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Anonymous Agony is an episodic game for RPG Maker VX Ace, created by Coded Emotion.

It follows the parallel stories of Haze Stratos and Dr. James Samson, a teenage serial killer and child psychologist respectively. One day, Haze returns home to find that Clara had been raped and she is sent to a mental hospital to recover under Dr. Samson's care. As she follows the road to recovery, Haze decides to take a different approach and uses her online name to lure other predators to his home to murder them.

The prologue, File 0, was released on June 15, 2014. File 1: Contamination was released almost five years later on June 12, 2019, with File #2 still being in development as of December 2022. It can be downloaded from Steam for free here.


Tropes found in Anonymous Agony:

  • Abusive Parents: Haze and Clara's parents are scummy and verbally abusive people who treat their kids like crap, hate each other, and only seem to stay together because it's easier than splitting. Haze hates them immensely because of this, almost choking his father after Clara is assaulted.
  • All There in the Script: The developer made the in-progress script and design document public around 2021 (and made a new one in 2022 after losing access to it thanks to a cyber attack) in order to show progress with the game, which is around 492 pages long and features spoilers up to the completed File #10 and the work-in-progress File #11. A couple examples include the origins of Haze's name,note  and Gabriel's fate.
  • Batter Up!: One of the tools Haze uses for his victims is a baseball bat. While he does use it to incapacitate his victims, he'll usually resort to using something else to finish his victims off.
  • Big, Screwed-Up Family: How the Stratos household managed to remain stable for so long is a mystery in itself. Ben and Bridget are Abusive Parents who barely care about their relationship and their children, Haze is a Troubled Teen who thinks he's above everyone else and is generally unpleasant to be around, and Clara might be the only normal person in the family if not for the fact that she wanted to start swearing to feel older and that her actions online led to her getting assaulted.
  • Caught Monologuing: One of the few reasons why Gabriel managed to turn the tables on Haze when he was holding him at gunpoint was because, unlike his previous two victims, the latter wouldn't stop talking before trying to incapacitate him.
  • Everyone Has Standards: For someone who made it his mission to hunt down pedophiles and acts as if he's above everyone in general, it's odd that Haze is not racist and tries to talk down a hooker from her job and help deal with her boss when he doesn't approve of it.
  • Fat Bastard: Haze's father, Ben, is extremely overweight, which annoys his wife. He also represents one half of Haze's Abusive Parents.
  • Four Is Death: Over the course of File 1, Haze kills three people, two being victims and one being a random person. The fourth person Haze attempts to kill, Gabriel Romero, doesn't go as planned and ends with Haze being left passing out from a knife wound while Gabriel escapes.
  • Idiosyncratic Menu Labels: You get "New User", "Log In", and "Log Out" as menu options in place of the "New Game", "Continue" and "Exit" buttons.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: When moving to a new area, you'll have to sit through a loading screen every time. What makes this egregious is that they're fake loading screens as the game can sometimes be seen fully loaded in, often in the span of a second or two at most, before the screen suddenly pops up.
  • Mood Whiplash: The game is rife with it. The earliest example of this is when Dr. Edwen brings up the topic of Clara being raped, Haze hears ringing in his ears and violently responds by throwing him out the window of his office. Cue happy, chipper music playing not even one sentence later.
  • Morality Pet: Clara is the only person in the family that Haze treats with any decency. When Haze discovers Clara got assaulted while he and his parents were away, he completely loses it.
  • Police Are Useless: The fact that it takes five police officers to subdue an unarmed Haze says a lot about how competent they are. If you look beyond that, one officer asks Haze to find his wallet (which is a short walk away from him at a nearby park) and the police can't even tell if Haze's murder of someone was a suicide or murder despite all the blatant evidence towards the latter. Craig might be the most competent police officer in the town, and he believed Haze's word that the loud gunshot coming from his house was from Haze playing Call of Duty and easily lets Haze off the hook for having marijuana on him by forcing him to have dinner with him and his wife.
  • Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: The premise of the game revolves around this topic, with Haze firmly believing so to the point of actively searching them out in order to kill them.
  • Sir Swears-a-Lot: A lot of the sentences that come out of Haze's mouth have at least one swear word in them.
  • Stuffed into the Fridge: Clara. She was the only person in the family that Haze had a somewhat positive relation with and discovering that she was assaulted while the rest of the family weren't home one night is what causes him to start murdering predators.
  • Troubled Teen: Haze was already like this prior to the game starting, no thanks to his parents and demeanor in general. Discovering that Clara was assaulted while he was away made this aspect of him much worse.
  • Unfortunate Names: A downplayed example. While Ben, Bridget, and Clara have normal names you'd see in real life, Haze is the unusual name out. This is lampshaded when you first meet Brian.
    Brian: Haze? Odd name.
    Haze: Yeah, my parents were stupid.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Haze's parents never appear in File 1 outside of flashbacks and Haze (understandably) rarely mentions them in the present day while still living in their house. A dream sequence implies that Haze killed them, but whether this is true or not has yet to be determined.

 
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Anonymous agony

haze is a character hard to take seriously especially when he is swearing in scene that are meant to be taken seriously. in fortunately swearing is his main habit which lead to..this. does this even need explanations? wheteaver. enjoy.

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2.33 (3 votes)

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Main / SirSwearsalot

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