Bottom Line: Stephen Gillmurphy's nine-episode horror-comedy is the funniest, strangest, most confidently written adventure game in years — and it barely bothers to be a "game" at all. If you value prose and vision over verbs and systems, this is essential; if you need objectives and mechanics, walk away now.
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 you 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 genuinely 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, bounce off hard. That's the most common complaint in the Steam reviews, and it's not wrong — it's just describing the game accurately and calling it a flaw.
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 experience frays is movement and camera. Traversal is floaty and imprecise, the third-person camera fights you in tight geometry, and there are moments where finding the one interactable object in a cluttered room becomes 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.