Fight For The Top 50 2016 – Anatomy

Each year, we do our best to keep up with the games released so that we can make educated decisions when it comes to accurately rewarding titles a spot on our annual Top 50 list. Unfortunately, while the early months can be simple to stay on top of, we can quickly find ourselves buried under the avalanche of games as the year progresses, and several games wind up not having enough people organically playing it to argue for their spot on the Top 50. That's why we've done the Fight for the Top 50 each year in the lead up to our Game of the Year discussions. The goal is for a Game Informer editor to challenge another one to play a game they think was underplayed by the rest of the staff that deserves consideration for the Top 50.

Even for a horror game, Anatomy is strange. Rather than escaping from a haunted house or insane asylum, you play as someone skulking around a house with no plan to leave. The game plays out as a VHS tape, with all the fuzzy edges and static lines that entails. Instead of giving you breathing room between horrific encounters with monsters, it asks that you consent to delving back into its unsettling brand of weird over and over, trying to make sense of what’s going on around you.

Part of what I love about Anatomy is that structure, of having to go back through the same, dimly lit house over and over. The first time you load up the game, you get a VHS preroll with a date of August 18, 1994. You can’t see much and are one of the only sources of light in the entire house. Your objective is to find a number of tapes strewn about the house. In order to make the next tape appear, you have to load the previous one into a tape player, which causes a monologue to play. The writing is prose is pretty purple, and the voice-acting isn’t great, but that adds to the game’s lo-fi feel. A message then tells you where the next tape is. The tapes aren’t hard to find, but they serve as a reason to explore the entire house.

Anatomy makes the metaphor of a house being like a human body. A bit obvious, sure, but it's all in the execution. Each tape is located in a different part of the house, and the tapes make the connections between body parts and rooms. The bedroom is the mind, where we dream. The stairs are the spine. The basement, our hidden desires. It works as a way to keep your mind occupied as you wait for a monster to jump out at you, unsettling you before the hammer drops.

After finding all the tapes and hearing the final message, the game just sort of ends. The first playthrough won’t last you more than half an hour. But when you load the game up again, you’ll notice a few changes. The initial VHS preroll is different, and the house looks off. The frames on the wall have more sinister paintings in them. The tapes you play are distorted, and the messages that lead you to the next tape start changing. On your subsequent playthroughs, the house continues to deteriorate. The whole game feels like it’s breaking apart.

There’s little in the way of coherent plot, but that only adds to how bewildering the game is. I ended my final playthrough unsure of what had just happened, but I didn’t feel robbed of anything. The incomplete feeling felt intentional. Like trying to come to terms with the idea that part of you is missing.

With as many great games that came out in 2016, it’s easy to forget about the margins, and Anatomy is one of the best arguments for why we shouldn’t leave them out. It’s not the next great step forward in gaming, but as with all forms of art, the ideas on the bleeding edge tend to bleed into the mainstream over time, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see other games borrow from Anatomy’s tone, structure, or baffling weirdness down the road. But Anatomy works as a horror title on its own, and if I never saw other games crib from it, I wouldn't mind it too much. It lives up to its strange potential.

The Top 50 Challenge
Not many people on staff here have played Anatomy. When talking about our games of the year, I’d casually bring it up, and people would look at me and say “what’s that?” It’s the work of independent game designer Kitty Horrorshow, and it’s a tier below what we tend to think of as “indie games” in terms of visibility. But that lack of visibility gives it a darker edge; playing it feels like finding and stumbling down a dark YouTube rabbit hole late at night, the kind you’ll remember but won’t talk about much afterword, partially because you’re not fully convinced it really happened.

I think Jeff Cork is a good candidate to tackle Anatomy. I think he’s willing to give stranger games a try, even when they might not be his kind of thing. I think he’ll like the VHS schtick, and the strange, glitchy nature of the later parts of the game could strike a chord. But I can see the abrupt conclusion and the repetitive nature of finding each tape a few times getting in the way. I could also see him mocking the voice acting. So it could go either way. Still, I’m curious as to whether Jeff will jive with Anatomy’s idiosyncratic tendencies, or call me a weirdo for liking it so much.

Jeff was given one day to play Anatomy. Come back tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. CST to read his impressions and see if it’ll get his support for Game Informer’s Top 50 Games of the Year.