You never came back.
"In the psychology of the modern, civilized human being, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the house."
Anatomy is a Psychological Horror game created by Kitty Horrorshow. The game starts with the player inside of an empty and abandoned home, with the only company in it are cassette tape recordings from someone who had been in there prior, which the player finds throughout the house. The person on the tapes describes that a house is very resemblant of the human mind and body, and goes into detail about why it therefore can't be trusted.
The game can be downloaded here
for only two dollars.
Because this is a very short game (roughly half an hour in length), expect spoilers below.
Anatomy contains examples of:
- And I Must Scream: Not to the player, but for the house itself, this is its fate. It is left dormant and left to rot indefinitely as it awaits someone to finally come inside. Ever hungry, but never starving. Even the player is implied to not even exist, but is just a projection the house made to keep itself company.
- Apocalyptic Logs: The cassette tapes the player collects.
- Arc Words: Late into the game, "You never came back".
- Asshole Victim: The tape where the house directly takes over as the voice of the tape has it describing a man who approached the house and vandalized it for some sick laughs. Then he is devoured by the house when it closes a door on him and grows a stomach in its basement.
- Body Motifs: The tapes describe several parts of the house in linking to the human body, but focus primarily on the mind; the master bedroom is one of dreams, as the basement keeps those thoughts you keep to yourself. It also focuses a lot on mouths and teeth, as some portraits show human teeth, leading up to the house devouring the protagonist.
- Body Horror: There's nothing like veins growing around the rooms or a mouth forming inside the room you're in that drives the point of Anatomy home.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- Even when all the doors are unlocked during the second and third playthroughs, the basement is off-limits until the end.
- Many times, mouth imagery is used before the tape compares the master bedroom to one. Later, we learn that the tapes mean this quite literally during the final trip to the basement.
- Creepy Basement: As the tapes point out, the basement of the house is linked to the imagination. It goes into detail about how throughout our childhoods, we dream up of monsters inside of it. It's empty. At least, at first.
- Eaten Alive: The ending has the basement growing a set of teeth and chomping down on the player.
- First-Person Ghost: The protagonist has no details of note, even peering into the mirror of the bathroom only shows a flashlight looking back. Intentional, as the player is implied to never have existed.
- Found Footage: The player's view has a VHS tape-like overlay, invoking this feeling.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: As it goes on, the game will crash at points and causes some Interface Screw each time it's reloaded, including the title screen which becomes more and more decrepit until culminating in it instead saying "YOU NEVER CAME BACK" after you're eaten.
- Game-Breaking Bug: Invoked, as the game deliberately crashes a few times, with flickering objects which get worse each time. The house's layout makes less and less sense as textures go through rooms, the mirror in the bathroom is inverted sideways, scenery and tapes floating, distorted audio, and so forth.
- Genius Loci: The house rearranges itself throughout the game, first manifesting as the door you came into the master bedroom through subtly disappearing behind you after you collect the tape inside. This is further shown through the Game-Breaking Bugs mentioned above.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: The house itself has undergone this.
- Haunted House: The premise of Anatomy is that a seemingly normal-looking house with odd tape recordings is not as ordinary as it may seem. This is actually subverted: the house isn't haunted, it's sentient.
- Interface Screw/Painting the Medium: The hints to the next objective that appear after playing each tape eventually start to disappear, or worse.There is a tape in the basement.The rrrre is a tape in the dining room.There is a ta aaaa doors are unlocked.HHHHHHHHHHURTS
- Multiple Endings: The scene after being Eaten Alive seems to change by some factor. Players have found themselves trying to reenter the house, being inside of a fleshy room, and walking through a maze.
- Narrator All Along: It's very much implied that the house is manifesting itself through the tapes.
- Nothing Is Scarier: As Killscreen describes it, Anatomy merely suggests that the house is sentient and malevolent, feeding off your expectations that something is going to happen in the next room you enter.
- Primal Fear: Anatomy plays on the fear that your only safe space is not as safe as you think, and can betray you at any time. The game gives you limited vision, and keeps egging you on that something is going to happen, until it does.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The final tape recording has the narrator addressing the player directly, lambasting them for constantly poking around the House and trying to learn its secret when all they were supposed to do was listen to his lectures.
- Sapient House: The house being compared to a human being invokes that the house is this. Turns out that the house is very much alive after all, especially as it finally catches its prey.
- Spooky Painting: The house has very... peculiar paintings hung on the wall, including ones of mouths and flesh. Both of which are Foreshadowing.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: The final tape implies that the events of the game are just the house's imagination, and the player character never existed in the first place.
- Tragic Monster: The final tape (as in, the one that plays after your death) paints the house as one; lonely, insane, and ever hungry.
- Wham Line: The penultimate tape."There is an important distinction that must be drawn between the words dissection and vivisection...a distinction that would appear to be lost on you."
