questo gioco cade nella stessa trappola in cui sono caduti molti degli indie horror a cui ho giocato: dopo un po' diventano ripetitivi e noiosi e smettono di fare paura. mi dispiace per la bella idea sprecata: una casa che cambia forma e si sgretola e si sbroda ogni volta che il gioco viene aperto per confondere il giocatore che la deve attraversare. vorrei infine prendere per il culo fino alla sua morte il tizio che ha recensito scrivendo "non riuscirò mai più a dormire in casa mia". che minchiata stai dicendo???

Familiar become Unfamiliar. Something was there, now it isn't, something wasn't there, now it is. Change and decay seep into the walls til they begin to crack, til something unchangeable happens to the home. What was once a safe haven becomes a nightmare of the unreal, an inescapable perversion of your own personal life.
Perhaps it was a traumatic event caused by family. Perhaps it was merely an overactive imagination. Or, perhaps it is the house itself that hungers for your pain. The source is unknowable.
All that you could ever know is that piece by piece, the beast is tearing into your memories, devouring all you ever knew, and it cannot be undone.

I'm not entirely sure why this one is so unsettling. This game is little more than a dark, empty house. Your zone of vision is very limited, and everything else is shrouded in darkness. The first time through, room by unlocking room, you retrieve cassette tapes and play them. They tell you an extended metaphor between the house and the body. My heart skipped a few beats here and there. Then there's the next play, and it's like the game is a tape that's being worn out. Things change. Another play, things are wrong. They're not where they should be. The tapes go in and out of being understandable. The house changes around you. Kitty Horrorshow does a spectacular job of exploiting expectations in this game: expectations about where things are and should be in a home, expectations about how horror games play and progress.

"To carry it further, if we were to dissect a house as we might a human cadaver, we would find ourselves able to isolate and describe its various appendages and their functions in a decidedly anatomical fashion."

A haunted house is not about the ghosts living in it. The house itself is haunted. The house itself lives, it breathes, it eats, and it observes. Anatomy GETS it. Anatomy understands the house is its own entity. The house must eat. It is not doing it out of malice no, the house is not haunted because there are ghosts in it. The house is haunted because we do not understand that the house, too , lives.

"I dream that there are teeth, they're all over me, not right on me but within me like, cysts or bone spurs."

I am obsessed with anatomy.

When I was younger I used to have recurring dreams which weren't very scary but I was always terrified of having them. I was in a white-black void filled with tightropes of alternating thicknesses that I had to navigate across; the thinnest ones were like fishing wire and would slice me up real bad but for some reason I was more afraid of the thickest wires which were sausage-shaped and fleshy and standing on them wouldn't hurt me physically but I was repulsed by it none the less.

Where I grew up, houses didn't have basements. Instead we have attics or lofts which I have on occasion peered my head into and seen shapes move before fumbling for the lightswitch. In general though, I find that lofts take on a different role than that of the basement, instilling a sense of mystery rather than dread, where else would you store a century old painting or cursed music box.

There’s one word I haven’t been able to get out of my mind in the week since I finished Kitty Horrorshow’s masterpiece 'ANATOMY' - Betrayal


Think about the times in your life where you are the most vulnerable. Maybe it’s when you’re in the shower, when you’re stoned on the couch, when you’re sharing intimate moments with a partner. For some of us it’s easy to let our guard down and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, for others it can be nearly impossible. For all of us, though, there’s a pretty obvious setting in which we are at our absolute peak of vulnerability, and that is asleep in the comfort of our own homes. Anywhere else is foreign, it takes us time to learn a new space and build that key familiarity, but in our own homes we feel like we can know, without a shadow of a doubt, that we can trust the walls around us to keep us safe.


What happens when that home we leave our bodies to every night turns malicious? What happens when it betrays that trust?

Read my full review here: https://www.gohorror.com/post/anatomy-game-review

Anatomy is one of those cultural fetish objects that is written about by critics as a sort of Voight-Kampff test or Rubicon to cross. It falls within a style of art that appeals to interpretation and self expression through criticism: as in poetry we have analyses of Dickinson’s poorly scrawled letters or Sapho’s endlessly retranslated fragments; as in music we have this overturning and mirroring newly appearing in the music of Julius Eastman right now; as in film there are endless essays on the short and long works of Jonas Mekas or on the varying iterations of parlour tricks in Marienbad. In games, this type of fetish criticism tends to be more rare - cyclically there are discussions on IPs reverentially (the Dark Souls of whatever or the timeline of Zelda) but rarely does there crop up a game that pours out writing equally revealing of the game and the player/writer. Of course, nearly anybody who has chosen to do some writing on games has gone at too much length over a specific game niche to their own interests, but less often is there a game with an audience seemingly populated only by those who wish to espouse at length both the merits of the software and the experiences of play surrounding that .exe.

I won’t give into that impulse here, in any way moreso than is typical of my longwinded frothing, but I will try to at least see from where the bridge has been constructed in Anatomy and to where it ports traffic in its players. Something beyond its place and time (beyond the narcissistic indie prestige that comes with its makeup and distribution) resonates at a unique frequency for people, and just as much as it is worth investigating the game’s explicit texts and its audience, it is worth investigating Anatomy’s cultural presence presence. Just as in Dickinson, Eastman, and Mekas, the tension between alienation and opacity is not secluded in the face value of Anatomy: there is a read that dignifies the idea of the house as something which is present and obscured, enshrining the psychological force demanding the critical/diaristic writing that populates Anatomy’s cultural profile. That divide and union typifies this style of intensely isolated and cozied art: Eastman’s hammering minimalism unseats yet forcefully teaches his melodies violently; Dickinson’s ironclad form is belied by contrasting and incomplete metaphors built of the familiar; Mekas’ capture of comforting everyday life is reduced to truncated memory stylised outside the initial experience of it and further made partial in each recall; Anatomy sections its rooms with the inset knowledge of North American floorplan familiarity, and then betrays the player with endless trespassing transgressions across boundary. All of these are contrasting and codependent ideas which must be bridged by an emotional reaction to the art - founding an expanse which can only be commuted across by firmly planting descriptions of the experience which set off the audience member, which then demand a thorough extolling of that journey for the coordinated expectation of the journey’s destination to complete the thematic resonance. In Anatomy, the idea of the home is the horror but it is also the stakes. The player must identify with a primordial, and subconscious, ordination of sleep, sustenance, and security while equivocating to antagonistic ideals which are invading the subconscious via text denying any particularity towards a universal feeling of those fulfilled urges. I think this is why Anatomy impresses itself so much on its players: it strongly makes a case for its themes in as outspoken a manner as it can and directly counters them to the unspoken understanding most players have in costumed iconography making up the world. It’s this wonderful push and pull of where the site of resonance sits - it moves from the player inhabiting the home to the home consuming the player.

Outside of the text itself, Anatomy is also one of those prestige art objects which, as I said above, can be fetishised for its value of incompleteness. This is often the outside article which denotes the opposing ideals of insider and outsider art, but more importantly, differentiates insider and outsider audiences. The everything for everyone style of creation is the dominant form in all popular mediums - blockbusters like Avatar or Star Wars, thrillers from Stephen King or adventures from Brandon Sanderson, games like Assassin’s Creed or Halo: these are experiences which demand completion of their themes not from the place in the interfacer where those themes mine their iconographic substance, but from the collective consciousness informed by a heavily authored culture. Whether that is manichean ethics, broad antediluvian eco-populism, by numbers approaches of rudimentary logics initialising fictional systems and those fictions operating within them, or even mundanity of hyper familiar context sensitivities across an engine - all of these popular media require not an excitement of new and strange, often painful, mortal fuels within any individual’s capacity to care for what is being communicated, but instead scrap scaffolded by audience populism. Not that there is anything wrong with that on its face, especially when utilised for wrestling popular narratives away from dominant and harmful cultural forces (such as with Star Wars’ parodying 20th century American imperialism), but it typically leads to less acute extolling across any singular piece’s audience, such as is seen in Anatomy and its cultural cohorts. So why does Anatomy cause pens to burst from the palms of its players? Because suburban houses are scarier than the tombs in Tomb Raider, obviously.

Uma coisa que aprecio em Silent Hill é como o espaço urbano é subvertido; ao invés do amontoado de pessoas, que como o oceano, vem e vai com o fluxo do tempo, aqui não há nada além de criaturas criadas a partir da abstração humana. A subversão parte do senso de segurança e familiaridade, como se um espaço que nos era tão aconchegante torna-se um lugar de medo, de ansiedade, de terror. Em Anatomy vemos algo similar, só que ao invés do urbano o que é subvertido é algo tão querido e tão próximo de nós, algo que sempre reclusamos e sempre confiamos, a casa.

A cada canto da casa há sempre esse senso de paranoia à espreita, como se algo estivesse nós observando e esperando pelo momento certo, e a única coisa que podemos fazer é recolher as fitas e compreender o que cerca a gente. Das fitas surge uma alegoria que se tornara recorrente ao longo do jogo: a casa é como o corpo humano. As janelas são os olhos; a sala de estar o coração; os corredores são as veias; a escada é a espinha dorsal, e assim por diante. E então vem o quarto, a mente humana, o lugar, que como o jogo próprio diz, onde os sonhos são sonhados. Em síntese, é o lugar de maior conforto da casa, onde podemos nos expressar ao máximo, e relaxar e se acalmar nos momentos mais duros. O jogo até contrasta o quarto com o porão, mostrando o como a sua antítese, um lugar de extrema escuridão onde apenas restam memórias e monstros do passado. Ou seja, o porão seria a parte mais nebulosa da mente humana, algo que constantemente recalcamos momentos tão traumáticos que afetam nossas vidas. Entretanto, por mais que o porão aparenta ser o lugar mais conturbado e perigoso da casa, a realidade é o contrário, é o quarto que é, pois é o lugar onde colocamos toda a nossa confiança, e portanto é o lugar onde estamos mais vulneráveis. A qualquer momento algo poderia nos atacar e nem ao menos iríamos perceber, pois estamos tão confortáveis a ponto de pôr todo o senso de cautela e segurança sob a tutela da casa. É nesse sentido que o quarto toma como principal alegoria a boca, já que a qualquer momento a casa poderia nos trair e mastigar a gente. Anatomy, na mesma medida que subverte a casa, reflete também sobre o nosso senso de conforto, sobre como as vezes a casa, o lugar de nossa maior confiança, pode se tornar tão perigosa, e portanto tão traiçoeira. Porém Anatomy nos apresenta um aspecto mais conturbado da casa: é ela quem está no controle; é ela quem vai decidir a sua segurança. Não importa o que você faça, a qualquer momento a casa pode trair você e mastiga-lo em pedaços. Anatomy brinca com isso através de seu gameplay loop. É a casa que nos dá as ordens, e é ela que também libera os novos cômodos.

O que Anatomy mostra com a sua paranóia é como nós somos vulneráveis. Nas últimas semanas parantes próximos passaram por fortes infortúnios. O meu pai teve um infarto, para logo em seguida ser descoberto um derrame cerebral em meu avô. Ao final ambos estão em casa. Cada um passou pelos procedimentos necessários, e agora só o tempo pode responder. Partindo agora de mim, a princípio eu soube lidar com tais situações, só que é impossível de não refletir sobre como somos vulneráveis e que a qualquer momento poderíamos passar por um infarto ou por um derrame. Brincando um pouco mais com a alegoria de Anatomy, se a casa é como o corpo humano, no qual cada aspecto da anatomia humana é representado pelos cômodos, do mesmo modo o corpo humano também apresenta um dos aspectos da casa, o controle. Parte das vezes o que vai acontecer conosco não vai ser algo de nossa própria imperatividade, e sim do corpo. O que de fato vai decidir o nosso tempo de vida é a nossa própria anatomia, é ela quem nos domina e rege nossas vidas. Vivemos uma espécie de relação de força com o nosso próprio corpo, e que isso só demonstra o quão vulnerável somos. Como a casa, o nosso corpo também pode ser traiçoeiro e enganar a gente, e isso é inevitável. No final a única coisa que podemos de fato fazer é lidar com esse dilema, lidar com o fato de que poderíamos morrer a cada segundo que passa. Há sim um niilismo impregnado nesse dilema, e ao mesmo tempo também há uma resposta para tal questão.

No meu caso, bem, que se segue a vida e fodase mermão, vou é abrir um heintão brabo aqui.

THERE IS A TAPE IN THE DINING ROOM

Like most of Anatomy, it is not a line that should be utterly terrifying. Consciously - thanks to it being the first moments of the game, and having absorbed enough of the game through osmosis to know the game is not heavy on jumpscares/whatever - I knew there was nothing truly to be scared of in that room that is going to rip my head off IRL. And yet the first two times I tried playing this game, the sheer intensity of just walking around the few innocuous rooms at the start of the game was enough to have me Alt-F4 before anything had even really happened.

And yeah, I will concede, when it comes to this sort of thing I am a bit of a wuss. Particularly when it comes to the interface screw-y glitchy horror you get in a lot of Itch games, which Anatomy does like to throw at you.

But whilst that stuff always freaks me out, the general presentation of Anatomy is what really hooks under my skin. Just moving around the house has this weird feeling of intensity to it. The sound design is impeccable, the lighting just right, with a narrow field of view that makes it feel like the whole time you're never really sure you're alone. And of course, the fact that the game's setting is so deliberately ordinary adds this extra, primal layer to it all. Like an old memory of being alone in the house I grew up in and the fear that came with it resurfacing.

The main conceit of the horror is also really cool and well done. The concept of a place or location being the source of the horror itself is nothing new, but the intimacy of Anatomy adds a nice layer to it, especially with the very erudite sounding sciencey person who reads most of the tapes to you - the game's horror thesis is still gnawing at me a little, and I do kinda buy the point the guy on the tapes is saying...

So for a 30 minute experience of dread, Anatomy is fucking great. Probably the best horror game i've played since PT, even, and frankly, is very comparable to that game in general but for having less of a focus on direct scares. I do think it has issues - the game desperately, desperately needs subtitles and an actual options menu. It wouldn't clash with the game's aesthetic even as it basically already uses VHS closed captions on occasion. Without them i literally had to go find a subtitled playthrough on youtube to parse the entirety of some of the last tapes you collect. I would also say the game's one big actual scare is a bit dissapointing - its ok, and a perfect rounding out of the game's big theme, but looks a little goofy compared to the rest of what is an immaculate aesthetic, and is nowhere near enough of a crescendo to match up to the sheer dread built up before it.

Also, and this is the smallest of nits to pick, but the UNITY PERSONAL EDITION logo popping up every time you boot, for game that you will have to do so 3 times in 30 minutes to finish, is a bit immersion breaking for something that is otherwise so utterly captivating.

But don't let that take away anything too much from Anatomy. The small issues I have with the game are also mostly in retrospect. When playing it I haven't been as scared by media since PT, and it's theme is one that feels like it's going to linger with me for a while just like it. When a game makes walking down a simple Hallway I KNOW has nothing at the other end scary, that's when you know you're dealing with a properly excellent Horror creator.