AOTK This contains spoilers for the Of The Killer series. Please go play that game!!! History is terrifying. It's a beast we are both fascinated in and yet actively run from. The people who do not run from it get pulled into it. The beast tells them that it can give them the illustrious life of immortality if only they submit to its law of perpetual violence. These people become limbs of the beast that hold knives and hatchets that are used to cut down the people who run; they become mouths for the beast, yelling and screaming about the end of death; most become legs used to heave its massive body. Everyone has a purpose if only you submit. That was untill the Soviet Union fell. When I talk about the end of history I do refer to the postmodern idea of the philosophy. The idea that the past can be summed up as a single mass of time in which the worst of the world happened and ended when the Berlin wall fell. It is a very uniquely western idea that is mostly stuck in the late cold war. There is an article titled "The End of History," written by Francis Fukuyama, which sums up the idea by saying, "The century (referring to the 20th century) that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism." History of course didn't literally end but all remnants of the political structures of the past have been erased for the new and sparkly liberal democracy. There was no true competitor to the west. Facism and communism have been defeated and with them so has history. As a philosophy it's terrible but I find it as a concept to be very interesting. Even though an ideology has become dominant it can never erase other ideologies without some massive 1984-esque government and this is something the article admits. What happens if the ideologies of the past come back up from underground, rotting with decay, and take revenge? What if a new world order comes to establish history as the perpetual and final law? All the violence and destruction of the past brought back to the present. You can already see this in the modern world. The peace brought upon by the victory over the Soviets has been unraveling for the past two decades or so. The fear that history may come back has grown stronger with each coming year. Anthology of the Killer is a collection of games made by thecatamites that were all developed from 2020 to 2024. I've played a handful of their other games including Space Funeral, 10 Beautiful Postcards, and Goblet Grotto, but I fell in love with the Of the Killer games! I could spend so much time simply listing everything from its art style to the writing but this transition is already jarring enough. The games all follow a formula where BB, the main character, gets chased by murderers, all of some whacky nature, on her quest to become "new wave" or something. She lives in a city where violence and murder has become so normalized that it's almost expected. The elite are a part of a cult fixated on the idea that we should return to history and its nature of feudal violence. "Anti-murder technology" is developed and in common use. It's hard to tell if murder is even illegal in her city as the police have the largest body count. The gameplay itself is very, very, simple. You walk from one room to another while enjoying all of the sites along the way. Sometimes there will be a chase or a cutscene but that's about it. None of that is a negative, though. I love simple games like this where you just sit and enjoy the atmosphere and writing. There isn't even a real moral or lesson, hell, barely even a single story since they are all separate games. Only three characters carry over their stories across games. One, a character named ZZ, doesn't do anything really important. The other two are the Policeman, and THE Killer. All of the games are titled, "*body part* of The Killer," like for instance, "Heart of the Killer," or, "Hands of the Killer." The Killer is an actual character who is represented as a tall black figure with a red bird mask. BB wakes The Killer, at least I think that's what she did, while trying to find a light switch. You don't see him until the last game where he reappears at the moment of collapse. The game makes it very obvious that The Killer is the personification of history. All of the other lesser murderers are simply cheap imitations of the true killer. The killer doesn't really have a goal or message. He simply kills anyone and everything. What I find interesting about him isn't what he does but how the other murderers seem to idolize him but in their own ways. They all have their own understanding of who The Killer is and they are all wrong. To give some examples, the cult of murderers wishes to bring back history. Specifically, they want to bring back an era of hierarchy and murder. They see The Killer as the figurehead of this new era and their goal is to bring him back so they can establish it. They then all get killed by The Killer once they do bring him back. On the other hand, the policeman seems to be a little more simple. He simply wants power. He idolizes the people of the past and wants to become one of them, a statue to be remembered for the rest of time. He discovers an abandoned town underground, a literal representation for the town's history as it is all marble and clearly old. He believes that there is some group of city founders that will place him in his rightful place in history. All he finds is The Killer. The Killer kinda wins at the end. Anarchy takes hold of the city and everyone begins to murder everyone else in a massive, energetic, riot. The world goes through a change, a color correction. Literally nothing else changes. It's a twist, history never truly ended. The world order those cultists were seeking was here the entire time, just the wrong colors, the wrong aesthetics. Violence and death will always be the law just under a different identity. History nerds online are obsessed with aesthetics. They tend to ignore everything else as long as their favorite country or time period looks cool. I've seen people be consumed into these aesthetics and they eventually take on the beliefs those aesthetics breed. They become traditionalists that wish to bring back the time period they love, ignorant to what that truly means. History is a killer that brings nothing but death. This writing really has no thesis. I was simply just very interested in what the Of The Killer games portrayed and wanted to write something about it. Please go support thecatamites by getting the game if you haven't!!! Also click the face at the top of this page to go back to the essay page.