I sometimes feel too exhausted to even bring myself to play a game. You might know the feeling. You arrive home, exhausted, and just too fatigued to even attempt engaging your brain. So you waste an evening doing basically nothing; no stimulation, no creativity… it is a depressing thing to reflect back upon.

Critters for Sale, however, is something that punches through even my most exhaustion-driven haze and grabs me by the scruff of the shirt, and says pay attention.

The game is built so well around a five-pronged set of interconnected short stories, each given animal titles that at some point relate to the story, even if in just a tangential way. It is a game about almost ludicrous horror, but also the really disconcerting feeling of watching a smile twist uncannily on someone’s face as you answer their strange questions. It is a powerhouse of aesthetics, creating something genuinely unsettling out of a photograph of a goat. The melding of real-world items and people, game animation, and the subdued, 8-bit, 2-colour art style creates an almost maddeningly good presentation that quite simply I just couldn’t get enough of.

The goat stares right through the screen, through your skin, and exposes you for the person you are. Or it’s just a goat. Whatever.

The interconnected narrative really is cool, with each progressive piece you play lending context to previous pieces. They can be (mostly) played out of order, though I think in order to play the final one and beat one of its puzzles you may need to play the fourth one. So the order basically can be mix up any of the previous four, but save five til last. I would have loved this to have been noted elsewhere, but of course, guides can always be consulted if you doggedly want to play them out of order, as I did. But this is not to say the interconnected narrative and eerie facial animations and use of colour is all the game does. Certain episodes have extra framing on the side of the screen, allowing the player to be immediately informed of the situation. Subtle things like changes in temperature and location create a sense that things are building towards an inescapable climax. The knowledge that each story ends in one of two ways – YOU LIVED or YOU DIED takes everything to a natural boiling point, reducing the point and click adventure game to finely honed, finely paced points – you’ll appreciate that as your neck gets snapped unexpectedly, or you watch a knife fly through the air.

The game has a fantastic soundtrack too: one of my favourites that immediately grabbed me was Незнакомая сила by Утро. Almost every track is something I listen to alone, outside of the game. I’m a sucker for a good soundtrack, and this game has one of the best (but perhaps most unorthodox) soundtracks in the horror genre.

It is worth noting that the game has an epilepsy warning for a reason. It contains countless flashing lights and other similarly potentially triggering effects. A shame that this may limit its audience, as I think Critters for Sale is a remarkably good horror game, pushing at the boundaries of the at-times fairly stale indie horror subgenre. What we have here is a game that understands, but does not overuse, its mythos or antagonists, supplies intelligent and engaging puzzles (and a great minigame section that you can genuinely waste hours on), and constructs creepy scenarios in liminal spaces and challenges you to find your way out alive.

I promise you, there’s nothing like learning the origin story of the band Death Grips and coming face to face with a plastic-faced celebrity in a nightclub that exists outside of time. Critters for Sale is a daring experiment in video game design, which understands that it is not about the quality of the graphics or the volume of the gore that makes good horror. Instead, it dwells on the unseen, the unsettling and the plain strange, building an uncomfortable atmosphere that is always encouraging tension between the act of playing and the act of experiencing a story. As with all the best horror games, it is curiosity and a habitually human desire to stick our own necks into the noose just to know what the deal is. Pick it up wherever you can.

Critters for Sale can be purchased from Steam or from itch.io.

Toodle-pip!