The Cutprice Guignol

You know, I’ve written a lot about internet horror – from the SCP Foundation to Petscop to the lost episode creepypastas – and I truly, from the bottom of my heart, love it as a genre. But there is one bit of horror that unsettled me enough that I have avoided writing about it till now, and that’s Lacey Games.

As a millenial and a woman, I, of course, grew up whiling away many an hour on dress-up games hosted on Flash miniplayer. I can’t count the number of games I burned through in the corner of my childhood living room, nestled in the giant computer chair in front of our family desktop – if there was an interface that allowed me to dress a janky cartoon character for a date in the most decidedly fabulous fashions du jour (by which I mean, of course, the closest thing to passing for scene kid clothes as I could find), you better believe that I was there dedicating days of my pre-teen life to it.

Which brings me to Lacey Games, a short horror video series and later game created by ghosttundra. The series, at first, seems like any number of the Flash games aimed at young girls that I grew up with – cutesy aesthetics, a focus on fashion and cooking and animals, a sickly-sweet soundtrack studded with the same vaguely irritating action noises repeated every time you click a button. But there’s a dark side to Lacey Games, a grim underbelly to her world that slowly unveils itself over the course of the short series. If you enjoy surreal, psychological horror delivered through the lens of video games (which seems like a really niche genre, but, somehow, isn’t), it’s well worth checking out the whole series, which you can do here.

But the episode I want to focus on here is the first, Lacey’s Wardrobe, released in October 2022 and styled as gameplay footage from a lost 2006 flash game of the same name. At just four minutes long, it’s one of the shorter episodes of the series, but it’s one that got under my skin in a way the others just didn’t quite manage.

It starts off in familiar territory – a pop-up asking the player to help Lacey pick the cutest outfits for her busy day ahead, including a date with the guy she has a crush on. The player clicks through some banger classic 2006 fashion – that stripy sock and khaki skirt combo would have been everything to me back then, let me tell you – and visits the park before preparing Lacey for a visit to the mall. But the soundtrack is interrupted by what appears to be a phone call from a man – breathing heavily, expressing his excitement about seeing her, demanding for her to open the door in increasingly aggressive tones. A series of abstract images flash up on screen – a chocolate box filled with what appears to be gore, a woman’s severed legs, a sinister face – and the episode ends with the text “i ate her remains so that we will be together forever i love you lacey”.

And look, in some ways, this might seem like an obvious playing out of the haunted video game tropes – what starts off sweet and innocent turns out to be hiding a dark secret, it’s not exactly brand new. But the combination of the choice of game and the specific way that it plays off the darkness beneath is downright brilliant, and that’s what makes this short so disturbing. These kind of games, for me and so many people and especially women, are tied up with the innocence of childhood and girlhood in particular – when playing with fashion and appearance was something you did for fun, before the fact of male attention forced us to measure and manage the way we presented ourselves if (or so we were told) we wanted to be treated in a certain way. And to use that as a backdrop for the apparently sexually-driven obsession and violence of a male character, to have his heavy breathing overtake the cutesy soundtrack, his aggression and later violence breaking through the interface of the game – it’s a perfect metaphor for the way these things pierce the innocence of girlhood as you come to understand yourself through the lens of a system that views you as a sexual object, a thing to be consumed. Even before the antagonist fully reveals himself, he’s there, hiding in the bushes, peering through her bedroom window while she dresses, and there’s something about it that captured that uneasy, nauseating sense of realizing, for the first time as a young girl, that you are being seen through a lens that you have never been aware of before, of sticky and unwanted desire. The first time I watched it, it turned my stomach in the same way that those very experiences did for me as a girl, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it expressed so effectively, and certainly not in such abstract fashion.

And I know this is a lot of emotion for a four-minute horror short, but damn, when it’s right, it’s right, you know? I love horror that really hits me in the gut, and this series really did that – this episode in particular, though, is definitely where it peaked in terms of getting under my skin. I would love to hear your take on the series and the game below, and please feel free to drop any other recommendations for online horror series you love or that you’d like to see me dive into. If you enjoyed this article and want to see more stuff like it, check out my other blog, No But Listen, as well as my fiction work!

(header image via YouTube)