Lovecraftian Setting Games

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There was an Innsmouth game for Virtual Boy in Japan but I don't know if it's any good. Looks like it would give you a headache before scaring you.

Darkseed scared the fuck out of me as a kid. I had no idea about any of that fucked up shit back then, so it was especially fucking weird to me.
I'm not sure if Darkseed is lovecraft inspired or h.r. geiger inspired, honestly, because I haven't played it for something like 20 years.

I'd like a game inspired the guy's better works and not just the memes. There would be tons of room outside boring horror games in the late gothic sci-fi, occult historical fiction and dreamlike adventures. Best "lovecraftian" game is propably Fate of Atlantis.

I've never even read any of his stuff, and really don't know anything about it beyond the basic themes (and also the big mr. calamari napping in the ocean or whatever).
I find those basic themes really fascinating though - knowledge so profound or alien that it actually drives you insane, corruption so insidious and complete that you perceive the world as changing rather than yourself, and so on. That shit is really damn cool and it's almost nonexistent in vidya as far as I've seen.

Hell, I don't even know if those themes are truly lovecraftian or just stacked on top of his memes by other people over the years.

I know the thread just started but holy fuck.
OP PLAY ETERNAL DARKNESS RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!

Lovecraft's central theme is "fear of the unknown." To him ignorance was not mere bliss, it was the only thing keeping us alive. To say he was racist is a bit unfair. In reality he didn't like anyone who wasn't a white Anglo-Saxon protestant from Providence, Rhode Island.

Saya no Uta and Chrono Trigger touch on his themes a bit.

And all those consistent depictions of curiosity as high virtue of intelligent species is just bollocks compared to the first and only paragraph lol cthulhu crowd bothered to read.

Shouldn't you europoors be getting ready for bed?

Lovecraft is just as abused as zombies, nowadays. Normalfags and their kike handlers ruin everything.

Speaking of The Consuming Shadow:
5 Days a Stranger and its sequels.

Lovecraft isn't handled well at all. Most of the time they just go for aesthetics.

i could never really understand that one
The due was a scientist, or not?

Being racist is a good thing.

Nice, someone else brought it up instead of me. It can tear your ass at first until you figure out all that's going on but it gets pretty good. I wish more games even attempted some semblance of a sanity feature. I still remember how cool CoC was supposed to be before crushing my hopes and dreams and getting shitfucked by consolation.

I've been playing that this week, it's pretty okay. Somehow manages to spook me. I like there's sort of some semblance of a stealth mechanic where you can avoid stuff if you play it right. I found you can kind of cheese it by leading things to a door and closing it just in time and sneaking out another door but I suppose that's just a feature.

This. Not being racist is delusional and unnatural.

I feel bad for mind-raped whites. They've been indoctrinated into suicide on an existential level.

Grim dawn is an alright ARPG set it grimdark. The lore you can pick up and read is really good.

You can also use certain disguises against some types of enemies.

In The Legacy, I mean. They ignore you if you do that right.

Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath game when?

According to some youtube autist, bloodborne is mainly inspired by it. They fucked it up if true though.

What makes HP Lovecraft shit hard to transition to video games?

Probably has something to do with most developers being superficial morons at best who think tentacles are "Lovecraftian".

the fact that they are videogames ; not movies ,not books ,notcomicbooks , not pictographs

Closest thing I can think of is cthangband and that is not really a strict interpretation, but it's something.

That's such a vague descriptor that could apply to 90% of horror, though. "The insignificance of man in the grand scheme of things" is a more apt description of his central themes, that and "being an idiot backwater yokel or ignorant savage will lead you towards worshiping elder things" judging by the number of rural and ethnic folk that end up fabricating idols or setting up cults in his works.

This.

Because the concept of cosmic horror is hard to comprehend and create.

Is this a good one?

I second this. Only problem is that it's a Gamecube exclusive, and playing on an emulator would diminish certain elements of the game.
But yeah, if you can find a copy. Do yourself a favor and get it.

Hey call of cthulhu is pretty good !

For one its one of the only game that has a boss which's attack crashes your game !!!

How bout that.

I have finished it without it crashing even once. The only problem I had was too little time for the final escape. Apparently I shouldn't play in any resolution higher than the default one.

Fug, I kept crashing when Robert marsh (the guy you gotta kill with a knife) did his choking move ala darth vader .

The game also crashed on many random occasions but maybe it was because of the resolution and the steam version being shit
also >bethesda
Fuck them for killing the sequel to dark corners of the earth and other lovecraft games that were planned by headfirst studio.

I had the CDROM version, and then the GOG version. Patch the CDROM version playing on XP and I think I only had once crash in the entire time that I played the game, and it was while I was on the ship where you have to fight Dagon on the deck. Besides some of the bugs with the AI as well that game is still pretty awesome and I keep it on my computer just so I can go back to it once a year and play through it on the hardest setting and make sure I do a shit load of morphine and search out and look at all the madness causing events

As a big fan of Lovecraft, I don't see how they can make a videogame based on his works. A Mini-series or movie would work better

He was an atheist

I'd like a Lovecraftian setting where humans are actually just starting to advance to the point where the apathetic cosmos actually start paying attention. Cause that could get fucking bonkers really god damn fast.

I didn't get a single crash in the entire game. Instead the only bug I ever got was right in the last battle against Mother Hydra were I was unable to interact with the levers behind the statues inside the boss room. Since I didn't finish it that time I decided to replay the game a few years later after properly installing and patching the game in a new computer. Guess what? The same exact fucking bug happened.

Isn't that just the plot to every "dug-too-deep" movie ever?
Where man starts fucking around with nature, which wakes or creates terrible monsters, like Godzilla, Alien, all alien-invasion movies, or Planet of the apes for example?

I think it wasn't a bug. In that battle you weren't supposed to operate those levers personally.

i've never read lovecraft

If you mean that I had to use them while controlling a Deep One that's what I was referring to. I kept reading guides and watching youtube gameplay videos to check if I was doing everything right and yet those fuckers won't budge.

Then I can't help you. I remember that attacking the back of the statue with your pawn's claws flicked its lever.

Lovecraft's central theme was not fear of the unknown.
Lovecraft's central theme was discovery of truths that once known changed your world view so dramatically you could never go back to the way you once were. What's more, this was accompanied by no one believing you, giving society the impression that you were insane even when you told the truth.
That is the central theme of Lovecraft's work, and the ending of at least half of his stories.
Lovecraft used a fear of the unknown as a build up to unnerving reveals, often accompanied by horrific imagery using made up words like 'eldritch' so that your mind had to fill in the gaps for what the characters were faced with.
What's more, Lovecraft is a sign of the times. Cthulhu was a frightful thing not just because his presence made you insane, but because he was so incomprehensibly huge by human standards. This was before the moon landing, before the nuke, a lot of it before King Kong. And that's why a boat could knock out Cthulhu. But those men who knew that Cthulhu slept beneath the water waiting for the day he woke to destroy the world was a truth that they had to think about every night they went to sleep.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a spectacular game that highlights this and I highly recommend playing it if you can get it and get it working.

And you had to switch the central lever by yourself first, and only then deal with those on the sides.

And you had to reach second statue in short period of time before the lever behind first one flicks back automatically.

Well, that, but where humans actually can fuck with the terrible monsters, but also with the subtle idea that the monsters were always there.

One of the big things I personally liked with Lovecraft like works is the idea that the cosmic horror has always been there, simply existing out of the public eye and for most of human history exonerated as a god. I like the idea of these creatures being somewhat amused at the idea or indifferent until they realize that other humans have actually developed enough scientific understanding to pose almost as equals. Maybe just on the level of a midget with a knife against a fully trained soldier, but still a legitimate threat.

Of course I think my favorite version would be a story in which the cosmic horror being is apathetic or even somewhat benevolent to the plight of the protagonist, but the deranged people who believe in it view him as a threat. So as the cosmic being is carefully figuring out ways to manifest to observe or offer a tiny bit of help to the main character, a bunch of psychotic cultists are chasing him down with rusty pitchforks.

Spot on user

When I played it I somehow managed to create a second copy of my body, so I was simultaneously on the platform and also running around the map. So, I was constantly attempting to pray at the same time I was at the gong ready to make myself deaf. The second me on the platform was invisible while I wasn't controlling a deep one.
Once I activated all the levers and filled the pathways with water, I zapped it and the game immediately crashed.

Then during the escape I had to activate debug mode and fly so I could beat the timer. I even tried lowering my resolution to 640x480, but it did nothing.

The game is a mess, but I only crashed during a specific part of the game. It's when you have to go across the rafters when you're leaving Insmouth. If you go up top first, I crashed every time it tried to start a cutscene. Instead I had to go below first and do all of that, then I could go up top.
You can also hop right over the wall and fall through the ceiling, disregarding the locked door entirely, but you can't advance the game.

So Yahtzee's games?

Not really, Hitler, just those two. His other games don't go after that cosmic horror angle as much.

It's been a long time since I saw that comic, glad to have it again. The ending where they bend time and it becomes an ontological paradox always bothered me, but I guess there's not much else you can do about it.

Well, I have beat the timer without cheating on maybe twentieth attempt. In the 1024x756 resolution. A pain in the ass to do, but still doable.

Is not exactly the same, but I think Bloodborne plot is similar to that, in that most of the Eldritch Horrors of the game are in reality either benevolent, trying to help humanity in differents ways, with the exception of one which is just evil, but the cult fucks everything up in pursuit of knowledge. Also even though the Great ones may have good intention, their sole presence drive men mad or their idea of helping humanity is a little bit twisted.

Also, the final twist of the game is that the hunt is started by an eldritch abomination to help humanity, so it is thanks to it that you become a hunter and overcome the dream. But it existence is a secret so no cultist pray to it

He was. He was also suffering from some kind of PTSD because the government took his family away.

Holy shit someone who actually read the books and gets it. Thank fucking god.

Pathologic feels a fair amount like a Lovecraft story if you want to try it.

Lovecraft's actual books were mostly scientific and philosophical works if memory serves me, most of his horror works were short stories, poems and novella.

Lovecraft produced no books. He wrote short stories that were published in pulp magazines, he had a mountain of correspondence that he wrote to people, and he submitted poetry to some sources. But in his entire lifetime, Lovecraft never wrote a book and he never got a publishing deal despite his friends all getting publishing deals.

Lovecraft started life as the grandson of a rich wealthy businessman, but the businessman in his grandfather gave out and he managed to go bankrupt and lose the family fortune. In the end, Lovecraft wrote just enough to keep himself afloat, but he considered himself an aristocrat and he saw work as beneath him, he just figured money would always be there. He didn't like the idea of monetizing doing what he loved, so he fought against it, because his humility made him believe that it was wrong. His friends had to fight him tooth and nail to charge for his works to support himself.

The most Lovecraft ever wrote was novellas, and they were all published within the confines of popular fiction magazines. Lovecraft died, sick and in squalor of pancreatic cancer at the ripe old age of 47 with no one by his side save his two aunts.

And Lovecraft wanted to be an astronomer as a profession, but his lack of schooling failed to provide him with enough of a mathematical background to pursue astronomy. This was back in the days when schooling was not yet mandatory.

Don't know if any good since it ain't out yet, but check out Abandon Ship: youtube.com/watch?v=xa7sHudcXV4

This guy has been the most right out of all of you.
More importantly, the reason why Lovecraft hasn't been done right in video games is the same reason why many of his stories like Music of Erich Zan or Dagon get stale. Its because they involve something that can not be described. Once you describe/show it in a game, you've destroyed the whole point.

the CoC game is good, I want a Kadeth and Outsider game, but really, if you want this kind of dread and horror, read the original shit.

Also, read The King in Yellow

The only thing that has in common with Lovecraft is that it has weird water things with tentacles. If you just want that kind of surface level comparison, without investigating the themes of his writing, then you could also look at

I know Lord Dunsany gave him a great deal of inspiration. I thoroughly enjoyed Unknown Kadath, and when the King in Yellow showed up, I was a little surprised by it.

I think one of my favorites was Lovecraft and his friendly rivalry with Robert Bloch. Killing Bloch in The Haunter of the Dark inspired Bloch to create a Lovecraft stand-in that he also killed in equally gruesome fashion in his own story. I wonder what they might have done had Lovecraft lived beyond 37, and they grew old together.

Despite popular misconception, Lovecraft actually had a hell of a sense of humor. Take his story Ibid for example.

Oh without a doubt, just look at his poem On the Creation of Niggers, or The Walls of Eryx.

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It's almost as if games are not primarily a story-telling medium despite the efforts of a million Hollywood-rejects making interactive-movies because the real Hollywood would never take them

Ding ding ding, you win the prize!
Hollywood hacks shouldn't adapt literature, either. Fucking hacks lose the essence in the transition to film.

It's not just that, it's also a lack of the ethereal. The only way that you can convey the same type of discourse in a video game as you do in a book, is to have someone perform voice over or display text on screen. You can't describe what a character is thinking, you have to either show a flashback (whose scope needs to be limited to make sense) or you need to find a way to visualize something that doesn't exist.

An example is Stephen King's It. The movies of It completely avoid trying to describe what Stephen King wrote about It, which is that It is a being that comes from outside of our universe, the exact opposite of a celestial turtle who puked up the universe by accident. It is a series of destructive orange lights, named "deadlights" and the spider seen at the end of the movie is described as being closest to "spider-like" in the novel, and is merely a container for the deadlights and not even It's body. You try to convey those types of things without ruining the mood of a horror story. Then it just sounds like silly fantasy. Also there's the whole 10 year old gangbang thing, but thankfully no one tried to depict that in a movie, cause that would be super awkward.

I beg your pardon?

Stephen King is a fucking pervert, and he likes to write inappropriate sexual content in his books. In It the group of six kids gets lost in the sewers after defeating It, and Beverly deduces that it's because they are virgins and need to "become one with each other," so she voluntarily lets the boys have sex with her (and cum inside) to help them bond with one another and they make a blood pact to always be together.

It's as fucked up as you think it is, and it's pretty much on the same level of creepy as George RR Martin.

I'm quite convinced you could do at least an adequate job of making a Lovecraftian game if you followed the old MacVenture formula.

Give some examples, maybe?

Well then, I suppose it's a good thing I never had any desire to read King's works.
I'll stick with Poe, Stoker, Shelly, Lovecraft, and others.

Good call. Also the orgy is 7 pages long, and describes Beverly's feelings and emotions, and even describes the boy's penises.

Are we sure Stephen King doesn't have a problem?

Stephen King is beloved because of It and solely because of It, and only because someone actually took his 1100 page book and chopped out 70% of it, and made the parts of it that weren't completely awful into a movie. If it wasn't for It and The Shining, people wouldn't talk about Stephen King as fondly as they do.

You know, Uninvited and Shadowgate. Particularly Uninvited. It gets gothic horror surprisingly right for an NES game.

No shit he has a problem.

Big whoop. You should dig into Frank Herbert. He was one sick fuck.

Toss a coin to find out.

Cujo was an alright film, too.
Dare I ask what happens in the book? Do they fuck the dog or something?

Jesus H. Christ.

Darkest Dungeon would win the award for "I hate myself" gameplay. Permadeath combined with autosaves that are not optional. It's not uncommon for a character to go from full hp to no hp at all in one round, because the game is just that fucking brutal. If you leave the dungeon before your group either completely wipes or you complete the current objective, you get no rewards, not even the exp and money you've earned thus far.

any more like this?

No "The little boy dies of dehydration though. Movie was better."

t. 4cuck who's afraid of liking anything non-pc

Thinking niggers are less intelligent than you is just an observation of reality. Lovecraft did nothing wrong.

Actually, Lovecraft himself felt a bit ashamed/embarrassed when he wrote certain stories that fell back into his old racist ways, because as he got on in years in his life, he started to be more accepting of people of different cultures and phenotype.

After his mother died and he married Sonja Greene, Lovecraft's whole life and attitudes changed. After he left New York, he felt bad for the problems that came between him and his wife, and he decided that he needed to get out. So he began exploring the world, he actually went to other cultures, even visited Egypt that he loved so much. Lovecraft's insular attitude and xenophobia were fostered by the upbringing of his mother, who told him that he was an ugly freak and that everyone hated him, and she refused to show him any affection which left him emotionally traumatized for life.

You should actually read S.T. Joshi's biographical accounting of him, the only person who I ever felt described Lovecraft accurately was Joshi.