Anthology of the Killer

Most games that call themselves surreal are just games with a purple sky. Anthology of the Killer is the real thing: a nine-part serial by Irish developer Stephen Gillmurphy — better known online as thecatamites — released episodically over several years and now collected here under a single launcher, with contributions from Tommy Tone and A. Degen. It is a work that refuses to look like anything else, and it wears that refusal well.

You play BB, a zine-maker with a deadline and no self-preservation instinct, scavenging a rotting dream-logic city for material. Every episode she trips over a fresh murder plot with its own themed killer: Voice, Hands, Drool, Eyes, Flesh, Blood, Ears, Heart, and Face of the Killer. Each runs roughly 30 to 60 minutes. The settings escalate from mundane-adjacent to fully deranged — drinky-bird factories, dream resorts, waterparks, immersive theatre productions, art freeports, hospitals, police stations — and a loose continuity threads through all nine, less a plot than a slowly worsening mood.

The market positioning is refreshingly honest: this is the itch.io avant-garde arriving on Steam and Switch with a bow on it. The collection adds gamepad support, a hub world themed to each episode, secret bonus rooms, a digital museum of development artifacts and precursor assets, and a free downloadable zine. It is a cult work finally given proper packaging.

• Nine self-contained episodes with a shared spine: Each chapter is a complete murder-comedy with its own killer, cast, and punchline, but recurring characters and escalating consequences reward playing them in order. The bundle is the correct way to experience this — the episodic drip release never let the continuity land the way a single sitting does.
• Writing as the primary mechanic: Dense comic-panel text, an enormous cast of oddballs, and dialogue that is genuinely, reliably funny. The deadpan surrealism swings from slapstick to real dread inside a single exchange. This is writing someone actually sat down and wrote, and it shows on every panel.
• Hand-drawn lo-fi 3D: Deliberately crude, PS1-adjacent geometry wearing hand-drawn textures. It is not nostalgia cosplay. It is a coherent visual grammar built to make ordinary rooms feel wrong.
• The collection layer: A themed hub world, hidden bonus rooms, and a digital museum of cut assets and precursor prototypes that functions as a genuine director’s commentary — a rare case of bonus content that deepens the main text instead of padding it.

The Gameplay Loop

Let’s be blunt about what you do here. You walk. You poke at scenery. You talk to people at length. You occasionally carry an object from one room to another because a puzzle asked you to. That’s the loop. The verb set would fit on a Post-it.

This is the review’s central tension, and it is worth sitting with rather than hand-waving. Judged as an adventure game, Anthology of the Killer is mechanically thin — the item logic is light to the point of vestigial, and puzzles function as pacing devices rather than obstacles. You will almost never be stuck. There is no failure state worth fearing, no resource to manage, no systemic depth to master. If your definition of a good game requires interlocking systems that reward player skill, this will read as a slideshow with a walk button.

But the design is doing something specific with that thinness, and it works. Gillmurphy has stripped away almost every mechanic that would compete for attention with the text, because the text is the content. Every extra button would be friction between the player and the next joke. The exploration exists to control the rate at which writing arrives — you round a corner, and a new absurdity is deployed at exactly the moment you’re ready for it. That’s not laziness. That’s editing.

The Comedy Engine

The tonal control is the most impressive craft on display. Horror-comedy usually collapses in one direction: either the jokes puncture the dread, or the dread makes the jokes feel tasteless. Gillmurphy holds both simultaneously by keeping BB’s narration flatly unbothered while the world escalates into cartoon dismemberment around her. The horror lands because nobody in the fiction treats it as horror. A serial killer themed around ears is a stupid premise. The game commits to it with such total, bureaucratic sincerity that it becomes unnerving.

The non-sequiturs are the risk. This is obtuse by design — conversations detour into digressions that go nowhere, characters explain systems that don’t exist, and the “solution” to an episode is frequently a punchline rather than a deduction. Players arriving from conventional horror, expecting clear objectives and legible threat, will likely bounce off hard. That’s not a flaw so much as an accurate description of the game’s shape.

Structure and Pacing

The episodic format is the collection’s quiet superpower. At 30 to 60 minutes each, no chapter outstays its concept. A weaker developer would have stretched Voice of the Killer into a six-hour game and drained it. Instead you get nine concentrated doses, each with a distinct setting and its own comedic register, and the anthology structure means a chapter that doesn’t click for you is over before it can sour the whole.

The hub world is a smart addition. Episodic releases have a continuity problem — by episode seven, nobody remembers episode two. Giving each chapter a themed physical space to re-enter turns the collection into a place rather than a menu, and it makes replaying a favorite episode a two-click affair.

Where the design frays is movement and camera. Traversal is floaty and imprecise, the third-person camera is built with little tolerance for tight geometry, and cluttered rooms turn the search for a single interactable object into a low-grade hunt-the-pixel exercise in 3D. None of it is fatal — there’s no combat or platforming to fail — but it’s the seam where “deliberately lo-fi” stops being an aesthetic argument and starts being a rough edge.

The art direction is a strong argument for auteur development. This is hand-drawn, low-poly work that looks nothing like the polished PS1-revival shelf it will inevitably get filed next to. Textures look scrawled. Proportions are wrong on purpose. Environments are packed with dense visual noise that rewards actually looking at walls. It may be the most distinctive art direction in a game this year — hyperbole in most contexts, defensible here.

The comic-panel text presentation deserves specific credit. Dialogue arrives as illustrated panels, not floating boxes, which lets Gillmurphy control comic timing at the frame level — a reveal panel, a reaction panel, a beat. It’s a genuine formal innovation in how games deliver written jokes, and it’s the reason the humor lands as reliably as it does.

Technically, the low fidelity buys enormous headroom. A 2D-flavored game of this scope is light on hardware by design, and the collection’s engineering effort clearly went into the launcher, hub, and gamepad support rather than graphical uplift. Correct priorities.

Steam is the definitive version. Mouse-look makes the fiddly interaction hunting materially less annoying — when you need to find the one clickable thing in a room, a cursor beats an analog stick every time. It’s also where the discussion around the game and the museum content feel most at home, and the free zine download is easy to grab and read on a second monitor.

Nintendo Switch trades precision for the correct posture. This is a handheld experience by temperament — nine bite-sized episodes, heavy reading, no reflex demands. It is the ideal commute or couch game, and the horror side arguably works best in the dark. The tradeoff is real: the gamepad support is competent but doesn’t fully solve the camera imprecision, and the dense comic-panel text is more taxing on a small handheld screen than on a monitor. Read-heavy games and small displays remain an uneasy pairing.

Pick Steam if you want the sharpest controls and the archive material. Pick Switch if you’d otherwise never sit down to play it.

Anthology of the Killer is the rare game where the flaws and the virtues are the same decision. It is mechanically slight because Gillmurphy stripped out everything that would have competed with the writing, and the writing is strong enough to carry that bet. Nine episodes, nine killers, and a compact, concentrated argument that a game can be almost nothing but voice and still be one of the more memorable releases of its year.

The IGF recognition and the devoted following are not accidents of a small, friendly audience. They’re what happens when a singular vision finally gets a launcher, a hub, gamepad support, and a Switch port — the packaging that lets work like this reach past the people already following it. The clunky camera and the occasional interaction hunt keep it from a higher rating. The refusal to explain itself will lose some players entirely, and that’s fine; this game is not trying to be for them.

Buy it for the writing. Stay for the museum. Do not expect it to hold your hand, and do not expect anything else to feel quite like it afterward.