I’ve often worried that I would never experience a piece of media that made me feel like House of Leaves did. I don’t mean I’m looking for something that plays with form in the same way, though that was a big part of the novel that made it such a touchstone for me, but rather something that gives me the same combination of intellectual and visceral horror in a way I’ve never experienced. Something that not only stimulates my rational mind but also bypasses it and terrorizes my primordial lizard brain. Something that brings me back to the childhood fear of unknown things lurking in the dark. Thankfully, my worries were put to rest when trying out Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy for its 10-year anniversary.
It’s really hard to describe what makes Anatomy so special just from a brief gameplay description. At its most basic level, it’s just about walking around a dark house picking up audio tapes and listening to them. From that description, you might expect something like Slender: The Eight Pages, where you’re being stalked by some sort of horrible, unkillable creature. But that’s not what Anatomy is.
The type of fear it’s going for isn’t the jump scare type, but rather a dread that seeps into your bones as you go.
The game is also presented as though you are watching it on a VHS, complete with tracking lines and a low static-y noise. To complement the analog horror aesthetic is a low-poly look that adds an aura of ambiguity to what you’re seeing, allowing your mind to fill in the blanks. Many games rely on eerie music to set the mood, but there’s hardly any sound in Anatomy. No music, no footsteps, just the crackly audio of the tapes and the creaking of the doors.
At its core, what makes it scary is both the contents of the tapes and the feeling of going through the house, each ratcheting up the intensity throughout the hour-long runtime of the game. It’s a haunted house game that asks you to think about the house itself as a body, and what it means for you as a person to pass through it. I really want to get into some of the details that make this game so affecting, so after this, I’m going to dive into spoilers of specific moments and concepts.
The game is three dollars on itch.io, so I wholly recommend you just pick it up and play it a couple of times unspoiled (there are multiple endings), but for everyone else, feel free to read on.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
The game starts in a dark room. It’s astonishingly dark. So dark it feels like a mistake. I immediately had the feeling that I should hug the wall to make sure I didn’t get lost, like a kid in the basement whose parents turned off the light because they didn’t know someone was still down there. It’s part of the intentional mood that the game wants to put you in from the first moment. Starting in the entry way of a small suburban house, you walk forward and turn right into the kitchen, where you find an audio tape and a tape player. After listening to it, text appears on the screen to tell you there is another tape in the dining room. This is the core structure of the game – listen to a tape, go to the next room it tells you.
This breeds a familiarity with the house itself. It tells you to go to the living room, and you know where that is because you’ve passed by it. But the moment it told me to go to the bedroom, my stomach sank. I realized that would require me going to the second floor, something I hadn’t yet explored; somewhere foreign and alien to me. This was one of the first of many moments that unsettled me through smart use of game design, writing, and understanding of human psychology. It’s a simple trick, but one that made me once again afraid of what lies in the dark, right as I was getting comfortable with it.
The tapes have a very dry and academic tone to them, starting by talking about the importance of the house to modern civilization before describing the rooms of the house as organs, ruminating about what the core functions of a house are, and comparing it to the human body. As they begin to “dissect a house as we might a human cadaver,” they draw parallels between windows and eyes, living rooms and hearts, all subtly beginning to plant the seed in your mind that the house you wander in is alive. It’s incredibly effective, elevating the haunted house story by not making it a ghost that menaces you, but rather the structure itself.
After a few tapes, you notice a pattern. Each recording describes a room, and then you’re sent to it. This is used to chilling effect with a wonderful bait and switch where you hear a monologue about the blackness of the basement, a dark place where memories are buried, then immediately have to venture there. It’s a perfect moment of dread as you descend into a room that’s darker and bigger than any other you’ve been in. It feels like a place where, if you get away from the wall, you’d be lost in an ocean of shadows. But you go down there, find a tape, and nothing happens.
When you get back to the kitchen and put that tape into the recorder, it starts talking about how the real most frightening location in the house is the bedroom. You go back upstairs to the master bedroom and find a tape, but when you turn around, the door is gone, and a tape player sits on the wall. Playing this tape begins a monologue about the true nature of the bedroom – “It is here, in the bedroom, that we are at our most vulnerable. Each night we shut our senses to the world for hours at a time, trusting in the house to keep us safe until next we wake.” It’s one of the most effective pieces of writing in the game, ending with a chilling line right before the game forcibly quits, ending your first run.
There’s a note on the game’s itch.io page that says to play the game multiple times for more endings, but what it’s really hinting at is that the first “ending” isn’t really the conclusion of the game. Much like Nier: Automata, the “second playthrough” of the game is really just a continuation of the narrative, presenting you with the house again, but with changes. The tapes start similarly, but become distorted in eerie ways before beginning to change entirely. The text telling you where to find the next tape is all wrong, with extra letters flowing offscreen. Glitches start appearing, warping the house itself in ways that make it strange and unfamiliar.
At one point, while exploring the house during the second loop, I realized you could turn on the light in the living room, and somehow this made it feel even more wrong. I thought the break from the darkness would be a relief, but it left everything feeling so naked and exposed. By this time, the house-as-a-body metaphor had fully got its hooks in me, and turning on the light felt like violating the house, seeing something it didn’t choose to show me. A book with good writing could present these same ideas to me, in fact The Haunting of Hill House heavily inspired this game with its famous opening, but the fact that this is a game that allowed me to interact with it and led me to come to this feeling rather than telling me through prose is what makes it truly special and justifies Anatomy as a video game, rather than any other medium.
The end of this loop is the closest thing this game gets to a jump scare, and it comes from a little creak. In the final tape, you hear a different voice interrupt the normal narrator, and it slowly becomes apparent that this voice is probably the house itself. The voice describes a man walking through the house, vandalizing it as he goes, then the house knocks him down the stairs by slamming the door on him. Right after this finishes, there’s the sound of the basement door opening right behind you, beckoning you to come down and meet the same fate as the man in the tape. A stellar moment that sounds so simple and understated, but feels monumental because of the tone and writing of everything surrounding it.
In the third loop, everything is more explicitly nightmarish. A red glow permeates the rooms. Furniture is floating off the ground or flickering in and out of sight. Strange sinew stretches across walls. The first tape I found in this loop was one of the most horrifying things in this game, a loop of someone screaming on a distorted recording. Usually, these tapes would run out after a certain point, but nothing I did stopped this tape; it’s wailing coming through the walls of adjacent rooms as I tried to distance myself from it. This type of horror sometimes feels cheap or unearned, but the way Anatomy perfectly raises the tension and terror makes it feel completely justified.
Eventually, it once again leads you to the basement, where it delivers a monologue that makes everything clear – not only is this house alive, but it also hates you. Hates you for prying and interfering. For harassing it. It’s been left alone for so long, and now you’ve disturbed it. This ends with one of the best lines in the game, as teeth begin to grow from the floor and ceiling: “When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.”
There are a couple of different endings that happen here, but you’re presented with a scene that takes place outside of the house. Looking at other people’s discussions online, it seems it’s not really clear what causes each ending, but mine had me walking down a city street, leading up to the house. It’s a jarring feeling to be outside after spending so much time trapped in the house, making for an interesting juxtaposition.
Launching the game one more time places you on the floor, unable to move and staring at the tape player. A final tape plays. If you load the game again, you’re still on the floor, stuck in the silence. There’s some instructions in the game’s Readme file about how to reset the game so you can play it again, but it was such a haunting way to bring this to a close. It left me with this feeling that no matter how much I wanted to start again, I was still just at the mercy of the house.
You always hear people say that a house has “good bones,” but Anatomy made me contemplate the question “what if a house had teeth?” And not in a Monster House cartoon-y way, but rather like a hungry dog waiting for the chance to finally bite you for teasing it so much. Even though the game lasts under an hour, it burrowed into my mind more than pieces of fiction several times that length. Ten years since its release, it hasn’t lost a single ounce of its dread, making for one of the most unsettling games I’ve ever played.
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