bad flesh.

About bad flesh.

bad flesh. is a small horror game by ToothandClaw, the maker of These Heavenly Bodies and Incident at Grove Lake. It was made for the 2023 LowRezJam and, as its maker puts it, missed the deadline because they were too busy eating bad flesh. It runs in the browser and as a Windows download, and its maker gives an average play time of five minutes.

Everything is drawn in a few chunky, dark brown pixels. A gaunt figure stands at the left of the screen; a dotted line picks out one part of it, a torso, a head, and shows it in a frame with a single button under it: EAT. A bar fills as you go. Between courses come close-ups of what you are eating, a brain clotted with red, a face half lost in the dark, and the warning that is the game's whole tagline: do not eat bad flesh.

The fear here is slow disgust more than chase or threat. The low resolution hides as much as it shows, so the eye fills in the rest, and the grim, unhurried meal builds to an ending that players in the comments say made them jump.

It suits players who like very short, strange horror that can be finished in one sitting, and anyone who has played ToothandClaw's later games: players note that this is where some of their ideas first appear.

How to play bad flesh.

1. Open the itch.io page and press Run game, or download the Windows build.
2. Press PLAY on the title screen.
3. Look at the figure and the part picked out beside it, then click EAT to go on.
4. Keep eating as the bar fills and the flesh turns worse, and watch the screen through to the end.

Tips

• Play with the window large or full screen: the art is only a few pixels across.
• It takes about five minutes, so play it in one sitting.
• If you like it, ToothandClaw's These Heavenly Bodies is another tiny, grim body horror game you can play in the browser.

Questions