a submarine has always scared me, and after watching Das Boot they terrify me.

This little game does a good job of capturing the dread and claustrophobia of being on a submarine, with the added horror elements of being submerged in an ocean of blood in a universe in which all inhabited planets and their stars suddenly vanished. That being said, the experience of this is mostly tedious- cross-referencing coordinates with a map, delicately fine-tuning the angle of the submarine; but the tedium builds up the anxiety. The suspense of the proximity sensors going off when there shouldn't be anything there leads to a couple good jump-scares. But overall don't go into this with too high of expectations. It is mostly a really cool concept executed in a very limited scope. It doesn't overstay it's welcome I guess, which is nice.

The dithered 1-bit visual style really goes a far way in selling the mysterious magic of the central gimmick here. Exploring these frozen moments of death in three dimensions really feels like you're breaking the rules of reality in a way that is extremely satisfying. Piecing together clues and cross-referencing data points can get a little tedious sometimes, but there are enough 'aha' moments that it keeps you wanting to go on. It's especially satisfying to explore a moment of death beyond the immediate circumstances of the victim, piecing together a chronology of all the other sailors through these disparate moments, sometimes on other decks of the ship.

As far as the story itself goes, it's perhaps a little underwhelming compared to the mechanics of uncovering that story. While there are a lot of fun little vignettes to discover, I was hoping to find more fleshed-out personalities to the characters. But, with so many characters, I suppose it's understandable that they're all mostly one-note. The mystery of the secret 'Bargain' chapter also gave me high hopes for a real shocking twist to the narrative, but unfortunately all you get is a pretty unremarkable extra scene. Still, the experience of piecing together this narrative is really something special.

What I assumed would be a cozy, relaxing game ended up giving me a premature midlife crisis. Day in and day out, waking up and performing the same, repetitive tasks, hurrying to plant and harvest crops in order to buy more crops to plant and harvest, the workday fading in a blink of an eye all while the years stretched on endlessly past the horizon, all this meaningless toil, for what? For what? To repeatedly rehearse the same vapid lines with the girls of the town, flirting with Eve, the independent yet troubled alcoholic, only for her to give up her life and personality to marry me, never leaving the house, so miserable in her life choices that she loses affection points if you go to bed with her (is this a bug, or merely a reflection of her misery at playing the role of housewife?) I gave up about 2 years in.