The Anthology of the Killer museum beckons. You wander into the building of eclectic textures surrounded by vague murmurings. The exhibitions cover the different aspects of The Killer: voice, hands, drool, eyes, flesh, blood, ears, heart, face. These exhibitions cover the exploits of the zine creator BB and the culture of violence in the world she lives in, an unfolding history of senseless crime and gig work.

Anthology of the Killer is the collection of games made by thecatamites, made under the name garmentdistrict on Game Jolt over the last three years. The game won the Nuovo Award from the last Independent  Games Festival, which is the award given to honor “abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games,” which I’d say is an accurate description of Anthology of the Killer. I’ve generally been a big fan of thecatamites’ work and he e-mailed me himself, so I just had to drop my new bingo rules to check this out.

The games are a horror-comedy series where you walk BB around huge 3D sets. It sorta feels like a 3D version of 10 Beautiful Postcards where you’re moving a doofy animated lady around intricately designed places, where walls are no longer a suggestion but exist to keep BB boxed in. Most of the time the camera is kept angled- not exactly fully fixed angle, but enough so to feel like a pastiche of older horror games, though sometimes things switch to a more constrained first-person perspective. Going up to floating icons, BB will espouse her commentary on what she’s seeing, which will be the source for a lot of the humor in this game. If you’ve played thecatamites’ previous work, the rambly, bizarre, and sometimes intellectual musings will feel familiar.

But while comedy is a big drive of the series, Anthology of the Killer does not skimp on the horror. The game makes a good use of camera framing and shadows to emphasize genuine horror moments, like witnessing the aftermath of a bloody massacre by the Killer shown through vents in first person, a dark tunnel with nothing but glowing red eyes laughing just before BB steps into a play of a dramatized real(?) murder emphasized with stage lighting, and of course, a horror game is nothing without a good chase. While getting caught doesn’t lead to a game over or anything, the fake-out endings do give the impression that the chaser could have easily gutted BB if they truly locked the fuck in.

All this is accompanied with a soundtrack by Tommy Tone, who’s consistently collaborated with thecatamites under the New Vaders label. While there’s a sense of unease in the more atmospheric tracks, I’d say that the soundtrack generally feels like chill easy listening, with Placid being the song that would be most at home with more traditional horror offerings. My favorite track though has to be the Weepster’s Lament, an exciting upbeat track of a murderer trying to make it in the music world. We stan the Weepster in this house, Indie Hell Zone is pro-Weepster.

The chillness of the soundtrack feels reflective of how normalized murder and violence is in the world of the Killer. BB and other normal people treat it as a mild inconvenience when they’re not in the crosshairs. Culture is heavily influenced by violence, from a music wave of rock horrorcore, to an immersive theater experience where actual murder attempts are easily assumed to be part of the show, to a graduation party theming itself after bloodlust and the partygoers getting radicalized to actually act on it. There are counter responses to the violence of the world, but those are upheld by their own senses of violence – this is not even mentioning the legitimized violence of the looming police. And of course, you can’t forget that businesses need to capitalize on things. The music scene needs money men, the murder scene of the Killer needs to become an attraction as per the victim’s ghost trying to make an Economy 2, and you know, the good old fashioned method of murdering threats to local business is still good.

But consider that this is all just a cartoonish vision of the real world. The true crime scene has made real life killers into folklore to make money off of, with fanbases that at worst treat these crimes as fictional events and make tumblr sexymen out of the perpetrators. IDF soldiers happily post content of carnage wrought in Gaza and parading the possessions of displaced civilians as trophies. I fucking said this months ago, but George W. Bush criticized Israel for far far less in the aughts. Conservatives act as if the United States is as violent as the world of the Killer, and their solution to that is empowering the far more visibly violent police state. The grifter economy of the local cult is just a few steps away from QAnon grift culture. Violence made the world we have today and it continues to get worse as things get more normalized. Murder is in our culture, it’s our history. You live your best life when you watch them die.

Meanwhile, you must be wondering: who is The Killer?

Personally, I view the Killer as less of a singular person but more of a living concept. I see it as kinda like Lil’ Slugger from Paranoia Agent, but for the concept of murder and violence. Occasionally, a real person takes up the visage of the Killer, but the Killer clearly “exists” independently, emphasis on the quotation marks. Considering allusions to a bird god and the Killer’s own beaked appearance, maybe the Killer is a death god blessing people.

But where does that leave BB?

BB herself becomes a mythological figure, in that her proximity to several incidents leads to her being viewed as a murderer with a fictional counterpart making a literal and figurative killing in the home video market, and some other self becoming part of the murder music scene. Going back to my Paranoia Agent comparison, BB is to the Killer like Maromi is to Lil’ Slugger. Maromi is an escapist symbol while Lil’ Slugger is a bastardization of it to be a way to escape the problems of life (via getting beaten in the head). The Killer is a platonic ideal of a murderer, whilst BB is a platonic heroine. After all, what B-movie horror has a serial killer but no heroine? But in a world where violence is commonplace and normal, that role becomes bastardized in the sense that she never dies, nor any of her close associates who’d normally die off and leave her as a more typical final girl. BB soon becomes viewed to be on the level of the Killer, her initial image shifting in society to become another expression of murder. After all, the dolls that resemble BB in Hands of the Killer are practice dolls to be torn up by posers, but by the end, people with actual murderous intent start to dress like her much like they dressed like birds. She becomes a bastardization of the Killer in that culture and history views her as a killer, because culture dictates what’s what, not her actual acts.

I generally enjoyed Anthology of the Killer, though I’d say that Flesh and Ears are my favorite installments. It was nice to have other characters consistently around for BB to bounce off of. Good potential for Scooby Doo-esque shenanigans, here. To me, Anthology of the Killer feels like the culmination of thecatamies’ work. It’s got the exploratory vibes of his bigger games like 10 Beautiful Postcards, it’s got the philosophical musings of crime and violence like Murder Dog IV: Trial of The Murder Dog, a general fascination with B-movie horror and crime like in smaller games like Drill Killer, etc. So far, Anthology of the Killer has to be the best thing thecatamites made. If you’re a fan of games like Space Funeral, you absolutely should pick this up. But if you want something chill to play that’s not quite a cozy game, this is definitely something to check out.

But as I close out this revisit of thecatamites, I’ve already spun the wheel to decide the next game. So next time, I will be revisiting Torch60 with Soma Union!