Space Funeral is an independently created role-playing video game and art game by Irish developer Stephen Gillmurphy (thecatamites). The short game was created using RPG Maker 2003 and centers on a boy named Phillip, who leaves home to save his world from a mysterious corruption. Space Funeral is notable for its parodies of the horror and role-playing game genres, its crude art style, and its frequent use of blood in dialogue, graphics, and themes.

Players primarily control Phillip; after the game's first major area they also control Leg Horse. The journey begins in Phillip's home, Scum Vullage, as he searches for the City of Forms, described as the origin of everything in the game's world. Throughout the game, players encounter twisted, often bloody creatures that take the place of non-playable characters (NPCs). The gameplay resembles a typical 2D, turn-based role-playing game (RPG), but includes a "Mystery" function that can be used only once per battle and has effects unique to each enemy type. This ability closely resembles "praying" in EarthBound but with a greater and more prevalent narrative focus. Certain enemies have absurd weaknesses—for example, exposure to silent films can make some of them sentimental. The game also has quirky status effects, such as "buff" and "sad," along with more typical ones like "poisoned." Space Funeral begins with Phillip, a perpetually crying, pajama-clad purple boy, seeing a wizard in Scum Vullage who tells him that his world has been corrupted and does not have much time left. The wizard says the only hope for survival is to find the City of Forms, a perfect city from which all things in the game's world originate. Phillip leaves the village and soon meets Leg Horse, a horse made of severed legs who is later revealed to have been Prince Horace, the former ruler before the "Great Change." The player passes through the Blood Cavern, home to the game's first boss, the Blood Ghoul, and arrives in the City of Thieves, inhabited by a vast array of criminals who are especially vulnerable to bibles. Visiting Leg Horse's former home reveals that his brother has also been corrupted, and the group is ambushed by "20th Century Boy," the corrupted version of his brother. Phillip notices that certain objects appear as graphical glitches—called "errors" by the denizens—who recognize them but cannot remember what they once were before the Great Change. After players defeat the King of Crime, they reach the City of Forms, an intensely glitched area that resembles a video game debug room. The "forms" refer to the game's sprites. There they discover Moon, a former artist who first sought the City for inspiration. She found it so perfect that she lost her purpose as an artist and decided to corrupt the world so she could create again.

After defeating Moon, the game returns to the default RPG Maker appearance and the characters revert to their normal selves, implying the previous appearance was the result of Moon's corruption. However, a corrupted house from the original world remains, suggesting it is not entirely gone.

Development: In an interview with the Tumblr blog fuckyeahspacefuneral, developer thecatamites said the game's art style was "based on the weird chunky pixel gore from Monster Party, especially the way it could be hard to figure out what a wall of tiled bloody heads was meant to represent in game space." The developer said the music was chosen by "pulling together things based on kind of superficially similar tendencies and almost creating a fake tradition in that way which could change how you progress from there." They also said Space Funeral was largely inspired by the games Bat Castle and Monster Party. In a different interview, Murphy claimed to have played Earthbound in his teens but added it was "kinda too late for it to have an impact" at the time of development. Several websites have listed Space Funeral among games very reminiscent of Earthbound, including that interviewer's own site, Paste. The game's focus on "corruption" versus the "perfect" graphics of the default RPG Maker was used by the developer to decry what he believed was a modern form of classicism for the RPGs of the 1990s, where people believed they were the "peak" of video games and wanted to copy them as much as possible instead of experimenting and trying new things. He believed that when RPG Maker games break from tradition, they are more interesting.

Reception: Space Funeral received positive critical reviews, with critics citing the game's unusual art style, music, and setting. Filipe Salgado of Kill Screen rated the game 75/100, saying its "messiness" contrasted with the tendency of most games to tie up loose ends, despite its underlying systems being the same as any Japanese role-playing game. Quintin Smith of Rock, Paper, Shotgun described the game as "Final Fantasy directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky," calling the art "disturbed" and the music "awesome." Space Funeral gained a cult following over time, partially as a result of attention from YouTubers and streamers.