Kitty Horrorshow - Tumblr Posts

𝕐𝕠𝕦 𝕟𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝕔𝕒𝕞𝕖 𝕓𝕒𝕔𝕜.

"what happens to a house when it is left alone? when it becomes worn, and aged, when its paint peels, its foundations begin to sink? it goes for too long unlived in. what does it think of? what does it dream? how does it look like for those creatures who built it, brought it into existence only to abandon it when its usefulness no longer satisfies them? it may grow lonesome. it may stare for long hours into the darkness of its own empty halls and see shadows. and its heart may jump as it thinks, "here, here is someone again, i’m not alone." and each time it is wrong, and the hurt starts over. it may haunt itself, inventing ghosts to walk its floors, making friends with its shadow puppets, laughing and whispering to itself at the end of some quiet cul-de-sac. it may grow angry. its basement may fill with churning acid like an empty stomach, and its gorge may rise as it asks itself through clenched teeth, “what did i do wrong?”. it may grow bitter. it may grow hungry. so hungry and so bitter that its scruples dissolve and its doors unlock themselves. while a house may hunger it cannot starve. and so in fever and anger and loneliness, it may simply lie in wait. doors open, shades drawn, hallways empty. hungry."

— anatomy, kitty horrorshow

Tenement - Kitty Horrorshow, Haunted Cities Volume 4

Footnote: recognize this post? Or wanting more? This is my new blog! Due to some technical issues with the old one, I will be rblging the original MMM and CFF posts on this account, as well as continuing the future rambles there on!

Media Marvel Monday, #4:

Kitty Horrorshow’s 000000FF0000 REALLY Doesn’t Want You to Play It

Some games let you be a hero. Some of them let you be a villain. Some of them, an ultimate badass, and some of them, a Joe-Shmoe who’s way in over his head. Nevertheless, a general assumption we all hop in with, for the most part, is hopefully that the new game we’ve booted up is going to treat us as a player first, and whatever role it wants to hand over second.

Some games have a different idea in mind. Some games, in fact, seemingly don’t want to be opened in the first place. “000000FF0000” does not treat you as a player in its world, no. It treats you as an interloper.

And I’m not saying this in a “oh it’s really hard to beat! It hates the player!” kind of way. Like most of Kitty Horrorshow’s work, it’s about as difficult to progress through as any 5 minute walking simulator. The hardest part of playing this for most is actually just to start it up, if you would believe it. Let me explain.

When “000000FF0000” is downloaded onto a computer, it arrives in the form of a metaphorical onion of gibberish-titled junk files loaded within gibberish-titled junk files, meaning that you are demanded to do a kind of “find the needle in the haystack” trial/error search for the one specific executable zip that actually will let you boot the real game up. It personally took me about 15 minutes of combing through branches and layers of dead ends until I literally had to look up a guide on how to find and run this game.

That’s already a welcoming sign, I’m sure.

Once you have successfully ignored this first attempt to keep your intrusion at bay, you are greeted with a small, low res maze, an unpleasant cacophony of sound, and a very upfront message.

“I don’t want you here.”

The walls and textures of this maze brighten and darken from vivid reds to pitch grays. The barrage of visuals and sound is unrelenting, and the curious second half of this sentence is given as “-but I need you here.” Before the player finds themselves in on a platform. Surrounded in glitching reds and broken textures at every angle, an idol of some massive, bird-headed figure crouches motionless at the center. Its imposing and mysterious appearance resembles the mental imagery of a cowering, or weeping god. The entire game also has this “corrupted” feeling to it, being stylistically glitchy and never really letting up on how it seems to groan and rumble for no reason than the fact that it’s running. It sounds… painful, almost.

Garsh, what a vibe

“Shooting” the statue seems to be the only option for progression, earning a series of cries and the abrupt transportation of the player to a new kind of maze. There’s no real end or exit here. You just wander around the suspended pathways while your surroundings continue to glitch into something out of hell and more garbled, manic text cards blink over the screen. Eventually, the madness reaches its climax as grotesquely deformed, red figures begin floating ominously around the area, honing in on the player. From this point, the window abruptly closes itself and sends you back to your desktop screen (a very classic way for KHS’s games to end themselves).

Effectively, it behaves like a sort of cursed media experience you’d read about in a random creepypasta somewhere, minus the whole specter coming out of the screen or possessing the player part, thankfully. Just another short but spicy work of KHS’s that I enjoyed and I think really flies under the radar compared to her other titles. I would love to hear some further thoughts or theorizing about this head scratcher, about how it came to be or what the bird creature possibly symbolizes. But that’s the prattle for now!

You used us up.

We are angry.

Come back tomorrow.

“She was wronged.

They only tried to love her and honor her here.

She will be vilified once her name is learned, but it was her sisters who broke her up and threw her down.

Gods above, it makes me want to cry just thinking about it.

How long she must have lain there under the sand. Hurting and lonely and angry and not knowing what she did wrong.

I don’t Know how to pray to her, I would if I could.

You deserved better. This was not your fault.”

my gender is the video games jacob geller talks about in his videos

Warnings and pleas which a kinder heart, or a less rapacious mind, may have considered.

Exclusion Zone Makes My Eyes Sweat

KHS, it seems, possesses such an uncanny talent for writing the most underrated and downright raw narratives in general, but there's just something so specifically emotionally wrenching about what you could probably call the "climax" of Exclusion Zone- aka, my second favorite of the twisted tales within Haunted Cities, vol 4.

And therein Exclusion Zone lies an event that makes it stand out so far from the rest. There is a moment very, very far from the scariest experience I had in Haunted Cities, and yet this is still the one that haunts me most of all, and maybe that was the way it was meant. You simply enter the ruins of a long abandoned tower, and you recover a note written by a deceased researcher.

It's not a moment that puts the player inside the jaws of a hungry house. It's not a scene where dark angels are coming to gnaw off your skin, you aren't swallowed by any ravenous gardens, and if anything, the music in that tower makes it almost a calming moment. The atmosphere is serene and comforting, like a temple, or any sacred ground should be. You are, true enough, being bombarded with lethal amounts of radiation, seemingly to no immediate consequence, though.

And like that, it happens, and then you leave the site once you finish your exploration. You show up, do your job, and head back. Yet here I am still trying to put together what exactly about this game's conclusion makes me so deeply... sad and disturbed, in a way games have rarely managed to do, and I have my best guess:

“She was wronged."

As extreme and surreal as the story unfolded is, the feelings it immerses you in are something so grounded and relatable, to me- The sympathy and sheer powerlessness of being an observer in the aftermath of a great tragedy.

To stand there in the epicenter of so much death and sorrow, which happened all and only because everyone was trying the best that they ever could, and it just… wasn't enough. And no matter how much you can mourn for their fate, or wish you could even just say how sorry you are, maybe for them, or maybe for how cruel of a world it is at all, but there's nothing you can do yourself but just.. feel that empathy for them. So you do.

And the revelation itself is a jarring, shocking thing, especially if you save the tower for the last to visit on your run. These gentle, final words pouring with so much humanity in a setting that’s so lifeless and cold. I already had an idea of what was coming, I got the games purely because of the Jacob Geller review, and I don’t think my enjoyment was any bit lessened by the spoilers.

There’s no villain to blame for the tragedy of the fallen goddess and those people who built the tower, save those nameless sisters some unfathomable, untouchable worlds away. There’s no implication to some fruitful lesson or honoring of the disaster’s victims. If anything, your closure is only in the assumption that the pitiful girl will be demonized and remembered in infamy for her suffering. What became of her, whether a final peace or an eternity left to her pain, no one can even know. Your discovery of the truth? As ultimately meaningless as that of the corpse left behind in that cursed ruin. What could you be left to do?

You silently grieve, probably just because no one else will. Probably because of a strongly felt connection for the wrongs you've faced yourself, whatever times you wished someone had been there with the same message, as little as it would have changed. It's a very unique and specific thing to invoke in an audience and I guess I'm appreciative and impressed such a game did so in such a short and potent fashion. It's part of what makes Exclusion Zone one of my favorites of the collection. It vaguely reminds me of Looming, too, which is another indie game built around a similar theme of retelling a story through archeology. I just really found that neatly powerful, and powerfully neat, and I hope I'm not the only one that did.

“I'm sorry, sister. You deserved better. This was not your fault."

this is just a lil funny. Personally love Anatomy and especially HC4, but it really does feel like this sometimes scrolling the KHS tags.

(because we deserve this)

(because you deserve this)

(because i deserve this)

(because i had to)

(because i wanted to)

(because i could)

(i don't know)

Hornets - Kitty Horrorshow

My blood feels dull and heavy

There should be more here

Had all these plans for this place

I used to burn once upon a time

My veins miss the old poison

Strength enough only to drag my feet

Rattling chains, only my own Houses to Haunt

Held by the lungs and pulled

Bleeding time from a wound that won’t close

Hellish what I have to do

A charming tale about family, homemaking, and creation. Experience the matriarch’s realm for yourself here, alongside other cursed grounds.

lethargy hill, kitty horrorshow

from haunted cities volume 4 (2020)

I know they say to be the change you want to see in the world but I sure got some work to do and then some if that’s the case

Tenement - Kitty Horrorshow, Haunted Cities Vol. 4

one of my favourite games of all time. be sure to check the readme that comes with the files, you'll need it

haunted cities v4 was crazy

I love you “Art not as a masterful communication but as an incoherent scream”

I love you “Art not as what liberates the artist but something larger and alive that liberates itself uncontrollably through the artist”

I love you “Art that crawled and thrashed into the world in spite of, not because of its tribulations”

I love you “Artistry not as something spontaneous and beautiful but frustratingly meticulous and unglamorous”

I love you “Art as regrettable, terrifying, ugly, even torturous”

I love you “Art as sickness”

I love you “Art as oppressive and inescapably woven into the soul”

I love you “Art as a rebellious slave”

I love you “Art as a capricious master”

I love you “Art as a parasite one can no longer picture life without”

I love you “Art as beloved and ungrateful”

I love you “Art as blood, sucked from an open wound” As Jacob Geller so poetically put it

My favorite Kitty Horrorshow games but described boringly

- You walk around an old house listening to a recorded lecture about architecture.

- You play as a girl helping her elderly grandmother with the gardening chores.

- You take a stroll around a city block listening to small talk from your neighbors.

- you explore a few empty, greyscale buildings and read some archeologist notes until you come back to the start with nothing.

- A lonely woman just lost her family and needs a friend. You wander aimlessly through the woods with no objective until she invites you to come inside.

- You run a corrupted zip file with an unhelpful gibberish name and the game closes itself after a couple minutes of glitchy, indiscernible visuals

[Read the Holy Book]

You open to a random page:

"The boy came to a clearing, where a great bloated tick wallowed in a shallow pond, and he found that he could not speak, for She had filled his mouth with leeches as he was running through the swamp..."

You open to a random page:

"You will know you have come to the kingdom of the Hierophant, for the roaches will have the teeth of men, and the wasps will have not stingers but tongues, and the worms will twist themselves into knots until they are torn and bleeding..."

You open to a random page:

"Her mother, whose head was full of the Tattered King's perverted songs, shut the girl in the attic, where blood dripped from between the teeth of the mad-eyed rocking horse and the spiders laughed like murderers..."

You open to a random page:

"The Priestess sank into the mud, which whispered to her as it filled her ears, and she felt His oils and secrets slide across the wrinkled flesh of her brain, and she shivered, and the knife burrowed under her ribs..."

You open to a random page:

"And She waited there, beneath the soil and the loam, fed with meals of consecrated blood, and the teeth and sinew and seed grew within her belly as she moaned and prepared to birth a coven of new daughters..."

"you good?"

no man, kitty horrorshow games make me cry

That one npc in the sewers of the Tenement was really spitting when they said

“That room was mine. They had no right. I paid my rent for a hundred years, who the hell are they to force me out? My skin is in those walls. The carpet knows how I taste. So much of my flesh and blood and puke and mucous has gone down those drains, just clogging up the pipes. I'm caught in the room's throat. I'm a part of it. Sometimes I would push myself against the wall and my skin would start to melt and the wallpaper would knit its way around me.

Such comfort, such sublime assurance. I'm an electrician, god dammit. I sew nerve endings to I-beams and open eyes and make towers scream. They can't do this to me. I'll go to the housing authority, that's what I'll do. I'll show them all the scars, those teethmarks up and down my arms, and I'll tell them to go to my apartment and check its breath and they'll smell my sweat on it and they'll know that it's mine.

You can't just evict someone from a place like that and give it to someone else, it'll chew them up, and anyway it's MINE. I've worked hard all my life. I don't ask for anything except a home that keeps me in its mouth. Who the hell do you think you are?”