Review: Anthology of the Killer

How late can one review a game? Pointless question, I don't care to hear your answer. Anthology Of The Killer has been out on PC for a while, but it was released on the Nintendthing and Player's Station V this week, bringing the comedy crime caper to the respective audiences of baffled children and tired parents who've forgotten they even have a subscription to PS Plus. This act launches the game back into what we may generously call the Public Eye. Ow! Poor eye.

This gives me the perfect opportunity to finally do what I neglected to do when the game came out two entire years ago (oh no time's inexorable stomp etc etc). That is to say: here follows a non-thorough yet official evaluation of thecatamites' comedy slasher. The video game review continues to be a relevant form.

If you are new to this developer's homebrew bafflements, fear not. Anthology is as good a jumping in point as any. This is a mechanistically simple game of walking about and looking at things until you feel one emotion or another, I won't dictate to you which. BB is a zine maker in a city of terrible murders. Every episode sees her exploring some new place of danger. A theatre, a swimming pool, a museum. Every episode is an excuse to read esoteric NPC dialogue and putupon inner monologues as you navigate a brightly drawn cartoon night terror. Every episode you will laugh.

At least, you will if you've got any love for language at all. I lean on the genre description of "comedy" when faced with the works of Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy but what really draws me in is a kind of manic fizziness in my brain when I read these chatboxes and thought bubbles. It is as if my mind is being carbonated by a sodastream, I don't know how it works but there you go. There is good reason this game made our best games of the decade list.

Tracts of academical verbiage and bookish understandings sit sandwiched between crutch phrases and everyday cliché. When elaborate musings on aesthetics are the lead-in, a cartoon "wow!" is a good punchline. When childish wonderings are the set-up, a stoic observation about art will elicit a laugh of an entirely different kind; nervous, confused. Sometimes I am not sure whether the thing that made me laugh was a joke at all. It was maybe just terror in the guise of art theory. Ha ha. 

The player can choose which episode to play in any order by exploring an exhibition in first person, with many doorways leading the way to each episode. Remember diving into paintings from a central castle in Super Mario 64? It's like that, except Anthology's hub world is full of wine drinking luvvies making comments about the oeuvre as you pass from room to room.

There is the "moral art" episode, in which BB and her pals goonie around a haunting art museum like the children of Stranger Things - those loveable rapscallions. In the end they get themselves inculcated by the ethical philosophy of a terrifying beast in a mask who traps the children in paintings, where they are chased by monstrous elephants. The elephants seek to stamp on the children's hands until crushed, a punishment meted out to young people judged as having unsatisfying moral aptitude. Kids respect a firm presence. "It gives you a new perspective," says BB when released from her hell painting. 

In another episode, you survive a maniacal theatre production in which many of the actors are dressed as bears. The bears, it transpires, are police officers chopping up bodies back stage. You are paid 20 dollars for your part in the performance. "Welcome to the arts economy!" says the director, a psychopath.

The word "episode" is often used in medical or psychiatric environments. In another episode of the Anthology, you will visit an aquatic leisure complex called "Tammy" on the outskirts of town, where the gel-like pools tranquilise and soothe your psyche, but also provide some sort of dark sustenance for the eponymous Tammy, a being who also resides in that same liquid. BB is furious to discover it is simply an unchlorinated swimming pool. "I coulda have got CHLAMIDYA!" she yells.

Each episode sticks to a formula in the same way a comforting Saturday morning children's show might do. BB always goes somewhere odd, she always goes deeper into the environment than she means to, she always gets pursued by a monster, or by a bunch of lesser henchmonsters, and she always leaves alive (?) with anticlimactic nonchalance, as if each outing is more of a nuisance dinner party obligation that is finally complete, instead of a terrifying ordeal she barely survived. BB lives in a delinquent reality. Things like this happen to her every day. That's life! Ha ha ha.

There is something compelling about that repetitiousness, about the way thecatamites plays out a simple structure in as many variations as is pleasing, like a chess grandmaster flicking bishops around and asking: "What if the queen went to the community leisure centre? What if she went to the library?" Perplexing for the opponent, sure, but let's move the pieces to some blood-stained squares and see what happens next. 

As always it is the flip-flopping from dramatic to colloquial that kills me dead with mirth. It is one of the most likely ways to make me laugh, and Anthokiller does this endlessly. "With courage and skill you captured the elemental PRISONMAN and set him to construct you a mighty estate," the game grandly announces at one point. "That's great stuff and I respect it."

Same here, Anthology. That's great stuff and I respect it.