Survive winter in this creepy horror game. Mother loves you!
Mother is a short pixelated stealth Horror game released April 2020 by indie company HorrorShopGames, the makers of Kiki And Ana - The Child and Space Yandere. In it, you and your family, including your three brothers and your mother, all try to survive an extremely harsh winter. With no food and becoming desperate, your mother might just take things into her own hands...
Due to the extremely short playtime for the game, all spoilers will be unmarked; if you want to experience the game's story first, it's available for free on itch.io.
Not to be confused with the Mother trilogy, or another indie horror title released the same year.
Mother contains examples of:
- All for Nothing: Nearly everything that the mother does, and the protagonist eating some of her to survive, is negated since stepping outside reveals spring was just a few days away all along.
- Big Bad: The titular mother spends the game killing and eating her own children out of hunger-induced desperation, and eventually tries to do the same to the protagonist, her surviving kid.
- Bittersweet Ending: Spring has arrived and the protagonist survives, but his brothers and his mother are dead, leaving him all alone.
- Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: The children include one blond, two brunets, and one redhead, which is the protagonist.
- Disappeared Dad: Your father was the one who would hunt and catch food during the winter; his absence is what leads the family to suffering without food.
- Evil Matriarch: The mother kills off her children one by one and feeds the surviving children the killed one. She never tells them where she got this meat they’re eating. At the end, she plans on killing her last son, claiming that it would be better to die quickly rather than slowly starve to death.
- Forgiveness: At the end of the game you have the option to fix your mother's portrait that's fallen loose from the wall. The game frames doing so as whether or not you forgive your mother what she's done.
- Mercy Kill: The mother kills her children partially to get food, but also because she doesn't want them to suffer anymore from starvation.
- My God, What Have I Done?: After mortally wounding your mother, she laments that you have to see such a gruesome sight, and then realizes what a monster of a mother she's been for subjecting her children to all this at all.
- No Party Like a Donner Party: The mother slaughters her children one by one and secretly feeds their remains to the remaining children because they can't find any food for the winter. At the end of the game, she encourages the protagonist to eat her remains so they'll survive.
- Offing the Offspring: It's not hard to guess as your brothers disappear what's happening. The climax of the game has the mother trying to kill the protagonist as well, and the corpses of your brothers litter the room.
- Pint-Sized Kid: The protagonist and his brothers are all very small compared to their mother who is huge.
- Psycho Smirk: Your mother sports one once she's made up her mind to start killing her children.
- Red-Headed Hero: The protagonist, in contrast to his easily-killed dark or blond-haired brothers and the villainous, purple-haired mother.
- Revolting Rescue: The protagonist's mother chases after her son (the protagonist) with the intent to murder and eat him due to a food shortage in winter. When she is sliced into pieces by the sawblades in her room, she realizes how cruel she was to kill her sons, so she has the protagonist devour her remains in order to survive.
- The Voiceless: The protagonist is the only character in the game without any lines.
