Kitty Horrorshow writes about ticks in what feels like every game she makes.
[His body is covered in swollen ticks the size of quarters.
Leeches too,
actually. Her writing is slimy, organic,
covered in viscera. And almost always, there are the bloodsuckers.
The boy came to a clearing, where a great bloated tick wallowed in a shallow pond, and found that he
could not speak, for She had filled his mouth with leeches as he was running through the swamp
The independent game developer Kitty Horrorshow, is maybe one of the best horror artists on
the planet. Within a couple hours, over a handful of experiences, she’s given me more
hair-standing-on-end moments than virtually anyone else I can think of.
Her most high-profile release, Anatomy, I’ve already talked about at length;
it’s a harrowing gauntlet of uncovering the thoughts of a house that hates you, one run
after another. But Horrorshow’s oeuvre is far more than one scary house. She’s released collections
which she calls “Haunted Cities,” full of short experiences she initially put up for her Patreon.
They aren’t what we would usually call polished; they’re raw. Even more so than Anatomy.
Haunted Cities 4 dropped this Halloween, for free, and had 4 games within: Exclusion Zone,
Grandmother’s Garden, Tenement, and Lethargy Hill. On one level, they are Extremely Kitty
Horrorshow’s jam. A long-abandoned shrine, suffering alone. An apartment
block floating in a void, where the residents are slowly losing their minds. A dense forest,
alive in more ways than one. They will likely scare the pants off you, as they did me.
But under these game’s initial layers of abject terror and instability, there’s a living,
squirming bedrock. One filled with ticks and leeches and ideas that feed on blood.
A base thematic layer where life is forcefully extracted and turned into...something else.
Okay, first off, let’s talk about the games. Spoilers follow- these things are short and free,
so do your thing. I don’t really think hearing about them will
ruin the experience, but hey why not. Exclusion Zone is kind of an archaeological,
anthropological-type experience. That’s a slightly unorthodox setting for horror, and I think it’s
probably the least scary of the bunch, though not to the detriment of what it’s trying to do.
Exclusion Zone sees you dropped off on one side of a massive wall and wandering into a
sort of shrine, or complex, or something that was formerly ceremonial. You’re not operating
on perfect information here. The loop of the game is approaching one of these imposing structures,
hearing the ambiance whine into focus, and then getting a flash of when it was...in use, maybe,
alongside some writing explaining what’s suspected so far about the area.
You learn that the site is likely the cause, or at least correlated with the
surrounding wasteland. You learn that the tower and its base were something new,
even to the people building them. You learn about the gardens growing
something and the cairns on the beach holding a strange energy. And you also hear, unavoidably,
a crackle of radiation every time you get close to the tower at the center.
It was because of this radiation that I avoided the tower until I had explored
every other place on the bizarre site, getting flashes of history without the
necessary context to put them into any kind of framework. Only after it was clear that I had
to go into the tower to complete my survey did I find out the piece that I had been missing.
Inside the tower, the writing shifts from impersonal archaeology to deeply, painfully human.
She was wronged, the entry reads, So much devastation because she wanted to be loved,
and because they wanted to love her but didn’t know how.
Deep within the radiation-poisoned center of the tower, one of the previous investigators stumbled
upon a shocking empathy for this place and in a moment of insight, identified the emotional pain
that detached archaeology could not. The story of the tower and the surrounding site is reframed as
a violent uprooting of a vulnerable god, brought to a place she was unfit for and one that she
ultimately destroyed through her sorrow. Exclusion Zone first shows the confusion of a place without
the appropriate emotional lens to view it through, and then gives the player that lens.
At the end, more cold and detached writing determines that nothing new was learned of
the landscape, in what feels like a rejection of the empathetic truth that you just read.
It tells you to prepare for quarantine. That’s the first game.
Grandmother’s Garden has a pretty direct spiritual linkage to
Grandmother, a game that Horrorshow made years earlier. In a letter about the two,
she explains that both are an attempt to represent a memorable nightmare of hers;
Grandmother’s Garden, coming after many hours more development experience than the original,
is one step closer to that dream. The only third-person game of the bunch,
Grandmother’s Garden gives you control of a character with the tank controls of early resident
evils, or Alone in the Dark. Inside a small house you find grandmother, sitting in a chair,
watching static, a bible full of horrifying quotes in the corner [AND HE COULD NOT SPEAK,
FOR SHE HAD FILLED HIS MOUTH WITH LEECHES...]. When you touch her shoulder, she does...something,
something that to me looks like it leaves her blackened blood all over the wall,
and hands you the keys to the shed. And then it’s out of the house, into the forest.
Where Exclusion Zone was a story about a dead land where there used to be life, the
setting of Grandmother’s Garden is overwhelmingly organic. Roots in the forest pulse like arteries;
our protagonist notes that they’re growing towards the garden. In the graveyard, a swollen vein grows
straight up like a fledgling tree, promising to be “seething and terrible and vivacious.” It already
“knows the taste of ten monsters,” presumably the ten sinners buried in the graveyard.
At a well in the forest, the protagonist explains that at different cycles of the moon, they receive
different fluids from the forest. From crescents and gibbons they get hemolymph, which they make
into soup. The half moon gives them water, though it keeps giving them less. The full
moon gives them bile. The protagonist wonders what would happen if they jumped into the well.
On the back of Grandmother’s house, a massive growth beats slowly.
Grandma says I’ll have a little sister soon.
Finally, in the shed, you find a shovel, and the game gives its only direction: get digging.
Grandmother’s Garden, the place, is a dark series of fenced plots, watched over
by bare trees full of crows. As you dig, your reservations become unavoidable. And then…
This is arguably the only jump scare in the whole collection, and it absolutely got me.
But at the same time it feels inevitable. The forest is living, and it must feed.
Plus, hell, maybe Horrorshow’s nightmare had a jump scare too. Who am I to question how she
manifests her subconscious? The third game in the collection is Tenement,
and true to its name, it’s a series of cold, gray apartment blocks,
floating in a strangely pretty void. Amongst the buildings are its flickering residents,
animal skulls on properly dressed bodies. Their voices give me the shivers [voice], but
the conversations you have with them have a tone that’s much harder to parce. The horrific and the
mundane are treated with equal weight here. A resident complains about the subways,
that they hate waiting and wish they could listen to music, and also that they keep
worrying about the shapes in the dark that could reach out and touch them.
A resident reflects on how hotels used to be before they got all corporate. He wishes
this place had one, like he remembers visiting as a kid with his dad.
“Yes there were rooms that would pull the skin right off your bones...there were rooms with floor
made of spider-skin and walls made of wasp-bone, where everything stank and buzzed and howled
and you’d come back out broken or not at all...but it was worth the chance to get to be the first
to enter a newborn room. Because there was always the chance you’d be the one to find THE
room, the grand and final room, the one where the hotel’s heart and mind and soul were.
The theater’s marquee advertises “I was a teenage giant floating
omniscient tick w/spider eyes & 98 human teeth- PG-13.”
While the stories the residents tell are enough to bury into your sleeping mind, none of them
seem to live in fear. Instead, the uniting emotion seems to be frustration; frustration that they’re
stuck here, frustration that they can’t sit on a fire escape and rock back and forth like
a cattail in the wind, frustration that their grandmother’s house disappeared when she died
and now it’s just a big hole in the ground full of long white bones that they have to re-read
old comics next to until their parents decide to pick them up- hey, their complaints, not mine.
While many of the residents feel stuck, unable to break out of their cycles or leave the tenement,,
that’s actually not true of you, the player. F5 resets the game,
and resetting brings a different time of day, and a different set of people. Sometimes it’s dark,
sometimes it’s starry, sometimes a light sweeps over the rooftops and walls like a spotlight.
Eventually, the tenement itself starts to suffer consequences from your constant resetting.
The sky is blood red, veins grow across the buildings and streets, the theater marquee tells
you it hurts it hurts it hurts. The residents, if you can find any, tell you that this is wrong,
this isn’t supposed to happen here, that you HAVE to stop. Resetting again sends the world
into a howling miasma of blood and flashing veins. Everyone will only give you the same 4 words
Resetting once more brings everything to a halt.
The sky outside is black, the door to the rest of the tenement is chained over.
Some scrawled text on the wall reads “you used us up. We are angry. Come back tomorrow.”
The last game, Lethargy Hill, is maybe the most technically bare of the bunch. It almost feels
like a custom Doom map or something, low-res and fast and without the ability to look up or down.
And yet, Lethargy Hill is still the one that gives me full body chills,
no matter how many times I play it. The story plays out in text in front of you,
no matter what you do. It follows a woman who lives in a house on a hill,
a house that drinks from the earth and is formed like a tick filling with blood.
Bored and lonely, the woman makes a family out of scraps of herself she breaks off,
and living matter she harvests from her surroundings.
She makes a husband, to shuffle around the hallways, make sure the doors are locked,
and sob gently into the silence. She makes a sister to shriek and make her life worse,
press her face against the windows and fill her rooms with jealous looks.
She makes a son and daughter, to bring life and motion and sound,
filling the walls with shivering worm-noises and trying to dig out each other’s eyes.
There’s nothing to do in Lethargy Hill except to wander the expanse while this story is told
to you, following the stone path or straying from it makes no difference. The house on the
hill is ever present, watching. What breaks up the experience are
interstitial cards with a totally different handwriting, a bloody scrawl that seems to be
written about the game itself, not from the perspective of the woman or the house.
“THERE SHOULD BE MORE HERE” the first one reads. “HAD ALL THESE PLANS FOR THIS PLACE.”
It’s hard to not take these notes on a metatextual level; it’s like the game itself
is upset at its sparseness. They inelegantly interrupt the scrolling text on the screen,
and when the playable section returns it seems angry at being cut off. The sky darkens,
the music slows, bolts of black lightning or dark veins once again flash on the horizon.
The story describes how the woman grows to hate the family she created.
Her husband useless, her daughter too close to her sister, her son perfect but so fragile.
She reduces her husband to twigs and burns him in a fire that smells like rotten teeth. Her sister
is trapped in the forest and sinks back into the soil. Her daughter falls apart into the insect
corpses she was made from. Her son trips down the basement stairs and splatters back into blood.
As the woman finds herself alone again and the interstitials spiral further into loneliness, the
world screams. Broken foghorns bellow and black angelic figures appear on the horizon, obscured by
the lines breaking the sky into pieces. And even through the howling, the story begins again.
“I hope someone visits me soon,” she thought. “That’s what I need. Someone I don’t know,
someone I didn’t make. That’d be a surprise.” So she opened a little path in the woods near
the house and waited. “As long as they don’t talk to my dead family, I’m sure they’ll come visit me.
I’ll invite them in and let them come see me, and then I’ll have the drones chew off all their skin,
and I won’t be alone anymore.”
The story fades out on a repeated phrase, that she won’t be alone anymore, that it’ll be so
nice to not be alone, that she’s chewed off all their skin and it will just be nice, so nice,
to not be alone anymore. WHEW
OKAY So those are the games. Feelin good? Good vibes all around? Then let’s jump into it,
but not before I say this: Kitty Horrorshow is a fun name and a semi-mythic presence,
but also a real person. None of what I’m about to talk about should be taken as any kind of
psychoanalysis of the actual artist that made these games, and I kindly
request that you don’t do that either. Let people have their privacy. Cool? Cool.
So, that being said, to me, all of these games feel like they’re some part in the cycle of
creation, but in the most agonizing sense of the word. This isn’t divine inspiration
guiding our hand, this is painful, this is art as blood, sucked from an open wound.
Grandmother’s Garden presents what seems like a mutualistic symbiosis.
We pull fluids from the ground, water and hemolymph, and make them into things that keep
us alive. In return, we keep the forest alive, feeding it bodies and tending its gardens. And
the forest seems to flourish. It’s tall and dense, a fresh new vein grows from a circle of corpses.
But is this really mutualism? Sure, we’re alive, but barely. We keep putting our time and energy
into this thing, working while it gives us less water and more bile every month.
And yeah, the forest is something to be proud of. That vein is alive because of us.
But how much pride can you give to a tick, or a leech, or a tapeworm? How much of yourself
can you give to creating something before that thing pulls you under completely?
While the forest flourishes, Tenement seems like the inverse; it’s a small world full of muses,
each with fascinating stories and insights, each, things to draw inspiration from. But
it’s not enough. We keep mashing F5 on the world, hoping for new people to pull from.
Sometimes we get it! But just like the forest, this relationship is secretly parasitic;
the more we reset the world, the more we damage it, the more harm we bring to our muses.
If the whole tenement is that limbo between a conscious and unconscious mind,
the place where creativity lives, it’s hard for me to not see our actions in this game
as punishing it. We keep demanding for this place, and ultimately it can only respond with pain.
And what if you are able to create what you want, huh?
Well for that we have Lethargy Hill, most overt of all. Lethargy Hill shows the whole wretched cycle;
first, the loneliness, the stagnation that can take over one’s life without creation.
And so you start. She concentrated real hard and
snapped off a few pieces of herself to grow into little drones, so that she could get to work.
And creating is exciting, and you make the things that you think that you want,
and then those things don’t quite satisfy you, so you make more, and you’re investing more and
more of yourself into these things, only to find out that you can’t stand them.
And if that wasn’t enough, the game gives you even more, flashing on the screen,
echoing the dissatisfaction. THERE SHOULD BE MORE HERE. MY BLOOD FEELS SO DULL AND HEAVY.
And though the cycle seems to begin again at the end, the woman destroying her
creations and craving them anew, the world doesn’t seem to be restarting its cycle,
it’s only heating up. It keeps getting redder and angrier, exponential increases until-
Exclusion Zone, then, is an aftermath. A dead world, littered with interesting objects,
ones made in a vain attempt to quell the pain of...whatever lies within that radioactive tower.
And instead, it seems like all the objects, all the creations, just heightened the pain
and loneliness she was feeling. Ultimately we’re left with this wasteland.
What are you left with, when you give all your blood, all you have, to the things you’re trying
to nurture and it’s not enough? What’s the result of putting so much of yourself into the things
you make that ultimately it feels like they’re what’s truly alive, and you’re just a husk?
THIS VIDEO WAS SPONSORED BY CURIOSI-
Kitty Horrorshow writes about ticks, writes about bloodsuckers, in almost every game she makes.
And what I think makes her one of the best horror artists of this generation isn’t her dripping
descriptions of viscera, not her impeccable sound design or the occasional, excellently
executed jump scare. Her work lingers, between my conscious and unconscious mind, because the horror
of these games is built on a foundation of anguish far more chilling than any individual creature.
These worlds, alien as they are, are still haunted by us. We don’t know floating apartment blocks,
or irradiated monuments, or the earth rising like a tick swelling with blood.
But this...is intimately familiar.
This video is, actually, sponsored by CuriosityStream.
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