Ultra-Indie Daily Dose: Game for Anna
Hello, you glorious gluttons for all things indie horror! Are you just starving for the newest of the new, the most unknownest of the unknown? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to the Ultra-Indie Daily Dose! In this series, we’re going to pick a new game every day from an indie horror creator you’ve probably never heard of. No million-dollar budgets or factory productions. This is the space for the little guy with not but a developer toolkit and a dream. So if you’re down to roll the dice on something different, then stick around and check it out!
Welcome back to your Daily Dose of Indie Horror for Anna ONLY! If you aren’t Anna, you should entirely cease reading this. I absolutely won’t close my eyes and look the other way. Definitely not. Game for Anna is an unsettling monochromatic toy-filled nightmare developed by Desert Fox, known for their dark and whimsical point & click games.
There’s something just unsettling enough about discarded childhood toys, and specifically neglected dolls that make them a hot choice for horror content across the board. Perhaps it’s the anxiety of nostalgia, the trauma of memories, or simply because creepy dolls have an appealing charm to their visage. Either way, Game for Anna taps into that umbral kinder-world atmosphere that leaves you feeling familiarly unsettled as you shuffle your way through ink-damp cardboard and decaying plastic.
Within a found footage frame, I had been placed right in the middle of a claustrophobic labyrinth that made me feel as though I was the monster creeping under the bed of my own memories. I then carefully lurched forward, inspecting the photographic details of each scene. Broken combs, headless Barbies, snapped pencils, and tinges of night terrors scribbled onto old graph paper. Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t just exploring someone’s dark imagination. I was hiding from something unseen. I was hiding from the monster of memories, under the guise of eyeless bleeding dolls. It was a game. Panic set in as the brain-camera’s memory core began to shatter. Anna’s memories were something I truly wasn’t meant to unravel yet.
A careful balance of hand-picked items and routes of movement combine for a few different enigmatic endings in Game for Anna. A route of silence steeped in shadows, only then broken by the shattered cries of someone familiar. A route of voracious consumption, then fueled by a certain macabre greed. It’s easier than you’d think to get lost in the shaded dreams of forgotten teddy bears and stuffed porcelain. Thus, take your Time to face what was once hiding in the nightlight of your mind-room. And don’t forget, this game is meant for Anna.
Click here to peer into the eccentrically macabre vision of Game for Anna. Yearning for more short horror? DreadXP has you covered.
