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Classic IF horror Anchorhead revised and illustrated

A horrifying Cuphead prequel

You might think you're made of stern stuff after beating Cuphead, but have you the bottle for Anchorhead? The Lovecraftian interactive fiction from 1998 "has been pretty consistently considered one of the greats of the noncommercial IF canon ever since", Emily Short told us, and now it's fancier than ever. Creator Michael Gentry has launched an 'Illustrated Edition' which, obviously, includes a whole load of illustrations to go along with the text parser action. This seems a fine time to visit a Massachusetts coastal town and get caught up in something terrible.

Anchorhead's Illustrated Edition is rebuilt in the IF language Inform 7, also now packing 50-odd illustrations by Carlos Cara Àlvarez. Gentry has reworked the textual guts of Anchorhead too, adding extra puzzles, scenes, and background information and generally polishing up the text with the benefit of all the doing-good-words-well-from-your-brain-with-good-words-and-stuff skills he's honed over the past 20 years.

You can buy Anchorhead's Illustrated Edition now for £7.19/€9.99/$9.99 through Steam and Itch. It's on Windows, Mac, and Linux, though the Linux version isn't on Steam just yet. For those who like feelies with their adventure games, Gentry also sells a physical pendant and map through his own site for $10.

You can still play ye olde Anchorhead in your browser, and the Interactive Fiction Database has a downloadable version if you'd rather use your own interpreter software.

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Alice O'Connor

Associate Editor

Alice has been playing video games since SkiFree and writing about them since 2009, with nine years at RPS. She enjoys immersive sims, roguelikelikes, chunky revolvers, weird little spooky indies, mods, walking simulators, and finding joy in details. Alice lives, swims, and cycles in Scotland.

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