In the readme file for Anatomy, past all the content warnings and the list of controls, there is a dedication to Shirley Jackson. Jackson was a prolific writer, but for our purposes here in this analysis she wrote the landmark novel, The Haunting Of Hill House. I covered that book ages ago on this blog, and I forbade myself from verifying when until I wrote this sentence so I could properly be gobsmacked when I go and look in between sentences. [Beat] Oh, only six years ago. Not as long as I thought, but still a long time. To make a long story short, that book mirrored its titular house with its protagonist Eleanor, showing a disorientating interior design of both house and mind. Anatomy does not run with the mental health implications of this, but takes a similar track of wondering about the power and possibility of a house as a living entity, and the ways in which it can mirror a human body. The gameplay loop of Anatomy involves wandering around an ordinary suburban house, looking for a cassette tape, and taking it back to the tape player in the kitchen. The focus on cassette tapes, combined with how the game always opens with the nostalgic clunking of a VCR and also periodically obscures itself with VHS static, gives everything this natural analog horror feel.
What's on those tapes are interesting musings about the ways in which a house is alive like a person, and what different rooms represent: the living room as the heart where all gather, the hallways like veins, kitchens and bathrooms as digestive system. The mind, meanwhile, is represented by the two parts of the house that aren't on the ground floor. The bedroom is the subconscious mind, the dreamer, represented by the fact that we sleep there and dream. The basement, dark and dingy (I got lost down there for quite a bit due to the low visibility of the game), is the id at the root of all human minds, where monsters lurk. There are no traditional monsters in Anatomy, but the house itself will distort and change to fuck with you. When I entered the master bedroom for the first time and found that the door behind me had vanished, for instance. In that regard, there's a little of House Of Leaves in there too, a living place where the shadows keep on changing.
From here, things get a little more abstract and metaphorical. The game fucks with you, actually closing itself out at multiple points and requiring you to go through another run of collecting tapes and listening to their messages, all as the house around you degrades and the audio becomes a distorted mess. There's a wonderful notion about the bedroom actually being a mouth, and what we hope the house won't let in while we sleep inside it. Later, as the audio chides you while you're trapped in the basement, everything goes red and teeth sprout from the ceiling and floor. The house is alive, and devouring you. The final moments are spent in a disgusting organic low-poly maze, some sicknasty shit that ends with one more ominous tape message. What does it all mean? It could be the malevolence of a house invaded. We spoke of the dedication to Shirley Jackson in the readme. House Of Leaves, the novel, has one ominous phrase before it begins: "This is not for you.". I feel that here. This house is a living space, and it is not for us to traipse about, leaving its doors open and picking up its tapes and watching its decay. So, it defends itself. It bites back. Respect the power of the house as a living entity, as a thing comparable to a person, or suffer the dire consequences. It's quite the intriguing little spooky game, and I'm glad I played it.
Two more to go... and we've not discussed zombies yet...
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