the first time i played 'anatomy', i got too scared, and turned it off immediately. there was something sinister about the darkness that i, an adult who is still admittedly fairly afraid of the dark, couldn't take. the next time i tried to play it, i decided to make it worse on myself. not intentionally, of course. i'd recently acquired a crt television off of facebook marketplace (for free, nonetheless), and i thought playing the game on it would lend to the 'authenticity'. the remote i'd been given with the tv didn't work, and so my ability to adjust the display of the television was extremely limited. on the crt, anatomy's dark hallways became a void. i found myself edging along clinging to the walls, the few sources of light in the game, for fear of becoming entirely lost in the darkness. white paintings on the wall would float before my vision as a ghostly afterimage when i looked away, the crt still holding their light in its memory. the red of the tape deck seeemed to materialize out of thin air. never did i feel comfortable, never did i know where i was going. truly, it was an untennable way to play the game. i really, really can't overstate how dark those hallways were. so i unplugged the hdmi cable from my laptop, laid back in my bed, and started back into anatomy the way i had begun it; in the dark, alone, on extremely modern hardware. i haven't yet finished it, and i likely will finish it while viewing it on my macbook screen, but for the half-hour or so i slogged through it on the crt, i felt every bump in the dark far too viscerally. in the end, the experience was unpleasant for the sake of its own unpleasantness, me in total darkness desperately squinting at the flickering television screen, as if contorting my face would reveal some new secret from the abyss in front of me. but how better to experience a game like anatomy?