Anthology of the Killer is the State of the World

Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor

Ahem. Is this on? Content warning time, kiddos. If you're the TL:DR type, or you regularly use the phrase "walking simulator" as an insult, you can bugger off right now. Likewise if you have ever used the phrase "blue lives matter" unironically. Oh, and the rest of this review is all about bloody murder and tripping balls (ovaries, gametes), so that's a thing.

I've appreciated the cursed surreality of thecatamites' (Stephen Gillmurphy's) games from Space Funeral (2010) on, so I thought I knew what I was getting into when I picked up Anthology of the Killer but I couldn't have been more wrong. All of Gillmurphy's games are a trip, but the "of the Killer" games (hereafter OTK) are a one-way ticket backwards through a psilosybin hellmouth into the guts of zombie capitalism, past the dismembered corpse of satire, and out through the putrescent liquefication of what might once have been the fabric of society. That and it's funny, with some oddly homey moments.

BB and another character stand in an front of a brick building with double doors. One says, “Oh, don’t give me that. You hang out with serial killers all the time.” BB replies, “I run away FROM serial killers all the time, not sell them merch.” The first replies, “Well, maybe you should monetize your hobbies.”

Anthology of the Killer collects 9 short games originally published from 2020 to 2024 on the social platform Game Jolt. They are all wrapped up in the frame narrative of an overhyped gallery exhibition. BB, the protagonist of the games and honoree of the exhibition, is a New Wave zinester with the physical proportions of a kewpie doll. Each game is a complete story in itself, but playing them in order means you'll at least know why you don't know what is going on.

Each game is titled [Something] of the Killer, e.g. "Voice of the Killer," "Hands of the Killer," "Flesh of the Killer,". As a result, coming to OTK and playing through these games back-to-back is going to be very different from returning to it after experiencing it in its original serial format. Don't shotgun this one. Each game is brain-breakingly bizarre enough that you're liable to OD or else wake up in a bathtub full of squishmallows and fake blood bags in Cincinnati only to realize that someone amputated your convenient historio-cultural amnesia while you were out.

A survey form about dreams, sleep, and waking. A pencil hovers over it, with a word bubble that reads, “Man, I wish they’d at least serve breakfast with these.”

That's the thing about OTK. The more surreal it gets, the more honest it is about the state of the world. Your pineal gland can only take so much of that kind of honesty at a time, viz the quote turned anthology tagline "history is a nightmare - - and loving it!!"

I recommend playing OTK the way I did: on the bus, on the way home from work. You'll have almost but not quite enough time to finish an average-length game in the collection, and you'll step off the bus in a state of complete confusion about who you are, why the world is this way, and what's it all about, anyway? Look both ways before crossing the street.

It's hard to describe these games: they look like the Joker (the Lego Joker, not the sad sack) had redecorated the Backrooms before someone used the space to store unprinted standees in various shapes, which Ms. K's kindergarten class had then been invited to paint "in the style of Edvard Munch." It's fucking brilliant: any jankiness, like the dizzying camera spin you get walking BB into and back out of a corner feels inevitable, if not deliberate. Similarly, walls covered in motivational posters, fine art, and living meat all feel equally plausible.

BB stands in a hallway, its floor tiled in a checkerboard pattern with splatter marks. Framed paintings hang on the walls. A word bubble reads, “Blobby, misshapen psudo-BBs grin back at me from all the walls, holding tennis rackets, tiny dogs - frozen images of my own best life. Did I escape in the middle of conversion to a moral icon?”

The OTK games even turn "walking simulator" gameplay into something trippy. It's basically inevitable that you'll wind up running away from someone with a knife, lion mask, or surgical scissors, but BB moves like she's swimming through melted butter, so when you (usually) fail to get away, it feels suitably inevitable. It's also comforting for players like myself with no reflexes or survival instincts: if your responses to peril are "play dead" or "negotiate strenuously" you'll be okay… maybe. BB is an absolute magnet for deranged killers and deranged types in general, but she lives in a world that is deranged, in every sense: it is aesthetically, architecturally, economically, ethically, and institutionally deranged, and without any functional guideposts to "range" oneself against. Derangement is inevitable.

BB's sister, ZZ, possesses a sangfroid or perhaps fatalism about the senselessness of the world that makes her a rock, the only stable thing in BB's life. ZZ reveals a different truth about the world: it's all built literally atop the detritus of the past, layer after layer of fads, fashions, trends and speculative bubbles each discarded as abruptly as they were adopted and now ripe to be excavated for nostalgia and renewed collectibility.

From tropes as believable as killer cops (one of whom is so far up his own ass that his name is "Cool Policeman") to things as far-fetched as big-budget community theatre, mixed up with with nihilist surf rockers back from the dead and the various ways BB is a recycled cultural trope, OTK reliably provides a profound dislocation from "reality" followed by a sharp crash into that unreality. It's like scraping your knee during a dissociative episode: it's your blood, but it doesn't feel like it's you, so you laugh (and that doesn't feel like you either).

BB stands in a large room, with file cabinets and other furniture in the background. A character sits at a desk in the background. A word bubble reads, “Inside it’s quite spruce and there’s a vague chemical smell. Nameless music fills the air along with a sound of distant splashing. I feel more at home here than I’ve ever felt anywhere, I think.”

Allow me to illustrate with my experience of "Tears of the Killer," the third game in the anthology. BB takes a city bus to Tammy, an indoor water park and pool complex in an office building that used to house a furniture company. An oddly-familiar cartoon duck in a sailor suit works there, and BB experiences a profound sense of belonging and wellbeing as she passes through the locker room to the big ground floor pool, so you know shit's gonna get real bad.

And it does, but by then I'm thinking about Lucas Harari's Swimming in Darkness (2019), a graphic novel about a much more subtly creepy swimming complex, one whose architecture is stunning and possibly predatory. The pool in Swimming in Darkness is based on the 7132 Thermal Bath and Spa in Vals, Switzerland, which is exactly the kind of place I'd love to get lost forever, which is exactly what one does at Tammy.

BB manages to leave Tammy, yet Tammy tags along, making everything squishy. Then the city floods and the bus to Tammy chases BB down the hallway of her apartment building. Meanwhile, I discover Pools, and I think I'll have to play it, because it's so Tammy.  The truth about Tammy is the truth about OTK: it's infectious, it spreads. 

My bus reaches its final destination. The driver shouts something, so I close the itch.io app on my Steam Deck and step off. Leaving the station in a daze, I look up at the breezeway full of colorful glowing dicks, and I feel like it's Tammy because it feels like home.

Anthology of the Killer is now available on Steam and itch.io.

Original publication date: 10/11/2024