Summary
- Release Year: 2018
- Genres: Indie, Visual Novel
- Platforms: PC (Microsoft Windows)
Shrinking Pains – A 20-Minute Descent That Stays With You for Days
By [Author Name], 27 June 2023
I’ve fought dragons, shot Nazis, and built 200-hour civilizations, yet the game that’s been squatting rent-free in my head is a free, twenty-minute pixel-art vignette about counting coins in the hollow of a collarbone. Shrinking Pains—made by two-person Melbourne studio Mellow Horror—doesn’t look like much on a store page: a lo-fi bathroom, a mirror, a body slowly winnowing away. But five minutes in, your chest tightens, your own breathing sounds louder, and you realize this isn’t really a game about weight; it’s about control, perfectionism, and the quiet horror of becoming smaller until there’s nothing left. It’s the most effective piece of interactive horror I’ve played all year, and it costs exactly zero dollars.
Gameplay – Less Is Horrifyingly More
There are no fail states, no combos, no collectibles beyond the coins you ritualistically slot above your clavicle. You click hotspots—mirror, sink, scale, door—and choose dialogue prompts that feel like self-talk gone feral: “I could lose another pound,” “If I just skip dinner,” “One more sit-up.” Each choice nudges an invisible stat called “Mass” downward and another called “Control” upward. The genius is that the UI never explains this; you simply feel the atmosphere thicken. Colors drain, the soundtrack (a single, warbling synth loop) slows by a few BPM, and the reflection’s eyes sink deeper. After the third in-game day the mirror begins to lie, shaving pixels off your sprite in real time. By day five your silhouette can slip between the shower tiles. The only mechanical “challenge” is deciding how long you’ll keep clicking. The horror is that you always click one more time.
Controls are mouse-only, perfect for a laptop trackpad and for the voyeuristic sense that you’re complicit. A right-click drags the camera closer to the mirror, amplifying the body-dysmorphic distortion. I caught myself angling the view so my own face, lit by the monitor glow, merged with the protagonist’s. I’ve never felt so seen—and so guilty—by a game.
Story – A Poem That Plays You
Shrinking Pains is autobiographical. Designer Lana V. wrote the script during recovery from an eating disorder, and every line was originally a diary entry. The narrative is non-linear, told through fragmented inner monologue, SMS pings from worried friends you never answer, and passive-aggressive post-it notes left by Mom on the fridge (“There’s yogurt in the door. Eat. Please.”). Because the protagonist’s gender is never specified, players project their own baggage; forums are split 50/50 on whether they played a teenage boy, girl, or non-binary teen. The ambiguity is deliberate—dysmorphia doesn’t discriminate.
The game’s single most chilling beat arrives around minute 12: you open the medicine cabinet and find a tiny, pixel-perfect replica of yourself inside, curled up among the pill bottles. You can pick it up. Your only interaction is to set it on the scale, where the number immediately plummets to 00.00. No jump scare, no musical sting—just the soft clink of coins as they spill from your collarbone hollows onto the bathroom floor. I audibly gasped, then spent the rest of the night reading journal studies on body-image dissociation. Very few horror games bother to weaponize empathy this effectively.
Graphics – 128×128 Nightmares
Mellow Horror calls the aesthetic “compressionist horror”: every sprite is hand-drawn at 128×128 and then down-scaled to 64×64, producing a smeary, over-compressed look akin to early Game Boy Camera photos. Color count is capped at 16, all sickly teals, bruised purples, nicotine yellows. The palette tightens as you lose “Mass”; by the finale the screen is almost monochrome except for the coins, which remain a taunting gold. The effect is like watching your own JPEG degrade with every save.
Animation is deliberately sparse. Blinking is handled by a single-frame overlay that flickers at random intervals. When your reflection “shrinks,” the sprite doesn’t actually scale; instead, the game subtracts rows of pixels from the bottom up, so limbs appear amputated rather than reduced. It’s subtle, but once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. The bathroom itself is cluttered with period detail: a Tamagotchi keychain blinking its final pixel heart, a CRT toothpaste ad reflected in the faucet, Nokia 3310 on the windowsill. The scene never changes, yet I discovered new props on my fourth playthrough because the lighting angle shifts with your “Control” stat. Environmental storytelling at its thriftiest.
Sound – One Loop, Infinite Dread
Composer Ben “Ghost” Walden built the score from a single 8-bar motif stretched across a cassette tape and then re-recorded through a broken Walkman. The loop slows by 0.2 BPM every time you skip a meal in-game. By the end it’s crawling along at 42 BPM, the hiss swallowing the melody. There are no traditional stingers; instead, everyday sounds (towel snap, faucet drip, coin clink) are pitch-shifted downward as your “Mass” decreases. The result is a piece of music that literally deflates with you. Headphones are mandatory—you’ll hear your own stomach growl and wonder if it’s yours or the protagonist’s.
Performance – Runs on a Toaster, Still Needs a Content Warning
Built in Godot 4, Shrinking Pains is 42 MB and boots in under two seconds on Steam Deck, where it’s Verified. I tested on a dusty 2013 MacBook Air and maintained 60 fps. The only option is “Full Screen,” and even that feels like a statement: you cannot window your way out of this. Because the game is free, there’s no DRM; you can zip it onto a flash drive and hand it to a friend like a cursed mixtape.
Be warned: the developers partnered with Australia’s National Eating Disorder Collaboration to include on-screen resources at launch. The game refuses to start until you confirm you’ve read a brief content warning. It’s the rare title that takes responsibility for its subject matter without moralizing.
Replay Value – Short, but It Grows Inside You
A single run lasts 15–25 minutes, but Shrinking Pains has five discrete endings based on two hidden variables: “Honesty” (how often you pick the “I need help” prompt) and “Connection” (whether you answer any of your friend’s texts). I’ve seen three so far: the “Hollow,” where you literally slip down the drain; the “Mirror,” where your reflection steps out and you swap places; and the “Coin,” where you finally fill the collarbone hollows so full of gold you can’t breathe and the screen fades to currency yellow. The “true” ending, accessible only if you text your friend the single word “sorry,” is mercifully hopeful: you open the door, the aspect ratio widens from 4:3 to 16:9, and the soundtrack blooms into a major key. I cried. I’m a 34-year-old man who speed-runs Resident Evil games for fun, and I sat in my study and cried.
The game keeps a local save file that remembers how many endings you’ve unlocked. After you’ve seen all five, the main menu adds a tiny sunflower icon. Click it and you’re taken to a password-protected page on Mellow Horror’s website containing a PDF of Lana’s original diary pages and a playlist of songs that helped her recover. I’ve never encountered post-game content that felt like a warm hug rather than a season pass.
Pricing – Free, but Pay What Your Heart Can Afford
Shrinking Pains is donationware. You can grab it on Steam, Itch.io, or GameJolt for $0. The page suggests $5, “roughly the cost of the latte you’ll skip after playing.” All proceeds go to the Butterfly Foundation, an Australian eating-disorder charity. At time of writing, the community has raised just over AU$42,000 in three weeks—small by AAA standards, but proof that horror can heal when it’s honest.
Verdict – Mandatory, Uncomfortable, and Human
Shrinking Pains isn’t fun. It’s not supposed to be. It’s the interactive equivalent of a panic attack wrapped in a poem, and it does more to illuminate the psychology of eating disorders than any after-school special. Yet it’s also hopeful: a reminder that survival can be as simple as texting “sorry,” as radical as stepping away from the mirror. I’ve played 40-hour open worlds this year that left no footprint; Shrinking Pains stomped around my brain for a week and then planted sunflowers.
If you’ve ever struggled with body image, play with a friend nearby. If you haven’t, play anyway—empathy is a muscle, and this is a 20-minute gym that costs nothing. Come for the horror, stay for the healing. Just keep the coins out of your collarbone. You’re already worth more than gold.
8.8/10 – Essential, harrowing, and free.
Review Score
9/10
Art
Cover Art
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