This story was originally published in issue #189 of Rue Morgue Magazine for their Queer Fear Special Issue.

You're standing in the foyer of a house. The house is so dark you need to hug the walls to navigate, but the layout is universally familiar: a living room with a TV and couch, a dining room with a table set for four, three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, a small kitchen at the back. Scattered around the house are cassettes containing the musings of an unnamed intellectual comparing the features of a house with those of a body; a body that hungers.

That’s the enigmatic setup for Anatomy, the slow-burn horror experience by the queen of independent horror games, Kitty Horrorshow.

Critically and commercially successful releases in the Resident Evil and Alien franchises have led to a new appreciation for interactive horror, but those games are made by big teams with millions of dollars. Kitty is just one woman funded by her fans and is entirely self-taught in the popular game development software Unity. Kitty started out in interactive fiction and is more interested in creating intriguing and unsettling spaces for the player to inhabit, filling them with personal stories rather than zombies or aliens. Her graphics recall the blocky, warping textures of original PlayStation games, which achieve the triple goal of being visually unsettling, a nostalgic homage to her influences, and efficient to make.

These technical limitations force Kitty to experiment beyond graphics and sound. Your first playthrough of Anatomy will take about ten minutes and end abruptly. As you're unceremoniously dumped back to your desktop, you may shrug and wonder what the fuss was about. But each time you run the program, something has changed: the house grows more sinister, the sparse text that guides you becomes untrustworthy-- even the file structure becomes twisted and corrupted. It's up to the player to decide how many times they're willing to venture back into that house.

"[Anatomy is] like a weird place you found out in the middle of nowhere coming off the interstate," Kitty tells me over the phone, through a thin and tinny connection that lent her soft voice a sense of otherworldly wisdom. "You wouldn't be guided conveniently through it and be told when you were done finding everything there was to be found. You would just have to be satisfied with what you discovered and choose to leave on your own."

In CHYRZA, this theme of exploration is taken to the extreme. The player is dumped into a world seared in a burnt orange haze. The player glimpses the husk of a village and distant structures through the fog. Within each structure is a floating gem that imparts a brief snippet of a story of utter horror: the people of this village have been slowly transformed by some unseen radiation that seems to be emanating from a black ziggurat.

"Something that seems to happen in nightmares is just this change, this indelible force that you're not aware of, you don't understand-- something is affecting you and you have no control over it. Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievitch [is] one of the most harrowing books I've ever read. That was specifically where CHYRZA came from: this massive structure that everybody worships but nobody understands."

Transformation is a key element to Kitty's work. As a trans woman, she presents a unique voice in game development, " I try to make games that everyone can enjoy and be unnerved by regardless of their personal background, but it's also my hope that they help make people like me feel a little more understood and a little bit less alone."

Kitty is reluctant to discuss future plans but she does tell me this: "I struggle with major depressive episodes and anxiety [and] it continues to appall me how poorly a lot of horror treats mental illness. I want to make a game where you have to navigate an oppressive, threatening environment-- maintain a daily existence in this environment while managing your stress levels and depression levels. I want to call attention to mental health and its place in horror-- not in a scary, creepy, haunted insane asylum way, but that this is a real thing that a ton of people deal with. I'm not horrifying, as a person with depression, the stress that I have to face is horrifying."

Lots of Kitty's work is available, most for free, on itch.io and those interested in supporting her regularly can support her on Patreon where she releases a small game every month.