A woman is violated by a man. In a final act of rebellion to preserve her humanity, she takes control and opens her stomach. Unable to finish what she started she waits for you, and asks you not to look away.
This is the opening epitaph of Biophobia, a short-form game released for free by solo developer Charlotte Madelon. It is the only form of written hint in the otherwise wordless piece, which otherwise leaves players to find their own way. The game’s Steam Store page is a testament to this deliberate obfuscation, with even positive assessments offering hints for the potentially frustrated. Truly, a game’s word-of-mouth is made or broken by how easy it is to internalize and play.
But “play” is a limited word when discussing Biophobia. Players do very little ‘playing’ in the 20-minute title, and instead, are given a sole grisly task to complete. With bare hands and a scalpel, the player must use a mouse or touch screen to cut incisions into and peel back the layers of an unnamed woman’s stomach. There are five distinct layers, and at the end of each, players must zoom back out of the woman’s stomach and click on a flower to advance.
Pressing these flowers jumps the player forward in time, as they’re invited to observe the woman’s corpse in various stages of decay. The first is the most jarring, as maggots fester in the victim’s womb and gnaw at her toes. It’s from this mess that players must pick up seeds to then take back to the past and plant. Though the task itself is simple enough—a simple left-click—the evocative and visceral imagery gives one pause. Clasping damp seeds between fingertips beneath wriggling, wet clusters of grubs on a corpse is an unpleasant thing to consider.
For all its conceptual grotesqueness, Biophobiaaims not for shock value or obvious social parable. Yet it does, however, come from a genuinely political place.
“The initial idea came less from a specific artwork and more from a feeling of anger and a need to protest,” Charlotte Madelon says via email. “I’ve had interest in art my whole life and these works came together to create Biophobia into what it is today.”
Madelon instills her work with an aesthetic ambiance that leads with open-ended beauty first, as the subtext feels in the rest of the gaps. In less expressive hands, such content could come across as aggressive, brutal, and upsetting. This makes it all the more impressive, then, that Biophobiais not any of those things. It’s a meditative experience on horrific subject matter, sure, but not horrific itself. There are no pained screams or spurts of blood here, only rippling water and the rustle of branches. The quiet decay of a woman into the natural cycle.
This choice is drawn from one of Madelon’s biggest inspirations for Biophobia, painter Fuyuko Matsui’s ‘Keeping Up The Pureness.’ The piece depicts a naked woman laying on her back in the field among lilies, mushrooms, and fruiting plants. Her womb is sliced open, and from within, a multi-colored array of innards dazzle the viewer. Where the woman’s body is cold and desolate, her guts offer the same aesthetic attraction of the flora and fauna around her. There is a calm and serenity to the piece, as the woman’s sweet, vacant eyes almost seem to be inviting you into her primary-hued offal.
Her aggressive attitude, “I have such a fine womb,” is a destructive impulse, occurring as a defense mechanism, that gives rise to self-injurious behavior. I project myself onto this woman and see her as I. The flowers blooming around her are all severed, as if in sympathy for her, and flaunt their pistils. I have created this painting for other women, whom I think will feel in sympathy with it. A capacity for sympathy is a special attribute of individuals with wombs who can produce eggs and create a child.
Madelon says the piece taught her the value of balancing tone with content.
“The painting […] shows, to me, a very aggressive yet delicate atmosphere. As a Westerner, the cultural context gave me a new perspective on my thoughts and feelings.”
Another work that inspired the developer was Hamlet.
“I used the character Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an inspiration for a setting or umbrella so to speak to all these ideas,” Madelon says. “She was a Danish noblewoman who was driven to madness. She picked flowers to express what she could not say with words. I think her storyline asks a lot of questions about agency.“
She also mentions ‘anatomical Venuses’ as a major influence on her title.The genre of wax sculpture dates back to around 1700, when surgeon Guillaume Desnoues commissioned a sculpture of a woman’s corpse on the verge of decomposition. Gaetano Giulio Zummo was known for his gruesome ‘Theatres of Death’ series, which prominently featured gored corpses, and thus was a natural fit for the job. The models are beautiful in their macabre elegance—feminine serenity open for hand-picked desecration.
Initially constructed to educate, these models became something of a novelty across Europe for several decades; its most famed contributor, Clemente Susini, would not be born until 1754. Susini’s pieces would go on to be recognized as some of the most striking and lifelike effigies of the human form up until that point. After a high-profile commission on behalf of Joseph II, Susini would spend the remainder of his life assembling upwards of 2,000 models. The most well-known of Susini’s models are his elegant, serene effigies of women captured in eternal repose, innards on display for eternity.
“[The anatomical Venus] blends art and science together as if there is no divide between those two categories,” says Madelon. “During the 18th and 19th century many smaller Anatomical Venuses were used to teach anatomy, specifically about reproductive organs. Today however, such a wax figure is considered quite shocking. Nowadays medical illustrations, statues and 3D models have been stripped away from any ‘humanity.’”
As if to prove this point, players are given no details about the woman set for disassembly in Biophobia, other than that she has been “violated.” This alone, however, is enough to either imbue a player with sympathy, empathy, or both. Like Matsui’s painting, Biophobiafeels like a piece meant to invoke a oneness with its player, and in that sense invites us to take part in a similar sort of projection. The mechanics conduct this intimacy, as players must ‘touch’ the woman with their mouse in order to carry out their vivisection.
‘Vivisection’ is a very intentional word here.
“I played games from the Trauma Center series and the old flash games of the Dark Cut series to learn how they set up their UI system of tools and how they use different kinds of inputs,” Madelon told me. She also mentions games like Gnong, Assemble With Care, and The Room 4 to help “learn about mechanics that select and focus on objects, how players interact with these objects and what the user experience progression is like.”
This comes through in expressive, upsetting detail as players cut into the woman. Veins must be peeled away, and placenta cut through with a scalpel.
“To create this visceral feeling during dissecting I took inspiration from artworks such as the ones mentioned above, other renaissance paintings, works from Louise Bourgeois, a lot of YouTube videos for medicine students, anatomical museums, books, etc.,” says Madelon.
At the root of the woman lies the first undeveloped signs of life. Not yet a fetus, far from developed, but cellular life nevertheless. It’s the final reveal of the game, and an extra twist of despair that lingers after the end-of-game title splash.
A disturbing question lingers: whose child is this? Is this a result of her violation, or something else? The ambiguity here is what strikes the saddest chord, let alone what it has to say about reproductive autonomy in an era where Roe Vs. Wade has been overturned in America.
This aching minimalism is a natural extension of Madelon’s inherent curiosity about the role of the body in interactive entertainment.
“I’ve always been interested in what function the body has inside a videogame or virtual world,” she says. “For my graduation project I had this idea that you would play as ‘Venus de Milo with drawers’ by Salvador Dali, where you could open up your own drawers and see what’s inside. I was too ambitious and inexperienced so the project totally failed, but I think my fascination with human anatomy started there.”
Madelon explains that this fascination led to a series of perplexing questions.
“Making a 3D game with dissecting mechanics was quite hard to get right. How should a mesh be modeled if it needs to be opened? How does the player interact with this mesh? Should it feel scary, organic or more clinical? And how is the camera positioned? Translating a 3D world to a 2D screen space can sometimes be quite tricky. And then you need to think about which input is used? What kind of tools show up in the UI? How many layers or levels are there?”
In July 2024, Madelon published the first version of Biophobiaonline—almost a year prior to its Steam release. This version had no gardening mechanics, something that the developer says was meant to “not only extend gameplay time, but to also balance out the grotesque experience of dissecting.”
“I don’t like to spell out too much what players should think or feel, but I wanted to add some elements that touched upon empathy. I think placing flowers around the woman emphasizes this feeling of compassion and sorrow,” she says.
Yet even after this initial release and several months of development, Madelon ultimately opted for a free release.
“It was not really possible to extend the gameplay time of Biophobia without smudging the concept, so it had to remain short,” she explains. “I was also aware that just the dissecting mechanic alone is quite controversial, let alone the themes it addresses. So I thought it would be better to release it for free and see the response. Any negative feedback would be useful to improve future games and positive feedback would allow me to pitch them with more confidence to potential collaborators.”
Going forward, she hopes to tweak and make further improvements to Biphobia. She’s also got several other projects on the horizon—including a sort-of companion game, Biopsy.
“I have many ideas, but for now I am focusing on Biophobia and Biopsy,” Madelon says. “There are a few UX issues I want to update on Biophobia, add other languages and perhaps revisit audio. Biopsy is a larger project, but basically consists of eight scenes like the one in Biophobia. But whereas in Biophobia you would go inside the body, Biopsy is all about detaching two bodies from each other. The other half of my time I spend as a UI/UX freelancer and I am currently working on a very exciting puzzle game called Mindset which is going to be released soon.”
Interactive experiences like Biophobiaforce players to confront and wrestle with their conception of what the medium is to them. Is it an escape from reality—a paradise of violence, sex, and cataclysmic stakes with them at the center? Or is it the possibility to engage with complex art on a deeper, more tangible level through the marriage of mechanics and aesthetics?
Different people will have different answers, but for the latter group, artists such as Charlotte Madelon continue to push boundaries that break cracks in the pavement of the larger industry. Cracks that can fell established norms, collapse rotted foundations, and trip stray artists in their paths.
All we have to do is not look away.
Madeline Blondeau is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. She’s written for Paste, Anime New Network, Anime Feminist, Anime Herald, and Coming Soon. Her writing has appeared in A Handheld History, Lock-On, and Sakura Serenade. You can support her work and read further writing on media and culture at http://madshaus.neocities.org/.
