12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 9Who owns the cultural zeitgeist? Does it trickle down from the rich and famous, or does it rupture up from the young and broke? Is it steered by the critics, the consumers, or the creators themselves? Where do these categories blend together easily, and where do they clash? I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. But here is a game that effortlessly slides itself into the conversation, knife in hand.Anthology of the Killer puts its cards on the table immediately by sheer virtue of being a Unity walkaround with a jank cartoon aesthetic and a dinky Yamaha soundtrack. This is a living fossil of early 2010s trashcore indie alt-games, and brought me right back to the good old days of stuff like Crypt Worlds and Armada and Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. That’s because solo developer Stephen Gillmurphy/garmentdistrict/thecatamites has been plugging away at games in this loose scene for almost two decades, cooking up such classics as Magic Wand and Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog. Anthology of the Killer is easily their most ambitious work, spanning nine episodic installments released from 2020 to 2024. As such, it began life as a pandemic project and ended by highlighting the cruelties to be revealed that have also always been there.As should be obvious by the name, Anthology of the Killer has murder on the mind. It’s set in a world not unlike ours, except that the societal death drive has been cranked up a few notches and everyone is trying their best to pretend that everything’s normal, even the ones doing the murdering. Especially the ones doing the murdering. Protagonist BB is a broke university student who makes zines about the strange goings-on around town, investigating various subcultures and getting press-ganged into haunted houses that have metastasized into entire haunted institutions. She’s a great window into this world, and has all the snarky commentary that you’d want out of an adventure game protagonist. Then there’s the rogue’s gallery of XX City. We’ve got the requisite slashers and ghosts, sure, but there’s also a night college of academics obsessed with murder from a philosophical perspective, menacing advertising and insurance agencies, literal washed-up surf rock revenants trying to summon a New Wave to drown the world, and the cops. The fucking cops, who want so badly to be cool and validated that they actively collaborate with murder cultists because they think that’s hip now. And at the top of this class/violence pyramid seems to be the countless off-screen elites, who spend their days moving assets around in Special Economic Zones and tossing money into up-and-coming art scenes to try and bend them into making art that better serves the powerful. I am used to seeing this kind of scorched-earth comedy wielded against politicians and religions and tech CEOs, but Anthology of the Killer takes it out on rich art snobs in particular. Even the framing mechanism of the anthology, a coiling exhibition peppered with commentary from disappointed attendees, plays into this. Time and time again in these games, the upper class look to inject themselves into the scenes of the young and the queer in a bid for legitimacy and street cred. But they also don’t like to get their hands dirty, so they fund things from afar and send in a trickle-down hierarchy of cops and professors and local pariahs to try and enact their wants. The end result is a cult of murderers infiltrating the community theater, putting on murder-themed stage productions because they’ve concluded that the rich want blood, like the gods of old wanted sacrifices.This all seems like an oddly specific bone to pick until you remember that Stephen Gillmurphy lives in Ireland, a country that is presently built entirely around international tax evasion, and that the art market is one of the classic mechanisms of money laundering among the elite.If you didn’t know this authorial detail going in, you can deduce it during Blood of the Killer, in which BB uses a government free travel scheme to take the train to a small rustic town in the country. The European angle, while not all-encompassing by any means, does make a lot of disparate Elements Of The Killer click together. This is a collection of stories about influential people chomping at the bit for both coolness and new ways to do tax evasion. The shift to a post-industrial society has forced them to deal in new kinds of power, pivoting to laundering money and culture, while the situation for those on the ground continues to be just as bleak as it was before.It’s interesting to see where sexuality does and doesn’t show up in Anthology of the Killer. While it’s a touchstone theme for the greater horror genre, it’s fairly downplayed here. BB is constantly being threatened with kidnapping and murder and whatnot, but these games are pretty careful to avoid even the suggestion of sexual violence, and I think that lets them better explore the capital/nostalgia/poseur complex they’re trying to shine a light on. But there is one chapter all about libidinal desire, and it is Heart of the Killer. Here, a consultant traps BB in an Electronic Dream Phone-themed resort to try and figure out her romantic preferences (so that the Youths can be better advertised to). This fails miserably, because she is not straight, or gay, instead something far weirder. BB ends up as the final girl in Heart not through virginity or sexual purity, but from having fetishes so particular and arcane that the nostalgia-consultancy complex simply cannot digest and regurgitate them. For her it is the frog from the Rainforest Café. While Of The Killer games are comically exaggerated, I really do think that there’s a grain of truth to this part. The sexual basis behind the bulk of furry fandom acts as a strong bulwark against total cultural capture. Sure, a company like Disney can make a children’s movie like Zootopia by surgically excising the sexual aspects, or they can attempt to toe the line with something like a Lola Bunny, but both fail to actually steer “furry” into their hands, instead simply adding new cultural touchstones that people can imprint on at a formative age. Going down this line of thinking also made me realize that a Simpson is a kind of furry, and that’s how you get a BB.The tone stays remarkably consistent throughout BB’s saga, while the scope and narrative ambition slowly grow with each installment. The final chapter, Face of the Killer, takes the themes bubbling just under the surface in the rest of these games and spells it all out brutally clearly in a three-act movie sructure. It threads together a vast web of conspiracy that is just so stupid in its means and goals, which is great from both a horror and a comedy angle. Any artistic scene with its finger on the pulse risks elite capture, and in this world that means incorporating blood. Fucking Mappy from classic Namco game Mappy (I will never escape Bandai’s clutches) shows up to start a mass murder ritual, while the severed head of the cult’s professor pontificates that violence is the throughline between the State of Nature and the Commonwealth. The state’s monopoly on violence will cause an atmosphere of flippant mass murder to bubble up in counterbalance, so why bother to fight it? Join the masquerade of death. Face of the Killer ends with the titular Killer bringing upon his new world, supposedly an evil negative of the original, and as BB explores the aftermath it turns out that pretty much everything is the same. The only differences are that some of the product brands have changed, the members of the city council have more violent names, and just a few more people than usual are putting on rubber masks and grabbing the nearest sharp implement. It’s a delightfully circular ending, the kind that offers no solutions other than a reminder that shit has always been fucked and that there’s no way out but through, trying your best to live and make art that is truly your own through whatever hell you find yourself in. After all, history is a nightmare – and loving it!As I crawl inevitably towards the untrustable age of thirty, it’s good to play something so deeply concerned with Not Selling Out. I am fundamentally not a BB, but it’s still better to be a ZZ than a Marcie.she’s gonna write the touhou fic that changes everything
Dec 22, 2025 • Subscribe
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