Quirky App Of The Day: Killing Room
by Kathryn Zane
May 22, 2011
Well, if anyone needs a game to satisfy their blood lust, Killing Room should do it. The entire point of the game is to squeegee blood off the walls. Blood drips from the top, and your job is to scrape it back up.
This game is as simple as it sounds. I'm a sucker for the macabre though. The weepy music, the horrific screams, and the gallons and gallons of blood just sends some tingles up and down my spine. It's along the same lines as being creeped out by a movie that you just can't seem to turn off. Speaking of movies, the game graphics are actually designed like an old-school surrealism movie. You know, the college films that you see people make spoofs of that are embedded with meanings that no sane person could ever really come upon by themselves. There are the grainy black lines that run down the screen, the graphics are a muted red and the animation has a surreal choppiness to it. The music in the background is in keeping with when movies first had soundtracks played in the background while the film ran onscreen. It's weepy and dark without being over the top. I'm genuinely impressed with the style and design. I sincerely can't praise highly enough the attention to detail and the unique style that this game utilizes in contrast to the simple, but disturbing and gross, aim of the game.
There's a reservoir of blood at the bottom that the blood will drip into. You lose when the blood pool fills to the top. There are little bubble of blood that float up from the reservoir. Some are good, like an expanded squeegee and a star that drops the reservoir level and takes away all the blood on the screen. Some are not so good, like a shrinking squeegee or a Scream mask that blacks out the screen with the exception of the eye and mouth holes that you have to try and see through.
There are levels to the game. When you complete one, some bloody, mottled hands reach down and scrap the blood back up to the top. The reservoir drops back down, and you start all over. There are some blood drips that don't scrap up with just one swipe. In fact, some of them never seem to really get scraped up. I'm sure that's akin to trying to get actual blood out of upholstery. Expect the game doesn't offer any peroxide.
Now, while all this blood is dripping down the walls, I can't help but wax philosophical. With all the death going on in the room above me, even to the point where it's running down the walls, why am I so darned intent on keeping that blasted wall clean? Is my mother-in-law going to be visiting any time soon, only to mutter about what a poor choice her son made while dragging a finger along my pink-stained wall? Am I scraping the blood out for my room in a way that I can't see onscreen, and my very life depends on how efficient and effective I am with a window cleaning utensil? If that's the case, then I would have taken my mom way more seriously when she said that doing chores wouldn't kill me. I guess that I just never could have known that not doing my chores would. Maybe I'm like the grumpy old man on his front porch that shakes his cane at kids walking on his lawn. I could see me renting an apartment beneath a killing room because of the insane discount, and spending my days trying to keep it clean while muttering to myself about kids and their darned blood baths these days. So many questions, and so few answers.
One answer is for certain, Killing Room is available at iTunes for the awesome price of FREE!