This week in games I wish I’d never heard of: The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, a horror visual novel and puzzle game about cannibalism and…possible sibling incest. Why am I bringing it to your attention, you might ask? Because, for some reason, 97% of the over 7,000 Steam reviews for this game are overwhelmingly positive, and the reviews are a deeply cursed cesspit that will stick with me beyond the grave.
The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is described as a “walk-n-talk adventure with light puzzling” in which a brother and sister practice cannibalism after “witnessing a botched satanic ritual.” The siblings in question are “caught in an extremely toxic sibling relationship”, which gets the tagline: “cannibalism and codependency!”
What the Steam page fails to mention about this sibling relationship is that Ashley and Andrew Graves, our two playable characters (and again, I remind you, siblings), have something slightly more incest-y going on than just a doormat brother and his highly manipulative sister. Depending on your choices in-game, this relationship can become even more incest-y. The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is still in Early Access with more to come, so there’s still plenty more gameplay and story to come, with likely, unfortunately, more brother-sister…whatever the fuck this is. Somehow, it takes a game about cannibalism and manages to make that the second-worst thing you can do. Honestly astounding.
The game is in pretty low pixel detail with cartoony pictures of the characters appearing side screen as they speak, meaning the actual cannibalism and occult aspects of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley are not actually all that graphic. The horror element comes more from perceiving the story and Andrew and Ashley’s dynamic, I suspect. The gameplay involves puzzles, killing and eating people, and making different choices that alter the story as you progress in a style that feels eerily similar to horrific RPG Maker games from the internet era of yore.
While the game itself is horrific, what really makes it noteworthy is the over seven thousand positive Steam reviews that accompany it, ranging from “I can fix her” through to “I LOVE EATING MY NEIGHBOORS!” repeatedly up to what I can only assume is the review character limit. For context, this is better reviewed than Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ve collated some of the funniest and most fucked up ones for your viewing pleasure.
And one final review that sent me so hard I entered orbit:
Weirdly large amount of Undertale fans in that review section for reasons I can’t quite decipher.
The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is set to fully release some time in 2024 with two more chapters (making for a total of four) of whatever fresh hell I’ve burnt my eyeballs with. It’s been getting a lot of internet discourse, mostly due to the incest. A sentence I never thought I’d have to write in my tenure at Kotaku dot com dot au, but here we are.
If you’ve ever considered playing this game, might I instead suggest: go outside?
Lead Image Credit: Nemlei
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