Autopsy Pile for Anthology Of The Killer, 2024.

VOICE OF THE KILLER This is the first one, more of a prototype, and mostly structured so that I could avoid having to give solid answers to things I hadn't figured out yet. Like, could BB die, was the Killer of the title a kind of abstract presence or just a guy, the degree of horror or supernatural elements etc.. These are all reasons it ends on a dream sequence, although as someone who felt pretty new to narrative games I also felt a kind of glee in being able to make as many mistakes as I could - unlikely coincidences, dreams, fake-outs and arbitrary twists. The idea of "story" as a set of crude contraptions and devices and the narratives that happen when you just pile them around. I like the occasional shifts into little minigame segments with this one. I think it's maybe the only one to feel the need to explain BB's constant monologue, by presenting it as the text in her zine, although only for the first few sections. The "Strange Town Series" tag was a holdover from when it was an RPG maker game. My favourite part is probably the title screen.... I like those kind of pulp book covers, with a heroine fleeing somewhere, looking off-frame, not making any particular expression. Things related(?) to the story kind of hover in the background, a clock, a pair of eyes, a telephone, a full moon... The dreamlike vagueness of serial stories where you tend to remember them as "the one with X in it" rather than for the narrative itself. The covers I was most fascinated with as a child were for the Babysitters Club books. I liked Enid Blyton's child sleuth stories and was vaguely aware of Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew etc, so for some reason I just assumed that the Babysitters Club was a similar kind of crime fighting organization. All those oddly generic covers, all the blurbs like "Twins are trouble.. BIG trouble. When Julie agrees to take care of the Henderson twins she has no idea it'll turn out to be one Memorial Day Weekend to remember..." I just assumed the gals would be busting smuggler rings and discovering secret rooms and such, and I'd flip through the books impatiently waiting for the babysitter filler content to end so the REAL story could begin. But it never did, and for that reason they seemed very mysterious to me. I could never accept that there wasn't a crime in the Babysitters Club books, so with every one I checked it was like the imaginary "crime" became ever more sprawling, vague and buried, something too vast to make out, dimly sensed under the fabric of the everyday... Of all the games this is probably the one with least explicit horror content. In general I feel traditionalist enough to want to give some sense of narrative bang for buck, but by the standards of horror games these are still quite talky - maybe more like those pre-Halloween horror movies where you get 5 minutes of monster after an hour of scientists talking solemnly in a lab. So when I imagine anyone being frustrated by that I think back to the Babysitters Club and hope that in this case, too, the confusion is more interesting than the thing itself.

HANDS OF THE KILLER I've always found places that used to be other things exciting. Part of the inspiration for Voice Of The Killer was working for the IT department of a call center and wandering around the building on my way to the bathroom - you'd find painted over doors, corridors nobody used, file cabinets full of expired calendars and dried out promotional biros for companies that no longer existed. Nobody knew how anything got there because the institutional memory of the company was zero. And I like apartment buildings and old style department stores, so the idea of an apartment building built on top of an empty department store was, well, why not. Why shouldn't we chase our dreams. 3D can be very literal - the geometry has to make sense, even if the architecture doesn't. I feel like this helped make things feel a lot more grounded and atmospherically real than they would otherwise. And over and over as I made 3D spaces it felt like I was drawing on the memory of real places.. The apartment block in this one is very vaguely based on visiting a friend in Texas. At first I wanted the lower sections to have more of an abandoned department store feeling, based on Honest Ed's, the famously crazed one in Toronto that Tommy Tone recommended I check out. The initial idea for the story was to climb into the forgotten areas of the apartment block via a hollow passage behind the bathroom mirror, just like in Candyman, but one day I relaxed by watching playthroughs of Silent Hill 4 and realised they might have scooped me on that one. After the first game I had to actually figure out a lot of what that one left conspicuously open. At first I had vague thoughts that the game would involve being chased around by literal hands of the killer.. like, giant hands... I thought that maybe every game should involve a giant abstracted body part, like that one Castlevania game where you fight Dracula's eye, heart, fang etc. And I was maybe also thinking of the classic John Stanley horror comic "The Monster Of Dread End". Actually I had no idea how I'd do big, windy arms that would look right in my 2d paperdoll style, so thankfully that idea was aborted. The hooded Night College was vaguely inspired by Georges Bataille's decapitation-centric "Acephale" group, purely because I thought it would be funny to have them show up in distorted form as crude horror movie villains. There's not much resemblance, I just like genre as an excuse to ransack whatever's around you in search of surprising effects, like the one Fulci movie that ends on the moving and perfectly invented line "No one will ever know if children are monsters or monsters are children - Henry James". And there's already a beautiful tradition of videogames containing odd fragments of an older avant garde culture, like the various JRPGs where you beat up guys named Heidegger and Lacan. Part of firming up the horror thing was also deciding whether BB could get killed. I decided against it for two reasons: first, I didn't want to implement some save / checkpoint system, and second, I liked her and would probably find it disspiriting to constantly have to draw her being mutilated in various ways. And to be honest I also liked the staginess of having to come up with all these different unlikely fake-outs... Maybe it makes the games less scary, but I never really aspired to more tension than like the cliffhangers in a Tintin comic - where we can get temporarily invested in the situation while not really believing Tintin himself will ever be dismembered and killed. It's been pointed out that you technically miss out on content by taking the chases seriously as opposed to losing them on purpose, but I don't know. In my opinion you lose something too in not playing along, but making it mandatory can be to make that disappear.

DROOL OF THE KILLER This kind of became the template for what the games were, a template all the other ones felt obliged to depart from somehow. But because of that it has a simplicity that I like. It was one of the most enjoyable to work on, and I think that comes through - it was still novel to try out ideas but I felt a lot more comfortable with the basic rhythm of the games, with the chase sequences, with making areas that wouldn't give the camera trouble etc. I like the destabilising accumulation of sudden cuts as you move through the game, an effect I wish I'd remembered to use more. BB's different reactions were always fun to write as well. One reason the first game has no explicit horror stuff is that I wasn't sure how to handle her reaction if she came across, say, a real corpse - to just instantly wisecrack about it felt too cartoony, but I didn't care for the idea of having to write lots of quasi-naturalistic conventional reactions: "ahh!! noo!! oh my godd!! what the--!!". What helped was thinking of the ways her responses were off as an interesting part of the setting itself. In many ways the games are pretty blunt, but I did try to keep it so that the most thematically blunt moments were also kind of emotionally undersold or opaque - that nobody hears the big villain speech and goes "but killing.. is wrong!!". And conversely that anything close to a regular emotional moment is thematically or otherwise undercut - to avoid there ever being a complete circuit in the game itself, since otherwise what's the person playing it there for? EG I'm pretty sure that getting chlamydia from an unchlorinated pool is a pregnant-from-a-toilet-seat kind of anxiety, which is why it's funnier to me that it's what gets BB to flip out. The setting was partly inspired by a waterpark when I was a kid, a mysterious location. I have vague memories of visiting other towns around Ireland, coastal ones, staying at hotels etc, and for whatever reason I end up drawing on those a lot.... Trying to make games that take place in that kind of heightened version of a place you end up imagining as a child, where you see two things, a beach at night, a weird store, and they kind of become symbols for a whole other world you imagine behind them. It was also inspired by visiting a friend and sneaking into the San Antonio Japanese Gardens at night. The art students (Ray, Max, Claude) were originally meant to appear in this one as fellow trespassers in some kind of abandoned waterpark, but I don't know, I guess it felt more mysterious to wander around that kind of place yourself. Less plausible, too, which is where TAMMY and her powers of persuasion came in. The Killer's design came from an Alfred Kubin picture and so TAMMY's backstory portrait sequence is also based on other works by him, as well as a random Nancy Drew illustration. The backstory itself, dying in a lake, is sort of based not on the death of Kleist and Henriette Vogel but on the kind of glimpsed premonition of same in the Robert Walser story "Kleist in Thun". I'd recommend it, the spectacularly deflating tone shift of the last few paragraphs was a big influence on the games. This was the first game where you get to change BB's outfits, something that made its way into most of the others to stop me getting bored moving around as the same little guy forever. Interestingly I could never redraw her original walk/stand animations, just edit the new outfits over them - whenever I tried to redo them after getting more used to Doodle Studio, the result wouldn't come out quite right, as if she always needed to be more scribbly than all the other sprites in the game. I finished the first three games before releasing any of them publically - with the first two I still wasn't sure if they worked or would end up going anywhere. This was also the time I got the first batch of songs from Tommy Tone and was able to fill out the music for them, which was always the point making these games when I finally felt they actually cohered into something.

EYES OF THE KILLER The basis of this one was simple: I figured a theatre setting would give me lotsa room to play with "fake deaths", the little scenes that play when you get caught in a chase sequences. BB could get caught, decapitated, the decapitated BB turns out to be part of the play, which the real murderers push their way through en route to dismember the real BB... etcetera.... Funnily enough nothing much in this vein made its way into the episode. Maybe it would have felt a little on the nose? Anyway, this was made right after Drool Of The Killer. Making games episodically led to a weird dynamic, where it felt like making a comparatively straight game was how I "paid" for the next one to be weird and offmodel and vice versa. So if Drool worked because it was focused and straightforward and had clear stakes and minimal weird lore to bog it down, it meant the next game should be the opposite of all these things. This was also the first game in the series to bring back much from the previous episodes - ZZ, the police, the hand cult. It's funny how just repeating an element can make it feel more important - like it's not like the previous games established that much detail about the cool detective. But somehow it works a little better to be able to go "hey, it's that guy", like how whenever Mad Dog shows up in Hard Boiled you go "ah, it's Mad Dog". It works both ways as well - bringing back certain things sort of committed me to doing something with them, since otherwise what was the point? It's funny that maybe as a result, this game was also when I started coming up with ideas for the ending in Face Of The Killer. But as a consequence the plot threads in this one ended up kind of hanging there until the last game... For the play, at first I wanted to do a genuine adaptation, like a videogame version of Ubu Roi or something where all the dialogue was sampled and you just occasionally glimpsed BB weaving in and out of the plot. That maybe required more discipline than I have to spare, although Ubu is the reason for the spiral motif in some of the sets and characters. In the end I settled for things which seemed interesting and abstract enough to give me lots of interpretive wiggle-room when sampling: Jarry's "Caesar Antichrist" (also furnishing some text for songs in Ears Of The Kiler", Kruchonykh's "Victory Over The Sun" (and some of the great Malevich costumes), some poems by Georg Trakl. The plot of the fake game is meant to sort of indicate where the final game ends up - landed gentry whose insulation from history leads them to misrecognize the origin of their own power, letting their hirelings go off-leash as a show of symbolic strength and getting chewed up themselves in the carnage that results. The theatre setting itself was very, very vaguely inspired by a school trip we went on once to the Abbey theatre in Dublin. The Abbey is a weird thing - kind of used as shorthand for a stuffy state institution, the "National Theatre", an official organ of the state - but also with some of that weird 1890s symbolist glitter mixed in. That's why Bosso initially lurks behind a little puppet of WB Yeats, poet turned theme park mascot. There is room for a full Yeats themed mascot horror still, maybe one where he gets hopped up on ape glands and chases you around a windy stair. "Raaahh.. the power... I'm changing..." For this and the next one I tried to change BB's nose in her face graphics from a dot to a little upturned snout - maybe I was worried she was too cutesy? But why fight it? The dot soon returned.

FLESH OF THE KILLER Some background: I started work on these games in 2019, in the downtime from my office dayjob which had turned into work from home. During that time I think a combination of bad furniture, cheap bedframes, lack of exercise etc meant I gradually got a carpal tunnel type stiffness in my mouse hand. This is one reason the games have no mouse component, and why they use as few buttons as possible. It feels a lot better now - vertical mouse, stretching, better chair and desk setup etc - but I was pretty stressed about it at the time, and the way it seemed to be getting worse and worse. Eventually I took time off from work and also tried avoiding computer use at all for a month to give myself time to heal up some. It helped a little, although I still felt nervous for a while.... anyway, I mention all this because that monthlong break actually happened right in the middle of development for this game. And for that reason, this one still feels kind of like a missed opportunity to me - I wish the back half, wandering around the trashed museum, had been filled out a little more, I feel like there could have been a lot of impact from just some small extra touches. But I was hurrying through so I could get back to resting again, oh well. So I think this one is kind of a hinge point for the series as a whole. The games after this got increasingly sprawling, "ambitious", tried harder to move away from the one-weird-location-with-one-weird-guy-in-it formula, for better or worse. I didn't want to ever feel again like I was just farting one of these out... although at the same time, taking a break for my health BY farting one of these out was part of how I eventually felt recovered enough to go all in later without concern of harm. So, I don't know. No moral. Anyway, this is the ensemble one where BB hangs out with the art students. I liked that dynamic, although the rest of the games don't really return to it... I think partly it just felt so much easier to write back-and-forth between the characters than to do BB's typical weird self-directed monologues. So easy that it made me nervous, the worry of just slipping into endless banter or cute lines without any sense of offness or dread behind them. The art students are popular - I think people playing these games were a bit starved for signs of something like a regular emotional life in them. Friends, relationships etc. Unfortunately I was trying to leave that stuff out as much as possible. Anyway, that stuff is what fanart is for. Is this the game which has least relation to the body part of the title? I don't really know how flesh comes into it. Originally it was an idea that BB herself gets hired as a fake "murderer" at an institute tasked with developing a kind of Ultimate Victim, an unkillable protoplasmic goop which gets out of control and etc. I ditched it because it felt too much like standard monster movie for me to do anything funny with, but parts of the theme of like a "moral" themed monster mixed with a different idea I had sitting around about breaking into an arts freeport. For me the two ideas were a natural fit. I don't know if anyone playing these games could come away with an impression I'm personally against didacticism in art, or whatever. But something I think about is how maybe the most "moral" period of my lifetime - when artists, thinkers, editorialists en masse demanded we put an end to irony and snark and return to depicting goodness, sincerity and niceness among ordinary folk - was the early 2000s in the lead-up to invading Iraq. And that the call for a new moral frontier was led by a lot of the same people who were also championing that particular adventure. It's been hard for me to lose the impression ever since that morality is coming up with something highminded to say while you're kicking someone in the head.

BLOOD OF THE KILLER Probably my favourite in the series next to Heart - I guess one way you can tell both had a little more juice than usual put into them is that they both have totally new sets of level textures. Anyway, with this one my hand was healing up OK. I had a different job, more time, felt rarin' to go, felt like I wanted to make up for a lack of vim in the previous episode by making something more ambitious and direct. It was inspired by the Henri Rousseau paintings I looked at as reference for the museum game - not the jungle ones, but his eerie quiet ones of the Paris suburbs. And it was also inspired by giallo, by Richard Sala's horror plots full of complex inter-murderer battles, by the bright streets and atmosphere of Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders. I feel like aside from the very first game, Flesh is also the one with maybe the least connection to "horror" as anything but a framework to hang jokes and ideas off of. Blood was kind of an attempt to push back on that a bit, which is also why it has one of the higher onscreen kill counts in the series. It was also an attempt to do something with the Killer of the title again. We actually do get some kind of backstory here, although too mangled for anyone to tell - the fragment of Kleist on the marionette theater, some background paintings and the golden bird speech, BB complaining about not getting to see the world's largest drinky bird followed by a shot of the Killer drinking blood out of a head. But to be honest, I didn't really mind if this stuff went under the radar. In terms of the b-movie analogy, I like when the nominal plot of a horror film feels kind of unimportant - too circuitous to follow or chopped up and artificially tangled via poor dubbing, edits, sound mixing, actors, etc. Or buried underneath some other effect - - I greatly enjoyed the experience of watching Dario Argento's Tenebrae and spending the whole of the climax being distracted by "wait, my parents have that same art print in their house." I like that whatever plot these things have ends up just being the wreckage they leave in your head afterwards. Another way this one tried to distinguish itself is by changing up the murderers a bit - I felt like I was slipping into a rut of all these friendly, talkative killers, I thought it would be interesting to try having some who were angry. Clarice is one example, Concerned Citizen is another - he sounds affable when talking but I tried to give the impression of someone grinding their teeth under the mask. Handy & Mandy are of course just having a good time. It's very funny to me that BB is deployed to this one by some shadowy, Comintern-like "Zine Committee". Yeats makes a surprise re-appearance in the bird museum, perhaps as apology for turning him into a muppet. Technical stuff: In general with the games I tried to restrict each scene to three active lights at a time, in deference to low-end PCs. This was the first time I played around with light cookies, an effect I liked a lot, even if it doesn't get used much. I was pleased with the completely gratuitous and functionless curtain physics in the opening sequence too.

EARS OF THE KILLER The series equivalent to "AAA", really long and sprawling but kind of discombobulated as a result. I think the excitement of feeling happy with how certain things in Blood worked out - the larger cast, being able to try certain segments out of order - made me go mad with power, as happens to videogame developers. I like a lot of the individual parts in this but wish they were wound together a bit more closely... I definitely underestimated how much splitting the plot into multiple player characters means having put more parts back together again, and there are kind of too many moving around in there for me to fully keep track of (like give me a running start and I'm sure I might remember the exact distinctions between Golden Grave, Positive Way, Negative Way, the various phynance and music scene figures etc...) Well, it was fun too. Making computer games for me is partly an excuse to do things I want to do anyway - read certain books, goof around with certain tools. With this one it was fun to have an excuse to dig into old psych and surf rock stuff, Frances Yates on Giordano Bruno, the mysteries of the ESP-Disk catalogue and the original "Gidget" movie. Sonic Reducer (which the "Golden Grave" line comes from, via the PC88 game of the same name), Having Fun With Elvis On-Stage, The Sensational Guitars Of Dan & Dale etc. When we talk about "references" it's mostly with things like Ready Player One in mind, offering the dubious pleasures of recognition and with some sense of reduced value if you don't already know everything they're talking about. I don't know, I don't think it's missing anything to not pick up on this or that little thing, but in a way I think of my videogames as more like construction kits than finished products. It's a set of parts, you put them together in a certain way, there are parts left over afterwards to do whatever with, and part of that for me is including stuff that acts as pointer to other places you can go if you want to explore the same ideas. It's also important to me that the stuff cited is not necessarily like, internet art... I like the internet as a thing that can connect you with other things but I'm less interested in it as a culture in itself, at least the kind of culture imposed through the same handful of platforms. It's always good to remember that there are other things. I was glad to finally get around to a playable ZZ section in this one, which I'd been meaning to do for a while. In the more bright eyed and peppy stages of the series I'd even thought about giving her full spinoff games, maybe ones with some different thematic slant than the BB ones... For some reason I didn't really want to have any sequences where she got chased around by a murderer, though. I guess my read on ZZ is she's already murderer-adjacent (runs a small business) and is only prevented from going all in by her own laziness and apathy. Incidentally, of both sisters I relate to ZZ a little more. An early version of the game plot had BB and ZZ form a band in order to investigate the city's Crime Wave music scene (and sell merch, respectively) - in the middle of a performance BB would get possessed by the spirit of the scene and their band would be catapulted up the charts. But I don't really have strong feelings about the imagery of "pop success" except as a bunch of recieved cliches, and it was funnier to me anyway to think of a band who got touched by an occult presence but who remained obscure scene also-rans. The maybe over-romantic idea of mystic inspiration was downgraded to just being the echo of a previous forgotten moment. One of the inspirations for Blue D Hans was a comment by David Thomas, of the band Pere Ubu, on the post-Beefheart post-Velvets pre-punk moment in music: a feeling that this was the future, the obvious next step that the music was going to take, one that somehow just didn't end up happening - diffused into the thousand channels of the new wave. He compared it to being a communist in the 50s: what do you do when the new world you glimpse doesn't end up coming about? Do you remain committed to that vision, or do you leave it behind? I guess the joke about the single guy left alive to run the Heavens Gate website is along similar lines. BD Hans's empty eye sockets are a pull from Hazel Motes, fellow celebrant in the church of the negative. Technical stuff: started playing with reverb filters, a wonderful toy. Unity comes with a default set of them which also function as prompts for the canonical videogame areas ("small room" "large room" "carpeted hallway" "bathroom" "warehouse" "sewer" etc).

HEART OF THE KILLER The intended amount of episodes in the series changed around a ton. I thought of doing 12 in total, broken into two "series" of 6 that could be sold seperately, in the way of trade paperback collections... Somtimes I'd decide to narrow my scope, only to get another idea that excited me enough to enlarge it again. The music themed one was actually meant to be one of the earlier games in the series, but I kept putting it off because I'd think of other stuff that excited me more. I think by the time of this one I'd accepted it would be the penultimate game. I'd been happy with how the slightly more ambitious scope was working out, and the attempt to keep building on every episode. But I was also starting to feel a little more worn down as a result of episodes that took most of a year to work on instead of being cranked out in a couple months. There was a general feeling as well that I'd maybe been sitting with this stuff too long - I didn't want the basic "move around collecting textboxes" setup to ever feel too rote to no longer be able to spark ideas, I worried about how busy everything was as well, all the postproc and reverb and normal maps and whatever else. When I thought about what excited me I mostly felt pulled towards something quiet, slow, almost a mood piece. Just wandering around a strange empty location by yourself. After what felt like a slew of more action packed games it felt like it'd been a while since I'd gone back to the basics of BB wandering around a weird place talking to herself. There was a little tension there, because initially the plan for this one was more "ambitious" - it was to be a sequel to Ears, picking up with BB still throwing up pieces of plastic bird. She'd have a fever and spend the whole game in bed watching daytime TV - her wandering thoughts would mix with fragments of the bad soap operas and erotic thrillers she was watching, as she encounted pieces of leftover death-drive masquerading as her own thoughts. But after thinking about it I realised that (a) I didn't really have any ideas on how to represent the "inner world" that weren't just second-hand surrealist cliches (b) I didn't know or care anything about psychology and (c) it felt vaguely rude to assign interiority to a videogame character. Hadn't she suffered enough?! Well, little bits of this game still made it in I guess. Like the little wedding sequence on getting caught by Doug From High School, or why you spend so much of it wandering blearily around in your pajamas. BB's romantic life or lack thereof is something I'd thought about getting into at various points. One thing kind of in the background of the games is the idea that living around constant ambient mass murder has kind of warped people's "inner selves" into weird new shapes, so that maybe what romance even looks like in this setting is too abstract to be recognizable. At the same time, some of the comics that made me even want to try more directly narrative work were romantic comedies, like Izumi Tsubaki's "Monthly Girl's Nozaki-Kun", so it was hard to escape the pull of it entirely. I liked the dynamic between BB and Clarice in Blood Of The Killer, and also wanted to play with more details of BB's local zine subculture. Originally I was thinking of Marcie as kind of a peppy careerist character BB's age, but somewhere between the Electronic Dream Phone, the various 90s mall aesthetics sampled from for the dream resort, the zine thing, she became extremely Gen X. Which also made the dynamic a bit less straightforwardly adversarial. Her stylish red mask comes from the cover to PSX racing game Winning Post 3. I imagine she spent the 90s dressing like the girl from KaBlam!. I hesitated for a while over the conclusion this one seemed to be leading towards, that of a choice between being destroyed by desire and choosing to ignore it, but I think it's ultimately less about that than the proxies we use for desire to begin with. Like despite the big speech about the power of metrics I gotta assume the Spook is about as accurate as those online ad companies that seem to believe I'm both 75 years old and pregnant. It's not mentioned anywhere, but one reason Marcie has such a hard time with BB is that I've assumed both her and the player's form answers are based on just picking whatever seemed funny at the time.

FACE OF THE KILLER Since I started thinking about this during Eyes Of The Killer, it had time to stew a while. At that point the main pieces in my head were the police coup, BB being picked up by the cops, and getting dragged into a showdown between Cool Policeman and the Killer.... I wanted to structure the game as a weird playback of Resident Evil 2, where you'd start in the burning streets and make your way into the police station and then the tunnels underneath. (You can still see fragments of this progression in the finished game, I think.) There was a vague idea of some kind of apocalptic transformation into a new age of murder, etc, as befits a big blockbuster climax. But as I kept working on the other games, slowly the idea of the transformative climax made less and less sense to me. The iconography of "mobs", burning buildings and broken windows - does that stuff really indicate a worse world than one where mass death happens but you still have to go in to work? And the example of real world fascists somehow inspired no dramatic conviction - murderous but also somehow pathetic, insubstantial, little kids clomping around in dad's shoes. The sad ritual pageantry of a violence that already existed and preceded them, one they were already born to run. What did a "coup" mean when it was pretty much the same guys who already ran things, breaking into political offices they already controlled just to mill around gurning and taking pictures of each other? Certain other specific details also rang a bit false. Originally the police revolt was gonna be spurred by an attempt to dissolve the whole department - that as Bosso would explain, the idea of "legitimate violence" was a decrepit holdover from some distant age when legitimacy was still thought to matter somehow, and that in the new world this function could be replaced by forms of private murderer enterprise. I thought this was funny, but the idea that police power would get scaled down in any form eventually sounded funnier still. A funny thing about the games to this point is that we never really see any rich people. Bosso, Marcie, Cool Policeman are hirelings, Count Masko an actor impersonating a feudal lord, Concerned Citizen a downwardly-mobile heir. The final game fills things in a bit - the small business owner Pusman, various party guests - but for some reason it always felt false to me to present anyone as really in control. The Killer games pretty much take place in the paranoid world depicted by editorial cartoons - the difference between an editorial cartoon and a horror comic is just a question of whether the girl screaming and being sawn in half has a big sticker on her reading "THE DEFICIT" or something. For this reason the games have always maybe been a bit uncomfortably close to the heightened world of conspiracy theory, a line I've tried to avoid crossing as much as I can. To me the paranoid view of history comes in weak and strong forms. The weak form is the logic of conspiracy - which typically holds that at some point the world was fine, that everything made sense, until some group or other took command and remade things in their own dread image. The stronger form, that I think we glimpse in Adorno and PK Dick, is that the world never made sense - that there is no golden age to go back to, that the hacienda must be built. The masters of the universe here are not those who have dominated the world through their own strength and cunning but those who have allowed themselves to be remade completely in the image of forces they neither control nor understand - which would at least account for the weirdly embryonic look of our various leaders, that stunted quality which seems their only human characteristic. The fixed and painful smiles they wear when forced to pantomime enjoyment to the shareholders, the corny public neuroses they carry around like little Mr Potato Head features that've been stuck into a bank account. Do we know what they "really" think, do we care? A deep emptiness, a banal lack of care, at the centre of all these systems, which can be more horrifying than any imagined world of private obscene enjoyment. A place which cannot act, which can only simulate and repeat the gestures of acting. And so the eventual movement of the game ended up being the opposite of what I'd initially planned. Rather than a coup, an event, we get a succession of non-events, each one instantly unmasked as something even more deflating and tawdrier, while still managing to make the world just that bit worse. Well, anyway. In terms of structure, I like the walpurgisnacht thing of bringing back a bunch of characters in piecemeal phantasmagoric form for a big finale. The ending itself is, well, I think I have a bad habit of doing the same thing over and over, if you couldn't tell by now. The ending of Face Of The Killer is sorta the ending to Space Funeral is sorta the ending to Magic Wand... they all play on the idea of a transfigured world as a change in videogame tilesets. I guess the context is different, though. In Space Funeral it's more a hopeful feeling that even the most conservative forms can never rid themselves of their own shadow. In Magic Wand the idea of opposition itself has become muddled, blurred through back and forthing, there might still be some kind of dialectic but it's no longer leading anywhere. In Face Of The Killer all the oppositions are false, there is no dialectic - negation turns out to just mean a photo negative, a Dragon Quest palette swap. The idea of failed or blurred oppositions is I guess political or whatever but closer to home it's also hard for me to disentangle from game development in general. Most of my games are pretty much just comedies but they're still kind of adjacent to a vague "altgames" tradition... that is to say, games defined against an imaginary mainstream. But often that distinction is hard to pin down - for me something like a Jake Clover game is more mainstream than most AAA games, in the sense that it makes more sense as a continuation of the form as established through decades of weird microcomputer and Amiga games. And the boundaries slip further over time - - if "alternative" just means it doesn't make money, then nearly all videogames under a certain budget are "alternative" now, no matter how orthodox or heterodox they're trying to be. Slick platformers and raggedy personal games are united in making no money and in for the most part never getting talked about. That's one reason why I made these games to begin with, horror games, relatively conventional narrative games, I maybe would have felt more embarrassed about that before, but if it feels like you're dumping it into the void either way then what does it matter? Fuck it, add some curtain physics. Do whatever you want. The feeling that the distinctions you defined yourself by no longer make sense can be both freeing and deflating - maybe freedom in art is just the admission of irrelevance. Despite everything, this game still has a kind of happy ending. A different kind of negation might still be out there, somewhere. What else - oh yeah, this one has a little "act selection" bit at the start because the structure is weird. The first act is all setup, things feel a little heavier and more disspirited than before, everything's that bit more on the nose, as if the foreground's worn thin. The second part is one big chase sequence. In general the chases get more perfunctory as the games continue - there's (blessedly) not much like the more open maze levels from Hands Of The Killer, so it felt good to try to go all in on one last try, combining all the different types. The third part is pretty much all exposition, and I was worried all the little "twists"(?) would start to seem interminable if people had no idea how much of the game was left. Despite that I felt pretty happy how it all worked out. For some reason the rooms beneath the secreted marble city were the hardest for me to settle on - like something that could be both rickety and tacky looking without feeling like it was totally deflating any sense of build up. The little end part in the suburbs was also something I'd wanted to do for a while - at one point I imagined a whole last game taking place in this section, and digging into the skeevy military contractor backgrounds of the extended family, like Jonathan Coe's "What A Carve Up!". But a lot of those jokes got pushed into the party section instead, along with the Electrician themed character who appears in the first chase.

Some last little notes: I've already posted these to Tumblr, but should probably get in the habit of backing up stuff before that site explodes. These are some pieces I wrote for the Developer Tunnels of the game and took out in case they felt too overdetermining. So, only read on if you're ok with finding out The Moral.

HISTORY HISTORY IS A NIGHTMARE FROM WHICH I AM TRYING TO AWAKE is one of many famous zingers given to Stephen in Ulysses and I've always wondered if it's especially Irish as a sentiment, Ireland sort of feeling like the "Oops! All Peasants" edition of European history as a whole - same misery, exploitation and death minus the occasional episodes of feudal colour or triumphant empire-building that seem to make the past tolerable for other people, and give them their own sense of demarcated time. But then I've never been much good on Irish history, which has always just felt like an interminable, indistinguishable series of massacres and betrayals and missed shots. Was I not paying attention or was this how it was taught in school? Well, it would have fit the style at the time - I was born in 1989, smack at the start of the famous end of history era. The 90s in Ireland meant the peace process and infusion of American capital to our backwards shores, all the more reason to cosign the idea of an abrupt and permanent break with a history notably lacking in the non-depressing or picturesque. All our history textbooks seemed to trail off at the point we'd joined the EEA. And even as this new modernity just started seeming like the monstrous antiquity dressed up in different clothes - hooded prisoners transported to torture sites through Shannon airport, our patchy social infrastructure dismantled by burghers, ghost estates and half-completed monuments scattered around like the ruin theory of value with more leprechaun imagery - there was still a sense that any change was off the table. You didn't want to drag us back into history, did you? History seemed to have "ended" in the same sense Freddy Krueger did - done away with in ways that none of the grown-ups ever wanted to talk about, and now officially a non-presence, even if all the kids in town were mysteriously disappearing.

ART One reason I wanted to do an episodic series is just to see what would turn up, if any recurring interests would build despite a minimum of planning. One of the themes turned out to be, "art" - or specifically modernist art - and I am curious about why that would be. A recurring tendency in modernism was the idea that only by destroying the world as it currently existed could we clear space for anything better to emerge. Under the cobblestones, the beach! But this was always attended by a kind of fear: that clearing away the old structures would just allow something even worse to emerge, unmasked. Under the cobblestones, more corpses! And that the bleakest tendencies of the period would now run free without even the emptiest symbolic constraints to chafe against. Max Ernst's painting of the fascist victory in Spain, of a huge, grinning oaf rampaging over the landscape like a kaiju while a miserable birdlike figure remains haplessly grafted to its leg - is titled both "The Angel Of Hearth And Home" and "The Triumph Of Surrealism". As if to suggest that these are each the same thing, as though a cause of creative liberation worth devoting your life to and an empty cliche of domestic repression had so little light between them as to not even be worth the effort of distinguishing. Part of the reason works like that make their way into the games in little ways is because I just like them, and go back to thinking about them. But the status of modernism in the 21st century is an odd one; the most tentative and inventive parts got dropped, while the brashest and stupidest aspects curdled into a kind of official state ideology - the idea of "creative destruction", which just seems to mean a vague sense that it's punk rock to create ridesharing apps. The monkey's paw curled and the emptiest version of the modernist credo became something we all have to live with.. and yet I still can't help but be moved by the source works and the goofy, ridiculous temerity of that wish to transfigure the world. sometimes it feels like only way to keep faith with those ideas is to travesty them, to try returning to them some of that sense of fear and doubt without which they just sound like so many web design agency manifestos. Kept alive in the breast of so many grimacing waxworks, underground. Another reason to put this stuff in a horror game: to try getting at that feeling in a dream of looking in the eyes of people you know, people you love, and seeing nothing there anymore, seeing them look right past you. An earlier horror game idea I used to think about would have ended with the protagonist being dismembered and eaten by Gertrude Stein.

MORAL I've seen people express a sense, now, that merely working in the negative is not enough; to just outline what's bad without also trying to give a vision of the good, some glimpsed utopia to shoot for. For the benefit of these people here is an epilogue. Imagine it's the future and the long nightmare of prehistory is over; history proper unfolds as the full expression of human powers unhindered by material subjugation. Some students are given an assignment by a professor to investigate the meaning of a term that no longer exists, the meaning of horror. Well, the students do their best: they watch lots of old movies, put on rubber masks, comb through old fragments of the world that was. They're enjoying themselves and that enjoyment warps the process, they keep drifting into pleasure, unsure what's meant to be funny and what's not. They get lost, get confused, lose the thread, famous faces appear under the wrong names, espousing things that are the opposite of whatever they believed. In the end they all have to admit defeat: they hand in their assignment with a note saying that in the new world, we can't even imagine what horror may have been. The professor reads their findings, nods, and gives them all an F. No moral.