bad flesh. Compels You to Sickening Acts Through Your Own Curiosity
Joel Couture
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bad flesh. takes us through some sort of eerie ritual. We are striving to become divine. I’m not sure how eating corpses makes that happen, but here we are. At least, I hope they’re corpses. At any rate, you’ll be poring over bodies to eat the pure parts. You’ll come ever closer to a surreal being that’s rotting and expanding before your eyes as you steadily devour more and more bodies. It’s a sickening experience that is no less compelling for how much it will churn your stomach. Maybe it’s even more compelling because of the willingness to engage in sickening acts that it instills in the player.
Your teacher seems human at first. Well, I’m not sure if they’re a teacher or spiritual leader or what. I do know that they’re here to tell you that the bodies are ready. Just take care not to eat the bad flesh. At this point, a body appears. Most of the limbs were covered in red spatters. I presumed they were blood at first. However, the arm was clean. At this point, you need to move a cursor over the various body parts until it lands on the one that doesn’t have any red blotches on it. Once you do, you can choose to eat.
Eating something is a bizarre experience in bad flesh.. Well, beyond the fact that you’re eating corpses. When you select something to devour, a mouth closes down across the screen. You see things from the inside of those jaws, too. It was off-putting to look at, for some reason. It feels unnatural to see yourself from the inside and look at your bizarre, elongated teeth. It’s like looking at a strange x-ray version of your own mouth, and it made everything feel just a bit more uncomfortable. Perhaps because it felt like something was watching the events from inside of your mouth? Was it insinuating that something inside you was staring out from within?
You will steadily devour the whole body as the bloody patches keep shifting. Once you eat the whole body, you’re told that you are full and can sleep. After this brief rest, your teacher appears again. They’re more twisted, now. Their face is split and mangled. Something seems to be gushing from their body. They tell you that the truth is coming. Then, they present you with a new body that looks twisteded and rotted. You’re told not to eat the bad flesh again.
Cannibalism is…kinda gross in general. The idea of eating human bodies makes me sick to my stomach. Even so, I still went through with my disturbing meal the first time. I was more hesitant when bad flesh. presented me with the second body. It seemed like it had decayed into shredded pieces. Still, I felt compelled to follow the ritual again. I was curious about this ‘truth’ that the game was offering me. I wanted to know where this feast would lead. Despite feeling deeply unsettled, I kept going, carried along by that bizarre curiosity.
If you weren’t already sickened by eating bodies, you soon find that there is more to finding the truth than just eating bodies. You also need to purge your brain and lungs of insects. I have a feeling this is related to eating raw, rotting human flesh, but I’m not sure. The game doesn’t clarify this. You’re just shown a view of your mind and lungs with red, wriggling shapes throughout it. You can click on these to pluck them from your body. I don’t know how this process actually works, but the entire thing left me feeling even more unsettled than the cannibalism. I HATE bugs, and the idea of them in my body made my skin crawl.
bad flesh. had really put me off of my supper in only a few minutes, but it would continue. In the next sequence, you had to eat the bad flesh itself. Blinking eyes stare at you from the background as you continue to gnaw at sections of the human body. You now know that the red splotches are insects (at least, that was my suspicion). You teacher continues to fall apart, their flesh hanging from their bodies in tatters. They look more and more like they’ve been splattered on the ground. They grow more twisted every few minutes. Still, you keep eating.
You eventually reach the end of your meals. The truth and divinity I reached at this point were about what I expected. Even so, I had willingly followed this ritual through to its conclusion. Even though it made me sick to do it at every step, I just felt compelled to keep going. Pure curiosity had me shoving fistfuls of human flesh into my mouth. It had me observing from within a body that was my own. Even though the whole game was making me feel really queasy to watch, I just couldn’t stop.
It’s not like bad flesh. was really trying to make me sick, either. The human bodies look broken and rotted, but in an abstract way. All of the art is made up of these shimmering, trembling pixels. They look a bit like they’re always moving, somehow. You can tell what the shapes and objects are through this style, but nothing is graphic about it. It all looks vague and unclear. You can almost argue with yourself that maybe you’re not eating bodies. Just, you know, something mashed up and semi-human shaped. You can totally tell, but it’s not explicit and gross in detail. Everything just seems hazy and unclear, adding to this feeling of eating your way through a horrible nightmare.
And I willingly followed every step despite my disgust. Abstract or not, I knew what I was doing. I kept eating no matter how gross it got. It was sickening right from the start – right from the moment it asked me to start eating human bodies in pieces. It got worse when I was plucking insects from within my body, and grew even moreso when I was eating insect-infested hunks of decayed bodies. All for this ‘truth’ that I knew would be unsatisfying at worst and disturbing at best. Even so, I just kept at it.
bad flesh. makes you purposely and actively walk yourself through a cannibalistic ritual. As gross as it is, you feel compelled to complete it. Maybe you’re even more compelled to do it BECAUSE it is sickening. Surely there is something special to find at the end of such horrifying acts? Maybe there’s some incredible discovery after putting yourself and others through such horrors? But there wasn’t, which made me feel even more sickened than anything I had done up until that point. Because I had done something horrible for something meaningless, it turned the game into an utterly chilling experience.
Categorized:Editorials
