'Don't worry! I'm a murderer!' - award-winning comedy Anthology of the Killer is out next week

rockpapershotgun.com:

In Anthology of the Killer you do not exit the game using a pause menu. You exit it by walking down a back alley into the quavering arms of two hungry bears. This is just one of many laughs your diaphragm will endure as you navigate "the escalating adventures of a girl trying to make zines in a town of giallo-style masked serial murderers". The horror comedy already won its creators the Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival this year, recognition that has been a long time coming for prolific creator Stephen "thecatamites" Gillmurphy. If you're unfamiliar with his work, you can get acquainted next week, when Anthology of the Killer gets its full release on Itch.io on May 28th. At which point you can explore its unsettling urban hell of shady corporations and cops who think they're cool. There's a trailer below.

In the first of the nine-part series, protagonist BB is an employee of a life insurance call centre were everyone wears sheets over their head. When you sit at BB's desk to work, the usual office chatter slows to a haunting warble, like listening to a cassette tape submerged in a bathtub of jam. A TV in the break room is set to a news channel reporting that 1000 bodies have been found somewhere ("Same news as always," remarks BB.) In the printer room a sign yells: "Remember! We don't pay out if the corpse is unidentifiable!" When you walk into the complaints department, the doors lock behind you. What follows is... well, I'll let you figure it out.

Many point to the likes of Disco Elysium or Baldur's Gate 3 as examples of excellent writing in adventure games. I will point to the entire body of work by thecatamites. As ever, it's the combination of DIY MS Paint visuals and a surreal comic voice that draws me in. The sea's breathy waves are caused by geology, "the baleful science". When our zine-printing heroine is nabbed by the cops she reflects that "Rule #1 of making a zine is never talk to the police." She lives in an apartment block with metal