This Week In Retro: ANATOMY (2016) (Patreon)

February 2016: There's no doctor in this house

by Diamond Feit

I still have a lot of affection for my childhood home. It's been ages since I set foot inside but I periodically look at it on Google Maps both to confirm its continued existence and to reminisce about the past. Within a week of my birth, my parents carried me into that house and I lived there until early adulthood. The passage of time has re-framed that 22-year span into a mere portion of my life—less than 50% at this point—yet it remains the single longest stretch that I've ever spent in one place.

Despite this strong emotional bond, I can recall plenty of locations in and around that house where I felt unease. The cold concrete of our single-car garage. The many dark corners of the basement where the light of the television could not reach. The oddly small door in my room that led to a cramped storage space inside the eaves. Even my parents' bedroom, while warm and cozy, felt slightly unwelcome compared to the communal areas like the living and dining rooms.

2026 marks 15 years in my current abode, a house we had built for us here in suburban Osaka. We moved in with a single two-year-old child and we now occupy it as a family of four. Barring an unexpected relocation, it will eventually usurp my childhood home as the primary domicile of my life. Yet there are times when the lights are out and anxiety creeps over me as if this space which I helped design holds secrets I don't know about.

I'm contemplating the mysterious nature of houses because this week marks the 10th anniversary of an unusual horror game, a small indie release that scared the hell out of me even as I played it inside the safety of my own home. With a tagline that reads "Every house is haunted," ANATOMY asks you to explore a space devoid of people and consider what happens when Home Sweet Home lies empty for too long.

Before I start dishing on the details, I must stress that ANATOMY takes less than an hour to play in full and costs just $3, so I invite you to experience the game for yourself rather than learn about it second-hand from me. I don't believe anything I can say about ANATOMY counts as a "spoiler" but it will have a larger impact if you don't know all of its tricks.

ANATOMY begins by spawning the player inside an ordinary house. The lights are out but there's furniture in every room and framed art hangs on many walls. As the player looks around—the game operates in first person—they'll find a majority of the doors locked, limiting their access to the ground floor. Notably, the front and rear doors do not respond to any inputs, dashing any hopes of leaving.

A tape player sits on a small table in the kitchen with an unmarked cassette beside it, illuminated in red by an unseen source. You can pick up the tape and use the player to listen to a narrator explain the significance of houses in human society, an excerpt from a lecture from the sounds of things. When the tape ends, you hear a door unlock and on-screen text directs you to the location of the next tape.

The process repeats as each tape continues the narrator's tale and each click grants you entry to new rooms for inspection. In no time at all, you develop an understanding of the house's basic layout: Adjoining living and dining rooms on the first floor across from the kitchen, direct access to a garage, a bathroom on each floor with bedrooms exclusively upstairs. There's no sign of any residents at the moment but you can turn on a TV in the living room, bathing the walls and floor in a blue light.

In these stages, ANATOMY builds tension primarily through the audio tapes as the narrator anthropomorphizes the house and opines about which rooms represent which organs in the human body. Their flat delivery maintains an academic indifference to the matter but the more they drone on, the more it feels like the house might actually qualify as a life form. Their voice also unnaturally fills the entire house at once, forcing you to hear each word regardless of how far you stray from the kitchen.

Things take an overt turn towards the eerie when you start investigating the second floor. ANATOMY's low-resolution graphics don't allow for much detail, but the bedrooms feel particularly barren given the ratio of furnishings to empty space. Walking around upstairs is also when a pattern concerning the framed artwork emerges: Instead of family portraits or even simple landscapes, cross-sections of insects and illustrations of skeletons adorn the walls.

Whether you find ANATOMY creepy from the start or feel fear slowly overtake you, the game never resorts to cheap tricks to get under your skin. No monsters ever appear and no traps threaten to harm you. The closest thing ANATOMY has to a jump scare is when it shuts down the game without warning to punctuate a scene. I'm not ashamed to admit that when I replayed it this week, I once got startled by the sight of my own desktop.

Speaking of shutdown, ANATOMY knows it is a video game and uses that knowledge against you. The longer you spend inside the house, the less reliable the level geometry becomes. Graphics begin to flicker in and out of view, solid objects clip through walls and ceilings, and doorways flat out disappear. I won't give away my favorite frightening moment but make sure you check the README file in the game's directory before you check this game off your to-do list.

These days, digital platforms are awash in short horror games that bewitch players with retro aesthetics of the 80s or 90s. Many rely on primitive graphics that resemble those of the PlayStation 1. Others imitate the look of a VHS camcorder with blocky white text on a bright blue screen, possibly introducing tracking errors as if the game's video feed is corrupt.

I don't know if ANATOMY did all this first or not, but its combination of dimly-lit hallways and faux-malfunctions made a strong impression on me. I once described it on Twitter as "My introduction to lo-fi indie horror. The simplest of premises, exploring an empty house, turns into a nightmare, proving that a game doesn’t need monsters or combat to be terrifying."

It's the video game equivalent of those shadows on the wall of my bedroom that spooked me each night or the rustle I sometimes hear behind me when I'm on my computer at odd hours. Common sense tells me that nothing's there, but in darkness even the safest places can harbor nightmares.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website. All Audio FX heard this week come from Pixabay.