ANATOMY - Game Review
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?
As much as it is a video game, ANATOMY is a vessel for pieces of spoken word recorded to tape, and then played back in this kitchen. True to the name, these tape recordings paint the house as a living organism with biology, systems and, of course, anatomy. You scour this house which is at once totally alien and yet eerily familiar, searching for more pieces to this narrative, and in the meantime this sense of betrayal grows and grows. I know how a house works. Of course I do. I’ve lived in one my whole life, and have visited countless more. I know what a house is, and this isn’t one. This isn’t where the bathroom goes. Garages aren’t supposed to be this big. This kitchen is too deep. It’s dark – painfully dark – and there’s not a single light switch to make it brighter. Who needs this many bedrooms anyways? This isn’t a house, no, this is a space not designed for me.
At $2 and only 45 minutes in length, there is no recommendation glowing enough that I could give ANATOMY. It’s terrifying in a way that can only be experienced firsthand, and affecting in a way that’s kept it in the forefront of my mind nearly every waking minute since completing it.
