Space Funeral’s Genius — Gore Houses and Noise Rock
In the world of “art games”, I personally believe that there are three RPGMaker2003 games that completely changed the landscape of future releases. The first is Yume Nikki, which I previously wrote about, and the second is Space Funeral, by thecatamites.
I see the relationship between these two games as a branching path. In my opinion, Yume Nikki explores the potential of using video games as a vehicle for art by almost completely excluding gameplay from the equation. Yume Nikki takes most of the “game” out of the video game and instead presents the player with the secondary facets of a game, like mood, atmosphere, sound, and theme as the complete experience — also coining the now famous term, “walking simulator”.
Space Funeral, on the other hand, is the inverse of this in some ways. Space Funeral is a game that is a product of its creator’s deep relationship with playing, observing, and making games — peering into them with a screwdriver and a flashlight and trying to make sense of all the strange parts. Space Funeral is simultaneously a game, a critique of the RPG genre (without any explicit criticism or statement), a love letter to the stranger and more obscure iterations of the same genre, and a story that sits squarely in the framework of an RPG without needing representation from any of its tropes.
Stephen Gillmurphy, most well known as “thecatamites”, is an iconic figure within the more niche corners of gaming and game design, and is the author of one of my favorite essays of all time about art. He has ironically become a sort of forefather of the sphere of bizarre, outsider gaming of the last decade and its overlap into commercial success, though he would likely humbly decline the accolade.
What cannot be declined is that his unique approach to gamemaking has inspired numerous descendants, especially from Space Funeral and its trademark silliness. Space Funeral is to me, one of the three “weird” RPGs (alongside OFF and Yume Nikki) that changed the genre with their unorthodox approach and laid the groundwork for the next generation — where breakout indie successes like Undertale, Omori, and Lisa: The Painful would evacuate the fringes of message boards and Kickstarter campaigns to become majorly successful video game titles whilst still keeping some inspiration from their more obscure ancestors — namely some tongue-in-cheek playfulness with RPGs that is completely absent in the progenitors of the genre.
And it is from this love of games and their bizarre runoffs that thecatamites paints a beautiful, gory, oddball world for the player to experience, culminating in (in my opinion) one of the all-time greatest endings to any video game.
Space Funeral is a game with its own visual language. As mentioned in this excellent interview from the creator of Space Funeral 2 (one of multiple fangames declared canon by thecatamites), thecatamites says that a lot of the art was based on “weird chunky pixel gore” from games like Monster Party, where bloody heads are literally part of the building blocks of the game’s world. Space Funeral embraces the idea that objects, despite having a bearing on the world, don’t necessarily have to translate into an understandable physical concept.
This playfulness and creativity with visual design translates into every part of the game. All of the facets of the traditional RPG are played for laughs in Space Funeral, but the difference between Space Funeral and most other “postmodern” RPGs is that Space Funeral is decidedly not passing judgment on these tropes as good or bad or even trying to subvert them, it is simply integrating them into its own story like the giant chunks of gore that splatter the overworld.
One of my favorite aspects of Space Funeral is its approach to combat. The traditional, turn-based combat of RPGs is a staple of the genre. Instead of omitting it entirely (as more of the art-focused RPGMaker titles tend to), it is presented as if it started to get boring to work on halfway through, and is mostly supplemented by laughs from its creator.
By the middle of the game, it barely even matters. You can just cut on auto-battle and wipe enemies out with relative ease, despite there being tons of items, upgrades, and special skills. It is actually much, much easier to accidentally game over from letting a certain blood-drinking wizard overindulge than through an actual battle in Space Funeral.
Most of the novelty items used against different enemy types are just that: a novelty. Using OLD MOVIES against ghosts is super effective, but it is completely unnecessary to beat them. Using BIBLES against criminals is equally superfluous. They are there solely there because it is funny to link these two ideas together, and because you are playing in the world of Space Funeral.
Through the way that an everyday RPG trope like combat is dealt with in Space Funeral, we are able to see what I would argue is not only the strongest point of the game, but also the central ethos of thecatamites’ body of work: freedom from constraint.
The music of Space Funeral is also an incredibly important part of its profile.
Diverting RPG tradition once again, thecatamites forgoes the MIDI medieval music of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest in favor of more contemporary and unusual selections, such as the Japanese noise rock band Les Rallizes Dénudés, tracks from the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra, and a truly haunting reading of a Baudelaire poem by Ruth White.
thecatamites actually claims that the game started as an excuse to use Les Rallizes Dénudés’ “White Waking”, the iconic track that plays in the first area of the game. Funny enough, a contingent of this obscure band’s listeners likely found this song first from Space Funeral, of all places. At least I did. How strange, for a band whose bass player hijacked a plane with the Red Army Faction of Japan’s Communist League in 1970, to be primarily known in the 2000s as the band that scored Space Funeral’s first area.
This novel approach to music in games not only breaks the tradition of what a game is supposed to sound like in correspondence with its genre, but also how a game is made. How many other games were created based off of designing an area for a song (that does not belong to the creator) to be played? As a general rule of thumb, music is one of the later steps of game development — it needs to match the tone and setting of where it is displayed in-game, therefore it usually is applied like a coat of paint to an already substantial thing.
However, for thecatamites, music is something that feels like a missing piece for games. All of the songs in Space Funeral are recontextualized for the game itself, they are the backbone for the game’s design. Space Funeral is not built just to utilize these sounds, it is a new, shared history that all of these songs now inhabit. This is something that is somewhat unique about Space Funeral compared to the other later projects of thecatamites, which are usually scored by NEW VADERS/Tommy Tone.
This, in my opinion, is one of the things thecatamites shoots for in gamemaking. The perplexity that he may have felt in adhering and interweaving these songs into a small world of their own is equal to the perplexity that an onlooker approaching Space Funeral would feel upon discovering all of these bizarre and unlike songs tied into this exact order and placement that they reside in.
One of my favorite details of Space Funeral is that despite the integral nature of music to the game’s development, the title screen simply uses one of the default, templated RPGMaker songs, “Mystery2” — which I later learned is even just a cover of the original Final Fantasy VII theme. This was very funny to me upon tinkering with RPGMaker for the first time myself, and even funnier to me once I (years later) booted up the Final Fantasy VII remake and heard the same theme play back. Despite all of the history that the song has, I heard it first in Space Funeral.
Space Funeral is not just an entertaining experience. It is also not a postmodernist critique of the genre. It is a bold game that seeks to answer no questions, which is integral to its genius.
While the game clearly engages with video games at a high level, it does not do so in a way to dissect it or extricate some critical truth from the medium. In the same way that Yume Nikki makes its audience question “What can a game be?”, so does Space Funeral. However, instead of subverting the idea of gameplay in order to make art like Yume Nikki, Space Funeral subverts the idea of what an RPG is, specifically in comparison to the greats that have established the heavy hand of tradition that the genre is known for.
thecatamites actually mentions this in the interview with Space Funeral 2’s creator below.
This is not an uncommon line of thought for thecatamites. Other titles of his such as Magic Wand or Mouse Corp also present similar ideas. The worlds of thecatamites are video games — no doubt. There are almost always points, treasure, HP, enemies, etc. However, these are not games you “win” or “lose”. They are games that eschew straightforwardness and tradition for intrigue and exploration, where these systems exist parallel to whatever is happening in a way that is understood by the world. The games of thecatamites are new places built from the curious cave paintings of video games’ ruins.
There is something completely distinct about the worlds that thecatamites builds. While they are steeped in the video game soup, they manage to come out the other side as something new and interesting instead of a simple rehash of past games. Even amongst his own games, the worlds vary greatly in looks — there is no formula to what a “game” looks like for thecatamites, only that it is a space where things exist.
For thecatamites, games are simply a medium. Though Space Funeral flirts with the conventions of RPGs, it is a one-off. Most of his games are completely detached from any sort of established formula. Instead of one singular experience, games serve as more of a point for pictures, music, words, and ideas to converge.
In an archived interview with Igor Hardy, thecatamites says “I couldn’t make movies because my experience of them is so tied up with ideas of what length they should be, what they should be about, protagonists and antagonists and three-act structures and all that garbage. With games there isn’t really that feeling at all. It’s like uncharted territory in that there is still a lot of scope to just do whatever you want and not really care if it fits some preexisting criteria of what a game should be.”
This, naturally, would mean that the definition of “games” for thecatamites is loose — his games cannot explicitly subvert tropes because it would require some sort of adherence to subversion. Instead, thecatamites is simply more interested in turning over stones that haven’t been looked at before.
As far as influence goes, I have no doubt that thecatamites would shoo away credit for his innovation. But even now, we can see traces of this forward-thinking and less constrained approach to gamemaking in modern games.
Current indie darling DeltaRune is a prime example, as well as Fox’s previous game, the ubiquitous Undertale. These games and their success pull at the thread of the genre, slowly unraveling the fabric of what is and isn’t an RPG. While Earthbound is commonly cited as the first major game to test these waters (ironically, thecatamites never played it until later in life), Space Funeral to me is perhaps the second most relevant in the current iteration of indie games — moreso than OFF or Yume Nikki presently because of the oversaturation of horror-adjacent titles that began around the time Omori finally came out.
While OFF and Yume Nikki are still incredible, exemplary games, the “dark” RPG is somewhat out of vogue right now, which the two have been heavy inspirations for. However, the tongue-in-cheek playfulness of Space Funeral will never wane in the same way — it is absolved from the trappings of genre because it does not stick to anything besides having fun and making weird stuff. Because of this timelessness, I think we will continue to see Space Funeral’s subtle influence for a long time — and by proxy, the fun-loving and curious approach of thecatamites to video games.
In closing, I will not spoil the ending of Space Funeral for you, it is truly such a great ending that you should just play the game. It’s free, takes about two hours max, and is a genuine masterpiece. Instead, I leave you with one quote from the itch.io page of Mouse Corp., which sums up the exact kind of playful simplicity that has made thecatamites such an icon in this space — and a personal inspiration to me.
