Horror Game Biophobia Grows A Garden From Grief – And Art
A woman is violated by a man. In a final act of rebellion to preserve her humanity, she takes control and opens her stomach. Unable to finish what she started she waits for you, and asks you not to look away.
This is the opening epitaph of Biophobia, a short-form game released for free by solo developer Charlotte Madelon. It is the only form of written hint in the otherwise wordless piece, which otherwise leaves players to find their own way. The game’s Steam Store page is a testament to this deliberate obfuscation, with even positive assessments offering hints for the potentially frustrated. Truly, a game’s word-of-mouth is made or broken by how easy it is to internalize and play.
But “play” is a limited word when discussing Biophobia. Players do very little ‘playing’ in the 20-minute title, and instead, are given a sole grisly task to complete. With bare hands and a scalpel, the player must use a mouse or touch screen to cut incisions into and peel back the layers of an unnamed woman’s stomach. There are five distinct layers, and at the end of each, players must zoom back out of the woman’s stomach and click on a flower to advance.
Pressing these flowers jumps the player forward in time, as they’re invited to observe the woman’s corpse in various stages of decay. The first is the most jarring, as maggots fester in the victim’s womb and gnaw at her toes. It’s from this mess that players must pick up seeds to then take back to the past and plant. Though the task itself is simple enough—a simple left-click—the evocative and visceral imagery gives one pause. Clasping damp seeds between fingertips beneath wriggling, wet clusters of grubs on a corpse is an unpleasant thing to consider.
For all its conceptual grotesqueness, Biophobia aims not for shock value or obvious social parable. Yet it does, however, come from a genuinely political place.
“The initial idea came less from a specific artwork and more from a feeling of anger and a need to protest,” Charlotte Madelon says via email. “I’ve had interest in art my whole life and these works came together to create Biophobia into what it is today.”
Madelon instills her work with an aesthetic ambiance that leads with open-ended beauty first, as the subtext feels in the rest of the gaps. In less expressive hands, such content could come across as aggressive, brutal, and upsetting. This makes it all the more impressive, then, that Biophobia is not any of those things. It’s a meditative experience on horrific subject matter, sure, but not horrific itself. There are no pained screams or spurts of blood here, only rippling water and the rustle of branches. The quiet decay of a woman into the natural cycle.
This choice is drawn from one of Madelon’s biggest inspirations for Biophobia, painter Fuyuko Matsui’s ‘Keeping Up The Pureness.’ The piece depicts a naked woman laying on her back in the field among lilies, mushrooms, and fruiting plants. Her womb is sliced open, and from within, a multi-colored array of innards dazzle the viewer. Where the woman’s body is cold and desolate, her guts offer the same aesthetic attraction of the flora and fauna around her. There is a calm and serenity to the piece, as the woman’s sweet, vacant eyes almost seem to be inviting you into her primary-hued offal.
Said Matsui on the painting in 2011:
Her aggressive attitude, “I have such a fine womb,” is a destructive impulse, occurring as a defense mechanism, that gives rise to self-injurious behavior. I project myself onto this woman and see her as I. The flowers blooming around her are all severed, as if in sympathy for her, and flaunt their pistils. I have created this painting for other women, whom I think will feel in sympathy with it. A capacity for sympathy is a special attribute of individuals with wombs who can produce eggs and create a child.
Madelon says the piece taught her the value of balancing tone with content.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
