Hideous corpus

Body horror is discomfiting in any medium, but it’s arguably at its most effective in videogames. This is, after all, a medium where these grisly violations and unnatural mutations occur to someone we’re controlling – or even inhabiting. Think of the squirm-inducing moment when Dead Space: Extraction fully lives up to its subtitle by having you mimic a sawing motion with the Wii Remote to hack off your own arm. Or Resident Evil Village, which takes the idea to almost farcical extremes given how frequently terrible things occur to Ethan Winters’ poor hands.

Few creators have such extensive experience with the theme as the man who wrote and directed the Siren games and the original Silent Hill. Slitterhead, the debut production from Keiichiro Toyama’s new studio, Bokeh, features grotesque monsters disguised as humans, their faces and bodies opening up to reveal their ghastly occupants.

Yet these disfiguring changes, disturbing though they might seem, can just as often be empowering. Bioshock’s plasmids appear agonising when injected, though the ability to hurl swarms of insects and shoot fireballs gives you the advantage in combat. Double Fine’s Rad and The Binding Of Isaac might have you sprouting extra limbs (or even heads), but they’re usually to your benefit. Death Trash’s infected meat might not do you much good, but spew it back up and you can use the vomitus as a natural lubricant to make various machines run smoothly.

The fascinating 99 Fails, meanwhile, explores the troubling dreams of protagonist Zeebo. In one, he discovers he has the legs of a grasshopper; another sees him become a limbless, steadily disintegrating blob. Most horrifyingly of all, these forms, with all the physical idiosyncrasies that come with them, must be used to navigate levels that become increasingly difficult to finish. Because there’s nothing as truly scary in a videogame as the feeling of no longer being in control.