Collection Andy's Apple Farm

Andy's Apple Farm presents itself as a lost children's cartoon-turned-game: soft colours, rubber-hose animation, a cheerful apple as your host. It takes about five minutes to work out that something is wrong with it, and the game is in no hurry to tell you what.

The horror comes almost entirely from tone. Nothing chases you for a long while. Instead the friendly characters say things slightly off-script, the music loops a beat too long, and the farm's cheerfulness starts to feel like something being maintained rather than felt.

It sits in the same tradition as analog horror - the idea that a corrupted piece of children's media is more disturbing than a monster, because it implies something happened to it. The cartoon aesthetic isn't a disguise for the horror. It is the horror.

Andy himself is a good piece of character design, precisely because he's drawn to be likeable and you spend the whole game unable to relax around him.

This collection covers the farm's residents in their original friendly style. Whether that's comforting on your desktop is entirely up to you.