Kitty Horrorshow

Kitty Horrorshow
Occupation	Video game developer

Kitty Horrorshow is the pseudonym of an independent video game developer. Releasing her games on the distribution platform itch.io, she specializes in the psychological horror genre, often surrealistic and atmospheric with an art style reminiscent of video games in the 1990s, specifically early 3D games.

Career and style

Horrorshow gave up on her initial attempts to become a game developer after finding it too complex. Years later, she became interested again after playing a Twine game. Horrorshow's art style is influenced by early 3D video games, such as Doom, Hexen, Thief, and EverQuest, citing their ability to create immersive worlds while still remaining unmistakably computer-generated. She explains that the world of Silent Hill has served as "more of a home" than anything in reality and that the works of Porpentine has greatly changed her outlook on games.

Owen Vince of Kill Screen compares the stylistic, low-polygon graphics in her games to that of German Expressionism, specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Her games often lack characters with whom to interact, but focus instead on dreamlike scenes to explore. She avoids jump scares and player death, as she finds them uninteresting. To scare players, she uses elements of psychological horror, such as leaving disturbing scenes unexplained and open to interpretation. Commenting on the lack of jump scares in her games, Brendan Caldwell of Rock, Paper, Shotgun wrote, "These games creep up on you slowly and rattle your brain, not your instincts."

In 2017, Horrorshow was one of four game creators featured at the "No Quarter" exhibition hosted by the New York University Game Center.

Games

CHYRZA

Originally published in October of 2016, CHYRZA is a game about exploring a vast desert populated with various forms of large monoliths around a deserted village. A narrator describes the scene, but in the first person voice of a traveler to the desert and their disturbing encounters and backgrounds. Fears around a large pyramid that continuously looms in the distance is also repeatedly referenced. The structures found throughout the deserts have their sources revealed to the player by the narrator when reaching the top of each one in an increasingly paranoid and unhinged manner. Chris Priestman of Kill Screen compares the atmosphere to The Twilight Zone's initial episode titled "Where Is Everybody?" and evokes the "feeling of being watched and isolated" and being slowly driven mad by the delusional psychosis. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Philippa Warr compared the setting to one of the bizarre news items that could be found in the fictional narrative podcast Welcome to Night Vale, especially one event where a "mysterious philosophical pyramid" arrives at the town.

Anatomy

Released in 2016, Anatomy is a game focused on exploring an empty house and finding voice tapes as the house begins to change around the player, almost as if it is a living organism. Initially, collecting these tapes are the only component of the game, but the program will eventually glitch and close itself. When reopened, the house that makes up the player space is radically changed, with static on the game screen and audio distortion occurring. These shutdown events are repeated as the house continues to degrade more and more upon each continued playing of the game. Anatomy's horror is a focus on how the safety of home can be reversed and that the comfort we feel in such spaces can have sinister undertones. More broadly, it is about haunted houses, what makes them scary, and how that involves looking into the depths of human fears within those enclosed spaces, especially in the dark, even when one fully understands the horror one is facing.

Wired writer Julie Muncy describes the game as an engagement with the potential horror behind any door that has become more frequently the source of the viral horror on the internet, with Anatomy serving as a "powerful entry point to that experience, an explanation of its value and an exploration of its impact". Jacob Geller for Game Informer describes it as the "scariest game I’ve ever played" and that the lo-fi nature of the graphics and audio are what make the game have the experience it does. Playboy's Suriel Vazquez applauds that rather than relying on monsters and jumpscares, Anatomy is instead "anything but predictable. And that’s exactly what horror should be." Adam Smith of Rock, Paper, Shotgun references the Lovecraftian quote "fear of the unknown" and reinterprets it for Anatomy as "fear of the familiar", whereby even familiar spaces can seem frightening in the dark and quiet of nighttime.

Haunted Cities

Volume 1

Through funding from her Patreon, Horrorshow has been releasing collections of games under the "Haunted Cities" package title. The general theme of the games included in the package is that of virtual spaces and the inherent disturbing nature of architecture and topography itself. The original release bundle included games officially published between November of 2015 and February of 2016. The games in the first volume of Haunted Cities included Leechbowl, an abandoned space of a midwestern factory town and an obsession with blood, Grandmother, a visit to an eerie grandmother's house in a dark forest and what can be found there, Pente, the space of an empty cathedral and the theme of suffering, and Circadia, a story made in Flash about "a girl trying to cure a cassette tape’s infection".

Volume 2

One of the games presented in the second volume is Scarlet Bough, which features an abandoned small town where each building hides gory secrets. Matt Cox of Rock, Paper, Shotgun pointed out that the game exhibits Horrorshow's stated design ethos of starting with a simple idea of a space and then populating it afterwards. The use of environmental storytelling and appropriate sounds helps heighten the atmosphere, according to Cox.

Volume 3

The third volume of this series included four games called Ghost Lake, Seven Days, Basements, and Castle Wormclot. A content warning for each game is included in the ReadMe file. The first game, Ghost Lake, involves driving a car around a decaying, abandoned city with disturbing imagery of rotting and breaking down buildings. Seven Days reflects several past games released by Horrorshow by having a strange environment of a house undamaged by the storm and water that has destroyed the rest of the town. The player follows the occupant's diary on each day in the decaying location. Basements is a shorter game with more graphic and sensory focused imagery that is about loss and the nature of humanity.

Unlike many of the other games in the package that have a greater focus on overt horror, Castle Wormclot is a subdued presentation of a candlekeeper wandering a castle to light candles in a slow and methodical manner so others in the castle can travel those same paths. The lives of the other characters in and around the castle is shown alongside their fears and worries about what is happening inside the castle. Cameron Kunzelman of Vice compares the game to the plodding horror of political life in 2018 in their home state of Georgia and having to wait for the voted upon positive results of the election to happen eventually, though with everything potentially collapsing in the meantime.

Ludography

• Dust City (August 2014)
• Chyrza (October 2014)
• Here Is Where I Carve My Heart (March 2015)
• Sunset Spirit Steel (March 2015)
• Hornets (April 2015)
• Sigil Valley (April 2015)
• Wolfgirls In Love (April 2015)
• Rain, House, Eternity (May 2015)
• Actias (November 2015)
• Anatomy (February 2016)
• 000000FF0000 (May 2016)
• Haunted Cities (May 2016)
• Haunted Cities Vol. 2 (October 2017)
• Haunted Cities Vol. 3 (October 2018)
• Haunted Cities Vol. 4 (October 2020)

Further reading

• UsesThis.com Interview

External links

• Official website
• Official itch.io