Warmest Maw is a point and click horror adventure game concept composed of several rendered game environments and cutscenes with customized audio as well as a specialized pixel blackletter typeface. It is inspired by early 90s interactive game experiences like Garage, Phantasmogoria, Myst, and Alice. Click the video above to watch. Content Warning: this video contains gore, partial nudity, flickering graphics, eye strain, and religious themes.
The game's story follows a contractor tasked to retrieve a family heirloom from an old house about to be sold by its heir, and discovering that it is haunted by a vengeful ghost Victorian trans man by the name of Viktor. The ghost appears to the player through animated cutscenes utilizing stop motion animation, digital animation, and frame by frame photographic sequences.
The logo is composed of the text " Warmest Maw" in the Tranzfraktur blackletter font designed specially for the game; and a frame from one of the hand drawn animations featured in the video Typography is the center focus of a lot of the cutscenes and a vessel for the ghost in the story to communicate with the player. Versatility and style were key in the creation of it. Tranzfraktur was designed on a 24x24 pixel grid and takes inspiration from Cyrillic and fraktur style blackletter, to call back to the ghost's Slavic roots and the Victorian timescape that the game is immersed in. Tranzfraktur's key qualities are trans-media, trans-cultural, and transgender. Trans-media refers to its versatile use in the game, connecting all of the deliverables, the logo the posters and any kind of associated media, with the video game concept. Transcultural refers to its blend of influences, and transgender refers to its malleability, calling back to the game's themes of body horror and transgenderism.
The horror element in Warmest Maw centers around the body, its perception of it and what it can become. Specifically from a trans perspective, it is about someone who had no control over his body while living, but becomes something beyond corporeal understanding after his death. It is about stretching the definition of a body to its limits, the way that Viktor interacts with the player, the way the house and its elements harmonize with him, he is the house, he is the ghost, and he is something new altogether. Beyond death he is able to take any form he wants, not fully understanding himself or seeing a future for himself as a trans man from the 19th century, these feelings take form into the game concept presented here.