Editorials
[The Terrors of itch.io] Discover the Junji Ito-Inspired Visual Novel ‘Grotesque Beauty’
The Terrors of itch.io is a new monthly series for Bloody Disgusting dedicated to highlighting some of the most noteworthy – popular or under the radar – horror games to grace the ever-expanding site of itch.io, one of the internet’s leading sources for small and independent games. Horror has consistently thrived under the video game art form, allowing for creators to tap into their morbid creativity and itch.io provides video game horror at its rawest form without filter. See the likes of Paratopic, September 1999, and the works of Puppet Combo as great examples of this in recent times.
A common trait to be found in many games on itch.io is a sense of homeliness, meaning that the usual amount of pandering and studio-based decisions are much harder to come by. Itch.io is home to some of the most passionate, talented, and occasionally hopeless, creators throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, which makes for a lot of rough and unpolished titles to wade through. You could use this to describe Steam or other gaming sites, but it feels most appropriate with itch.io and its focus on shoestring budget gaming.
As a result, it’s both a huge relief and heartwarming to see a hidden gem pop out from the sea of DIY horror games on the site and Grotesque Beauty, from Digital Bento aka freelance artist Ben Ho, is the first that I’d like to talk about in this new series. Released in late 2019, Grotesque Beauty has made its way onto both itch.io and Steam, advertising itself as a multi-branched visual novel with elements of Junji Ito-inspired horror and around 30 different endings to choose from.
Visual novels sometimes get a bad reputation thanks to a perceived lack of experimentation with the style. Doki Doki Literature Club and The Letter aside, horror visual novels don’t dominate the horror game market the way that first-person chillers tend to do, which opens up the opportunity for creators to test out their writing skills and potentially gruesome ideas in a sub-genre that’s a bit more open to creative storytelling. Nothing against other areas of horror games, but with a visual novel, there’s almost a laser-like focus on the storytelling itself over atmosphere and gore.
Grotesque Beauty, as its name suggests, contains plenty for gore aficionados to latch onto with its unnerving story that quickly turns grim with each new path you take. But above all else, Ben Ho’s short, but sweet tale is one that relies on a healthy mixture of story and atmosphere, focusing on two main characters: Anita, our vessel for this story, has a troubled past, and has been experiencing nightmares more frequently than normal lately, and Rachel, her best friend who offers Anita to stay over at her place one night to calm her nerves from the nightmares.
The story’s set-up is clear, effective, and easy to follow as the night begins to plunge into insanity at a brisk, yet perfectly measured pace. Though it’s a fairly short game on the first playthrough, the revelation of the game having 30 different endings allows for longevity and an incentive to explore the game’s surprisingly detailed word and characters. Longevity also allows for the game’s horrific secrets to be unearthed in an appropriately grotesque manner.
Without spoiling too much of what this game has to offer (I myself have not yet played through all of the endings), Grotesque Beauty rides the line between rational and surreal, introducing situations that stretch human logic past its limits, similar to a Junji Ito tale, though still unique enough to be its own thing. From the threat of another force possibly being present in Rachel’s house to an odd living room decoration that may be more than meets the eye, nothing is truly right in this game, refusing to give the player a moment of ease.
Even calmer moments between Anita and Rachel are often rooted in something darker and unsaid, hinting at something fractured at the core, which develops over the course of the night as the horrors become clearer. Best of all, it’s not overly long a la Doki Doki, so the story can be replayed over and over without the feeling of having to slog through something again. Each new playthrough opens the possibilities for how differently the night can go, making it something that could go over particularly well for Let’s Plays on YouTube.
Grotesque Beauty has been out for a little bit now and it’s had some minor traction from what I’ve seen, but for what it’s going for and the creative ways the storytelling evolves, I think Ben Ho has struck something valuable here for horror. Though it can be classified as a small game of sorts, its scope reaches far and wide beyond its budget and length and it can serve as a rewarding experience for players eager to try out this choose-your-own-adventure title.
As of this writing, the game is still for sale on itch.io and Steam, but it’s a small price to pay for a worthwhile experience and that’s a theme I hope to tackle with each new game for each month. Because a low bank account shouldn’t have to prevent us from enjoying the world of video games, right?
Grotesque Beauty is out now on PC via itch.io and Steam.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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