anthropophagy – Digital Fantasy Diary

Liam is a budding content creator who specializes in guided meditation videos. Seeking to grow his following, he jumps at an Airbnb listing for a spiritual retreat in the Adachigahara mountains of rural Japan. At the end of a long journey, the stylish cabin enclosed within a verdant forest is everything Liam could hope for. The beautiful young woman who manages the property offers a warm welcome, but there’s something strange about her smile…

I was extremely honored to contribute to this year’s 13 Days Advent horror anthology. My story, “The Smile of the Mountain Demon,” is about a 21st century yamauba who entraps a YouTube influencer with Buddhist pretensions by using Airbnb and the language of New Age spirituality. The young man is looking for a scenic “spiritual retreat” to use as a source of content, and the yamauba is looking for a tasty snack.

This story is based on the medieval Adachigahara folktales in which a cunning yamauba entraps a less-than-devout Buddhist priest, as well as Minako Ohba’s beautiful and heartbreaking short story “The Smile of a Mountain Witch.”

If you’re interested, I’ve posted my story on AO3 (here), and you can download a free digital copy of the anthology via its page on Itchio here:

🌟 https://13daysadvent.itch.io/13days-demons-divinity

The illustration that accompanies my story was created by the brilliant dark fantasy artist Maxyvert, who posts strange and ethereal paintings on Tumblr (here), on Instagram (here), and on Twitter (here). This artist takes commissions for both digital and physical watercolor portraits (here), and it was an amazing experience to work with them.

Leftovers
https://realmpact.itch.io/leftovers

Leftovers is a free narrative horror game that takes about 20 to 25 minutes to play. Your mother has ten servings of leftover food, and she wants you to deliver them to the other tenants of your rundown apartment building. As you might imagine, each of these tenants is super creepy.

You can answer the tenants’ questions by nodding or shaking your head, and “failing” the interaction will cause you to run home to the top floor. Your mother will get progressively angrier each time you return, and you’ll have to walk down all the flights of stairs again. My recommendation would be to set the camera at max speed before starting the game, as this can potentially save several minutes of stair climbing.

The concept of Leftovers is great; but, as this was created for a game jam, it was made under time constraints. The 3D space of the apartment building is about as basic as it could be. There’s no background music, and there are only two or three instances of sound effects. Since you have to start over from the beginning so often, I wish there had been a few changes to the environment between runs.

Still, I had a lot of fun with Leftovers. The hand-drawn 2D character designs are great, as is the writing. I was impressed by how much story fit into just a few lines of dialogue, and I really enjoyed how the individual tenant stories gradually begin to fit together into a cohesive narrative. It’s definitely worth playing the game a second time in order to appreciate the story details and foreshadowing.

Leftovers stands well enough on its own as an experimental prototype, but I would love to see the developers return to the game and polish it into something stranger and gorier and even more disturbing.