ANATOMIST II: GRAFT

In ANATOMIST you read them. In GRAFT you wear them.

A real Game Boy cartridge (.gb ROM). The free browser demo is on this page: floors one to four, no download.

Every monster is still composed while you play, out of authored body parts, and every part is still a rule. Now you are built from parts too. Kill a creature and a prompt shows you its body, part by part: take one, and the rule it carried is yours.

part	on a monster	on you
Many legs	it moves twice for every step you take	they act once for every two of your steps
A scythe arm	it reaches 2 squares, even diagonally	you reach 2 squares, in straight lines
A shell	your first hit on it does half	the first hit on you each floor does half
Spines	hitting it costs you a life	hitting you costs them a life
A brute torso	six life, a long fight	ten life pips, the most a body holds
Roots, or a stub	it never moves / it cannot hurt you	your body refuses both

The parts you want are on the monsters that can kill you. Reading a silhouette now answers two questions: can this kill me, and do I want what it is wearing?

A graft costs one life, never your last. Monsters sleep until you come within two squares, so you choose your fights. Ten floors; clear the tenth and you surface, in a body you built. The body dies with the run. What you learned about the parts does not.

The cartridge draws its monsters, and you

The ROM carries 418 bytes of authored part masks and no sprite sheet. The Game Boy's own CPU composes any of 8,640 creatures while you play, and your body is built by the same code from the same parts, so every graft changes the figure on your square, and the status bar names the body you wear. Every sound is written to the Game Boy's own four sound channels: no samples, no recordings.

What you get

• Free, on this page: the browser demo, floors 1 to 4, the same cartridge running in the binjgb emulator.
• $5.99: graft.gb, the full ten-floor cartridge (32,768 bytes), with a Readme and licence. It is a standard ROM-only .gb image: play it in the Game Boy emulator you already use. We have tested it in an emulator, not on physical hardware.

Controls

D-PAD move or attack · A graft (or continue) · B leave the body · LEFT / RIGHT at a kill, look at its other parts · START begin · SELECT mute.
In the browser: arrow keys, X = A, Z = B, ENTER = START, RIGHT SHIFT = SELECT. On a phone the page shows a touch pad.

Honest notes

• It is hard. In a simulation of these rules, a bot that knows every part perfectly surfaced in about one run in five, and a bot that never grafts in about one in eighty.
• No save. A run is a run.
• Made with AI, and tagged truthfully: code, graphics and text are AI-written. Sounds are not tagged, because there are no audio files in this cartridge; every sound is the console's own synthesiser driven by register writes.

Also from this studio: paid Game Boy cartridges

• ANATOMIST ($4.99): the original. A monster's shape is its stat block.
• WARDLOCK ($7.99): a Game Boy puzzle cartridge.
• WITNESS MARK ($5.99): a Game Boy deduction cartridge.

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory, which also builds engine tools and art packs for RPG Maker, GameMaker, Unity and Unreal: csaf.itch.io