Lovecraft Lite / Video Games

• 20 Minutes Till Dawn has hordes of Lovecraftian monsters that can be destroyed by guns, and are in fact so weak, that they depend on Zerg Rush to pose any kind of threat. One of the bosses is Shub-Niggurath, and they're just as vulnerable to bullets like everything else. And, as the title suggests, after 20 minutes, the sunrise causes all remaining monsters to instantly die.
• In AI Dungeon 2, trying to have the AI generate a Survival Horror scenario usually results in this. While the game can generate some surprisingly creepy scenarios and dialogue, the fact that combat is usually weighted in the players favor means that most monsters end up not being Immune to Bullets.
• Surprisingly, Amnesia: The Dark Descent can be considered like this, in spite of its obvious direct influences. Yes, Daniel may be running and hiding from hideous monsters, all the while pursued by a horrible, all-consuming force that he has no hope of fighting. The bad endings play the whole Lovecraftian horror angle straight, but the neutral ending makes it possible for Daniel to obtain his revenge and in doing so, free himself from his cursed pursuer. The good ending meanwhile, implies that it is possible for humanity to at least partially understand the forces behind the running of the universe, and perhaps even master them.
• Bloodborne is a game heavily inspired by Lovecraft's writings, but tweaks things around with regards to the Great Ones and their relationship to humanity.
  • First things first, they're not invulnerable. Several Great Ones show up as bosses, and while they are quite difficult fights, you can punch them to death if you've got enough skill and patience.
  • Second, they're actually fairly benevolent, if alien, being described as "sympathetic in spirit." Ebrietas is aiding the Healing Church's search for enlightenment, Rom is sealing away the Blood Moon, the Moon Presence is the reason you have Resurrective Immortality, and Kos in the DLC acted as the protector of the Fishing Hamlet. They also don't usually attack you on sight like most other bosses; with a few exceptions, you've got to hit them first.
  • Third, they're often as much victims as the humans of Byrgenwerth's search for eldritch knowledge. The Beast Scourge may have its origins with their power, but it was humans who spread it in order to use the city of Yharnam as guinea pigs. The DLC area, the Hunter's Nightmare, was created when Byrgenwerth's scholars killed Kos and violated her corpse in some manner, massacring the hamlet that worshipped her in the process. Ultimately, while they are strange and scary, they aren't Greater Scope Villains like Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. That role goes to Byrgenwerth and its successors, who by the time of the game have all destroyed themselves with the consequences of their experiments.
  • The only exception to the above is Formless Oedon who, due to being literally formless, is above any repercussions, is never shown as victimized by Byrgenwerth or the Healing Church (in fact the latter worships him) and actually causes at least some of the problems in the setting (such as all the half-Great One babies he keeps putting in random women's wombs).
• Basically every Borderlands game plays with this trope in one way or another and features various Eldritch Monsters that would be world-ending, madness inducing, flesh tearing abominations against physical law if it weren't for the practically invincible Vault Hunters and their never-ending search for better loot. It becomes quite clear as one plays that no abomination can outplay a maniac with a shotgun and a sick desire for better gear.
  • The Destroyer in Borderlands is a horrifying, Lovecraftian monster sealed within the Vault everyone is trying to secure, and is said to be dangerous enough to lay waste to this universe and is invincible in the universe it comes from. naturally, the Vault Hunters blast its betentacled ass to bits. And ultimately, this was the Big Bad's whole plan. Handsome Jack was a Dirty Coward unwilling to tackle the Destroyer himself, so he manipulated the Vault Hunters into killing it and then reaping the rewards from the Eridium that erupted across Pandora as a result.
  • Borderlands 2 has the fight against "The Warrior", a molten monster of rock born from the activation of the vault key. Handsome Jack wants it to bulldoze all "bandits" and rule Pandora.
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! introduces an unnamed Eridian Warrior who appears at the very beginning of the story. Jack even foreshadows that fighting it probably isn't a good idea, and you both flee instead. Luckily it seems to be on the right side (the side fighting Jack). There's also the fight against The Empyrean Sentinel, a humanoid guardian who protects the vault and resembles a Guardian but with three faces, and outright defies physics with most of its attacks.
  • Borderlands 3 has numerous Vault Monsters you have to face down. The Ravager, The Graveward, Tyreen after fusing to the remainder of The Destroyer, The Ruiner, The Psychoreaver, The Seer, Anathema the Relentless, and Scourge the Invincible Martyr. That's not including the entirety of the Guns, Love, and Tentacles DLC which is a parody of the entire Cosmic Horror genre and features you going into the carcass of a dead giant (named Gythian) whose heart still beats, and can revive those who reside within it by possessing new bodies.
• Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth mostly retains dark, scary, elements of the Mythos but it does show shades of this, if only by a small margin. You do actually defeat Dagon, Hydra, and Shoggoth as well as prevent The End of the World as We Know It but you still die in the end after all the depressing adventures.
• The Call of Cthulhu -- Rim of Madness Expansion Pack mods compilation for Rimworld adds Cthulhu Mythos related content to the game. While the difficulty is increased thanks to new events, a sanity meter, and strong new monsters, you can defend against said new monsters if you have enough firepower. You can also butcher their corpses, process their flesh into meals for your colonists or cattle, or craft clothes with their hides. Or you can tame them. There's also Elder Things as playable characters, who also appear as a friendly faction with settlements in the frozen areas.
• In Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, you lead a squad of Investigators in the middle of a World War One battlefield, in order to stop a German cult to create an army of undeads and Mythos creatures. The game features a Sanity system (attacking or being attacked by anything other than a German soldier or German cultist drops it) which grants interesting results when it reachs 0, but losing all your Sanity doesn't kill the unit; it can be regained fairly easily. Also, you attack and kill lovecraftian Eldritch Abominations with World War One era weaponry, including mêlée weapons. The final boss is a Star Spawn of Cthulhu, which is eventually blown with rifles designed for elephant hunting. Or, if you're lucky enough, you can have your Lightning Bruiser hit it to death with a sharpened shovel.
• Chrono Trigger would be a Cosmic Horror Story thanks to its Big Bad Lavos. Lavos is a massive Eldritch Abomination from space, can destroy the entire world with ease, has a cult that worships it, and treats humans like food. But, it can still be killed by a handful of teenagers.
• The Consuming Shadow: You play as a investigator to seal the correct Ancient invading the world using the Ritual of Banishment. While failure to so will result in the Cosmic Horror story played straight, is possible to succeed with both your body and sanity intact.
• Control explores many Lovecraftian themes and often plays them for straight horror, with aspects including, but not limited to: humanity being attacked by extradimensional entities beyond their comprehension, a mysterious (and probably sentient) building that moves around and is Invisible to Normals, a Government Conspiracy kidnapping children for their Psychic Powers, and at least three different mind-controlling alien presences infecting people in the same building. However, this is balanced out by chaotic third-person shooter gameplay, a subdued, but quirky sense of humor, the fact the protagonist jumped into the adventure willingly, some of the Eldritch Abominations being portrayed as benevolent (or at least allies), and the fact the setting seems to be decently stable and almost mundane half of the time. Rather than being an outright Lovecraft story, Control settles on being a New Weird action game with plenty of creepiness and surreal mystery.
• A few Crash Bandicoot games (namely Warped, Wrath of Cortex, and Bash) are set into motion by Uka Uka's plan to harness massive power and elevate himself to a cosmic-level threat. Wrath also throws in four more likewise destructive masks embodying the classical elements, who fully intend to devastate the Earth through eruptions, earthquakes, and another Ice Age. Despite this, Crash, Coco, and their allies put a stop to their schemes as usual. Although Bash has a path that sees Uka Uka succeeding.
• Crash Fever: The Disasters are collective of the otherworldy monstrous units that came out from nowhere. Their connections were Ambiguous and they were always targets the ALICE Main Branch where only you, The Adapter can stop them. After being defeated, they simply disappeared without any trace. All the residents of ALICE had at least fought them pathetically and ended up getting in Adapter's Way. At least Da Vinci acknowledges the existence of Disasters, though the story episode about them were unplanned by Devs.
• The Crysis series has more than a few shades of this. The Ceph as a race are billions of years old and have technology so advanced that were they to invade in full it would be less a war and more a planet-sized fumigation tent. Even the meager Ceph detachment already on Earth is a force to be reckoned with, with their area denial subzero-temperature-domes and all-consuming biomass "janitorial" plague, all sprouting from the ground causing seismic disasters as their foot-soldiers swarm from the cracks. And yet, if the multiple human factions would all just shut up and stop bickering we could finally actually with this war.
• Cthulhu Mythos RPG: The Sleeping Girl of the Miasma Sea has a cast of Japanese schoolkids surviving Lovecraftian horrors in a mansion and can end with them taking on an Outer God. They can even punch the thing out if they're skilled in it. With the game's multiple endings though, mainly the True Ending would qualify. The Normal ending could also count, although it's more of a Pyrrhic Victory. The bad endings meanwhile, are full-on Cosmic Horror Story.
• Cultist Simulator places you as the Villain Protagonist of a cult, seeking to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence by making certain necessary sacrifices. The Hours, however, represent aspects of the human psyche taken to toxic extremes rather than being utterly alien, and most of those Hours are ascended humans themselves. It's even possible in one of the three paths (the path of power) to ascend without killing anyone.
• Darkest Dungeon, but only barely. The hideous monsters that the Ancestor unleashed are powerful, genuinely horrific, and will almost certainly kill or drive to gibbering insanity many, probably most of the adventurers you send to destroy them. But with skill, patience, and a bit of luck, they can slowly be beaten back. While the thing the ancestor awakened in the Darkest Dungeon is supposedly an unstoppable abomination which created humanity that will one day awaken for real and destroy the world, it's still ultimately just another monster that can be beaten into submission (albeit at a cost). Even the claim that it is humanity's creator is in doubt, given the source and the existence of the Religious characters' holy powers. Furthermore, the game's ending and the Color of Madness expansion hints that the player managed to trap the Heart of Darkness in a permanent "Groundhog Day" Loop in which they, the Heart, the Hamlet, and the heroes that serve them are locked in a cycle where they indefinitely keep killing the Heart to keep it suppressed so the world beyond can survive.
  • Darkest Dungeon 2 plays this trope straighter. All of human civilization is suffering from violent dementia as the result of a cosmic misalignment, the eldritch monstrosities The Ancestor unleashed have spilled out into the world and joined forces with legions of homicidal crusaders praying to mutated human experiments, and humanity's 'gods' have been weakened by all this madness to the point that you can literally see them as a tiny supernatural ember on life support. None of this is going to stop you from slaughtering the experiments and saving the world, for real.
• Dark Scavenger You're able to shoot an ancient world-harvesting alien to death and beat an extra-dimensional blob wanting to devour the universe into submission. Doubles as Genre Shift.
• Dark Souls has a lot of very depressing Fridge Horror when it comes to the metaphysical aspects of the universe. The game is also filled with minor Eldritch Abominations. The Gaping Dragon might as well be called "The Mouth with a Thousand Teeth", and then there is Ceaseless Discharge, a 500 foot◊ tall Magma Man with some really freaky things coming out of his head. With enough patience and skill, you can kill all of these. The "Artorias of the Abyss" DLC takes it further by revealing that, for better or for worse, the most powerful force in existence is humanity itself.
• In Deep Town: Mining Factory, the Eldritch Abominations known as Elders are mountain-sized, tentacled beings that predate humanity and were the ones to end 23rd century civilization. Unfortunately for them, you are an A.I. mining platform from outer space and it's now much further into the future. So, apart from their potent Healing Factor, most of the Elders are helpless as you blast them back with lasers, bombs and more exotic attacks. Even the indestructible Iron Elder is beaten when the player, with the help of the Galactic Federation, reverse its chaotic frequencies to remove its sentience and turn it back into the Earth's core.
• Demonbane is like this. The mafia might include powerful sorcerers summoning Eldritch Abominations, but the protagonist can beat elder gods with a big magical mecha. Necronomicon isn't as much a book that drives you mad, as a Token Mini-Moe that is easy to fall in love with. On the other hand, it has enough moments where it goes into the full-on Lovecraftian despair-horror to be a less than straight example. Witness particularly the Bad End. The sequel continue to play with this. Turn out that it's impossible to permanently seal Nyarlathotep, as it will simply emerge in another mask from alternate universe and continue its plan to release Azathoth. Fortunately, there are omnipotent Elder Gods who will make sure its plan won't succeed.
• Among the enemies you face in Destiny are the Vex, a terrifyingly powerful and incomprehensibly vast machine intelligence that consumes worlds to build vast machines. Time itself is their toy, their weapons draw random energy from across time and space, and the only thing that stopped them the first time they attacked the Solar System was the Traveler and its Reality Warper powers. They even have a facility known as the Vault of Glass, specifically built to house and research "ontological weaponry" that can be used to decide whether or not something ever existed. Their ultimate end goal is to edit reality itself so that their existence is a law of physics. And in the face of all of this horrifyingly advanced, incomprehensible, Lovecraftian super machine intelligence, how does humanity respond? They charge straight in and kick the Vex's ass, looting the Vault of Glass and destroying the very Vex Axis Mind responsible for the whole operation. The main villain, The Darkness, also a joke. No-one is even sure what it is, and all the players have seen so far are its lowest level foot soldiers. When the Vex described above encountered just a piece of it they started worshiping the damn thing. And yet, when the player encounters a piece of it in the Black Garden, its response is to actively move to defend itself, indicating that the Guardians could hurt it.
• Devil May Cry, where humans are powerless to stop the hordes of demons from wreaking havoc in their world (Well, for the most part) and there is no sign of help from the man upstairs or his angels. Good thing, then, that humanity has a few demons on their side to clean up the mess.
• Discworld Noir What begins as a straightforward Discworld parody of the Noir genre slides towards this as the story progresses. By the end the protagonist is preventing the dark old god Nylonathotep from returning to the Disc.
• Doom and its sequels; The Legions of Hell are invading in an unending horde of monsters and abominations? Grab a shotgun and send them back to where they belong. Not enough? Chase after them and continue blasting them into giblets until you run out of demons to kill.
• DREDGE wears its Lovecraftian influrence on its seelve, taking place in a shore region with clear inspiration from coastal New England, where various otherworldly monstrosities creatures roam the open sea at night, its is possible to stumble on a Tome of Eldritch Lore, and the locals might know more than they let on. That said, the game ultimately leans more into its fishing element than its horror element. While the monsters can't be defeated (for the most part), but they can be evaded with some good engines, to the point that by the end of the game (and likely well before) the player can drive around in the dead of night at max panic with little to fear.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun has, as its final enemy a tentacled abomination called a Burrower that dwelt in a cavern deep underground and which was driving the people on the surface all mad, but in the end, you used a scroll to summon Ka the Preserver, and he killed the Burrower.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • On the surface, the series seems like a fairly generic High Fantasy setting, but if you start digging into the lore, you quickly find New Weird and distinctly Lovecraftian elements permeating throughout. The series' many deities tend to be quite Eldritch in nature, with the Daedric Princes and Sithis (the primordial "Is Not") as especialy notable cases. Heck, the series had so many examples of Eldritch Abominations that they had to be split off onto their own page. Lovecraft having tremendous Author Appeal to the developers and writers at Bethesda means that plenty of direct Lovecraft influences make their way into the series as well.
  • In Morrowind, Big Bad Dagoth Ur and his Sixth House minions are particularly Lovecraftian. Dagoth Ur is using the divine powers he channels from the heart of a dead god to twist his followers into Body Horror abominations and spread a magical disease. Further, very much steeped in dream-imagery as he "sleeps awake" at Red Mountain. "The Dreamer Is Awake" is often found scrawled by the mad cultists in their strongholds. To further get into esoteric "lore speak": The implication is that Dagoth Ur has discovered an unspeakably dangerous middle-ground between CHIM, Amaranth and Zero-Sum where he exists in a godlike state because of his awareness of Anu's Dream but, unlike CHIM where he exists as one with it and maintains his own individuality, Amaranth where he exits the Dream to make his own, or Zero-Sum where he simply fades into the Dream, Dagoth Ur's twisted, traumatized and broken mind is being imprinted on the Dream of Anu. Through Corprus, the manifestation of Dagoth's will, he is turning Anu's Dream into his own. Dagoth Ur is ultimately defeated, though it requires the three Physical Gods of the Dunmer sacrificing their divinity as well.
  • In Oblivion, the village of Hackdirt and the side quest that plays out there is a direct homage to The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The villagers have formed a Cult to an enigmatic, subterranean race known as the "Deep Ones". They practice Human Sacrifice to the Deep Ones and the player character must rescure one of their soon-to-be victims.
  • Dragons are eldritch beings in Skyrim. Most of them haven't been seen in at least a thousand years, a few words in their language said with conviction can change the surrounding landscape, and the Big Bad Alduin is known as "The World Eater" and his reappearance heralds the End Times. A few of them can also grow old enough that they are completely immune to mortal killing; they can't die, they won't die. A few of them led by Paarthurnax are actively watchful and helping humanity, select humans can learn to use the dragon language as "Shouts" and harness those abilities for themselves, and the protagonist eventually gets the ability to travel back in time to when Alduin was young and call on the heroes of old Nordic myth to beat the crap out of him for good. Even then, it's implied that Alduin can come back and you basically just held off The End of the World for a while. But that's good enough for now, because he's not coming back for the forseeable future, which can be a long time as far as Elder Scrolls is concerned. And for extra points, because of Elder Scrolls's character creation, you can be an anthropomorphic kitty to do it.
• Eldritch (2013) is a First-Person Shooter/Roguelike in which the player character has to explore Eldritch Locations inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos... while stabbing, shooting, or stoning all the cultists, Deep Ones, and various monsters which are standing in the way. Also, praying in front of Old Ones statues grant magical powers.
• Toyed with in Elona as the game invokes both tropes at once, both in story AND gameplay. Lulwy of the Wind might look like a naked chick with wings, but Lolth help you if you piss her off. She has so much speed she gets 8 attacks on a quickling character, damn near 30 on anybody else, hits like a falling starship, and is implied through dialogue and worship-interaction to be the cause of the Etherwind, a particularly nasty purple hailstorm at the beginning of every season which inflicts grievous Lovecraftian Body Horror mutations upon any caught within, for better or worse. Pray your world continues to entertain her, or Lolth help you she will reshape your face until it entertains her once more. Meanwhile, Shub-Niggurath is a random monster encounter, uses its source material as flavour text, especially for sanity attacks, but is really quite harmless unless cornered and unable to teleport, and once properly beaten to a smudge can be captured with a Pokéball and made your own. The real challenge of a Shub-Niggurath comes from the fact it is a very high level, and when it doesn't teleport, it casts summon monster. Summon Monster is a level-based spell, so it could conceivably summon something that will punch BOTH your lights out. And if you've been rendered insane, you're helpless against whatever it called up by accident. Also, the Big Bad is a CHAOS worshipping warmage halfway to becoming one. He can be dispatched easily with a little Batman prep time and skill grinding. In summary: Lulwy = Cosmic Horror Story and Shubsie/Zeome = Lovecraft Lite
• Final Fantasy operates on this general. Eldritch Abomination about to destroy the world? Kill it. One good example would be Jenova, the Diabolus ex Nihilo of Final Fantasy VII. Arriving on Earth in the distant past, it assumed the shape of a white-haired woman and set about injecting its cells into every living thing she could find. No backstory, no motive, no mercy. Man managed to overpower Jenova and stick her in the deep freeze for a few centuries, where "she" remains stuck in a half-woman, half-tentacled mockery of life. Her "son" Sephiroth plays the role of the game's main antagonist as he uses her power to summon a huge meteor in an attempt to wipe out and absorb the life energy of all living things on the planet; ironically, his human spirit allows him to make more use of Jenova's powers, because he can plan ahead, focus on things other than instinct, and act from within the Lifestream, reanimating Jenova cells that would normally remain dormant.
• Grandia:
  • The original Grandia tells a familiar yarn about a delusional warlord who seek to unseal a great evil. We learn that "Gaia", a lifeform which grew around the magical Spirit Stone, went berserk when mortals began abusing the stone for decadent ends. Gaia resembles a giant, weird hybrid bug/plant thing, and its human puppet General Baal is gradually turning into its duplicate. He begins the story with a tentacled scythe-arm hidden beneath his cloak, but has fully degenerated by game's end.
  • Grandia II went one further. The heroes are led to believe that pieces of the Devil are breaking out of their orb-shaped prisons and possessing people. Actually, both 'God' and the 'Devil' are artificial lifeforms which have been squabbling for control over man for eons. A lot of collateral damage in this story, including a little blind girl who becomes a host for the Devil's Eye. Everyone gets better in the epilogue, though.
• Grim Dawn teeters between this and outright Cosmic Horror. On the one hand, it is possible for the Taken to punch out the various Eldritch Abominations that have ravaged the world and seek to either enslave or exterminate what's left of humanity. On the other hand, the lore heavily implies that the only reason there's still anything left to save is that the factions of said Eldritch Abominations have mutually incompatible goals (the Aetherials want to maintain a breeding population of humans to use as host bodies for themselves, the Chthonians want to release their god from his eternal torment by ending all life in the world), every victory for La Résistance invariably comes at a cost in human lives, and humanity may not actually be able to do more than inconvenience the invaders. One of the gods you can talk to outright says that the Grim Dawn was only the beginning of humanity's suffering.
• Half-Life starts getting into this in the greater story. The G-Man has otherworldly powers that defy logic and explanation, and it's shown that while the Combine mostly appear as a mundane interdimensional slaver empire, it's possible that their leaders are in the same tier of power and unknowability as the G-Man, as evidenced by the fact that they somehow managed to imprison him in Half-Life: Alyx. They also have a variety of highly exploitable weaknesses that fending off and even destroying the Combine is surprisingly plausible.
  • Downplayed in the "official leak" of what would have been Episode 3's story which contains a description of the Combine home base as being incomprehensibly vast in power and scope, beyond any chance of humanity ever defeating them, and what Gordon intended to be a grand act of sabotage and defiance would barely amount to a blip on their radar. Nonetheless, humanity does have allies that can fight the G-Man and his ilk, and the story suggests that, even if Earth can't defeat the Combine, it can at the very least save itself from them.
• Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is a Dyson Sphere-sized mass of writhing tentacles and machinery. It's no match for a single alien piloting a dingy UFO.
• Kingdom Hearts is what happens when Eldritch Abominations invade a universe that runs on the power of friendship and Disney magic. While the Heartless and their ilk are numerous and have succeeded in destroying worlds multiple times, the worlds, and the people they may have killed along the way, are able to be restored, like nothing happened, when the heroes save the day.
• The Kirby series, of all things. Beneath the light Sugar Bowl of Planet Popstar is a surprising amount of Eldritch Abominations, most of which have lore behind them that paints a dark picture... but no matter who decides to attack Popstar that week, Kirby always manages to defeat them. There's also the fact that Kirby may well be an Adorable Abomination himself, though still firmly a good guy.
  • Nowhere is this best illustrated than in the backstory of Kirby and the Forgotten Land. The game takes Kirby to an abandoned planet heavily implied to be After the End, and it does indeed turn out that, long ago, Fecto Elfilis attacked the planet...and not only did the residents of the new world actually beat it, they turned it into a tourist attraction. The reason the new world is abandoned is because they left of their own accord.
• The Lamplighters League follows the eponymous league, comprised of thieves, scoundrels, assassins, revolutionaries and vigilantes as they battle against Cthulhu worshipping cultists, spiritualist industrialists and pseudo immortal warmongers in an attempt to prevent them from taking control of the source of all magic.
• Magicka's DLC campaign "The Stars Are Left" (and, to a lesser extent, its main campaign as well) is an Affectionate Parody of the Cthulhu Mythos with plenty of Body Horror to go around. This being Magicka, by the time you're finished with the campaign the wizards have exterminated half of the elder god pantheon.
• Gregory Weir's The Majesty of Colors puts the player in the role of an Eldritch Abomination that's located in the sea just next to a coastal town It has Multiple Endings, which range from becoming loved by the town and saving a little girl from a shark attack, only to wake up in bed human to getting destroyed by the military after drowning several townspeople. The titular "Majesty of Color" is what your character experiences when they pull a balloon under the water.
• The Metroid flirts heavily with this genre. It's impossible to sneeze without stumbling across some Ancient Chozodian (or other elder race) ruin that is holding back some eldritch horror that cannot wait to break out, and the eternal battle between the Galactic Federation and the Space Pirates means both sides have a tendency of opening those cans in search of an edge. Examples include Phaaze (a living planet that spreads a highly mutagenic, corruptive poison across the galaxy), the Thing-like X Parasites that assimilate the abilities and knowledge of any being they feed on, and the titular Metroids themselves (nigh-immortal, soul eating jellyfish that eat X). The only reason the games are on the "Lite" side of things is because protagonist Samus Aran always manages to defeat these entities in the end, often while everyone else drops like flies.
• I=MGCM: The game keeps on cool, heartwarming and/or optimistic tone with a Nice Guy player protagonist and virtuous magical girl warriors despite the dark Cosmic Horror aspects of the main story (and the dress stories): dangerous (and some of them resembling humanoid abominations) demons who invade The Multiverse (including the main universe) and eat humans' existences; having more than one heroine from the main universe killed (and occasionally subsequently corrupted into demons) by demons. However, thanks to Kamisaman's techonologies, they get better; massive demon invasions in the main universe and viler demon villains who have human-like intelligence and aren't slain and corrupted magical girls, but instead are from Demon World.
• Mother: All the games in the series feature some elements of this, particularly EarthBound, which features a Mind Screw of a final boss in a room that seems to be made of internal organs. However, a defining feature of the games in this series involves defeating things through The Power of Friendship and The Power of Love.
  • Cognitive Dissonance: This fangame is the most serious example of the trope, as the protagonists often travel through eldritch locations in the center of Giegue's mind, one of the protagonists is slowly descending into insanity as his dream world corrupts, and the Final Boss is Giegue transforming into Gigyas, the Cosmic Destroyer.
• The "shadowy" mansion in Mystery of Mortlake Mansion is an eerie Eldritch Location, with the Evil Sorcerer who dwells there having something of the Eldritch Abomination about him. This being a casual game, though, the location is harmless, with the sorcerer simply serving up puzzles to impede the player's progress, and being defeated at the end anyway.
• The Nasuverse's background setting has elements of this: if you piece together the background materials it turns out that the Earth itself is trying desperately to kill off humanity, and has enlisted the help other cosmic entities (such as the spirit and personification of the Moon) to do so. Humanity is constantly at the mercy of its own collective consciousness and that of the planet's, Alaya and Gaia respectively. The only way for Humanity to be free of them is to 'kill' the planet and to evolve to a higher level of existence, but this will only cause the other planets in the Sol System to turn on Humanity. And assuming Humanity can overcome them, the entire universe would probably turn on Humanity for getting above itself... so basically, the only way Humanity can truly be free is to destroy the universe itself. Still, another thing about the background setting is that Alaya is completely on humanity's side here (though it is a Well-Intentioned Extremist) and due to its nature, humanity also has a fair shot of doing exactly that. Humanity is holding its own, as evidenced by the fact that we're still here, and it is implied that the Earth is eventually going to lose... at which point humanity will be advanced enough to survive without it. Thus, it can said that while it is a Cosmic Horror Story, it may not be humans facing eternal doom and irrelevance. Of course, if Angel Notes is to be trusted, the Earth's parting shot is getting the rest of the planets to try to kill humanity in its stead. This trope is more directly in play in Fate/Grand Order. A handful of humans who survive their race's destruction by holing up in an observatory in Antarctica, or later, an armoured car dislodged from space-time, are all that stand in the way of either an impossibly powerful demon, or an incomprehensible extra-terrestrial being, who are planning to either incinerate all humanity across history, or just throw it out and replace it with a "leftover timeline". And that's not even speaking of the literally unkillable Beasts who all simply want to destroy humanity. Against these odds, what do these survivors do? Why, they summon humanity's greatest heroes and villains to join them on a time-travelling roadtrip to kick each and every one of these monster's asses up and down the timestream until the correct, human-centric chain of events is running smoothly again. Hilariously enough, in one event, one of the more infamous Lovecraftian horrors, Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos, make an appearance to seal these heroes because somehow he felt that being sealed is a much better fate than what awaits them on the road of restoring humanity history. And these humans still kicked his ass (and the Servant chosen to be his host).
• The browser-based Necronomicon card battle games dive into this. While they use Lovecraft's monsters and Great Old Ones, in the original Necronomicon you can get Shub-Niggurath eaten by a shoggoth or banished by the break of dawn. Not played quite so straight in the sequel, Book of Dead Names, however; the Great Old Ones manifest due to casting certain cards (marked with black stars) in relatively quick succession, can't really be interacted with, and just kind of hang about ruining things... but you can still win the game, and they won't appear in the next one. Additionally, while the various insanity conditions are inconvenient in the first game, you can still win, and Megalomania — which gives you a constantly increasing arcane damage bonus as well as persistent HP drain — can actually make it easier if you have enough burn spells; this is also altered in the sequel, with Sanity being easier to gain — but also making going below 0 Sanity for any length of time a serious risk to your survival.
• Oracle of Tao. You can beat up Cthulhu, Cyaegha, or Yog Sothoth. Though it is somewhat hard, since they are puzzle enemies that respawn if you don't do it properly, and if you fail, you get mind-raped, and go insane before tentacles swallow you and the world whole. Still, even the "terrifying" parts of the loss are a bit silly.
• Othercide has the being "Suffering" which has caused a crash in time as it seeks to turn the world into a place of unending torment. Unfortunately for it and its Chosen One, they are opposed by the Daughters, incarnated memories from the World's Best Warrior as well as intervention from her best pal "Memory", the same type of being as Suffering.
• In Oxenfree, the ghosts of Edwards Island have suffered eons of nothingness, and they seek to have revenge on the world for what they've done to them. However, despite terrorizing the teenagers who has released, Alex in one ending guided them on a path away from destruction and gained back Clarissa's body after being possesed for most of the game, and they all lived happily ever after.
• The true villains of Parasite Eve, a sequel to the novel of the same name, are our own cells; specifically, the mitochondria that have been silently guiding the evolution of Earth's creatures, just waiting for their chance to strike. Their mouthpiece is Melissa Pearce, a woman whose body has reshaped itself into Eve, a siren who can cause people to spontaneously combust with a mere thought. Her goal is to assemble the genetic material of New York's citizenry (who have collectively melted into a giant ball of goo) to use as her womb, producing the Ultimate Lifeform. You can kill them with enough bullets.
• In Path of Exile:
  • The hubris of the ancient Vaal thaumaturgists brought a horrible thing from beyond the world known only as the Beast to Wraeclast and destroyed their civilization. And then it falls victim to Hijacking Cthulhu when Malachai, another human thaumaturge, merges himself with the Beast and takes over as its guiding intelligence. And then you kill Malachai and destroy the Beast's hearts along with him. Similarly, the Beyond and Breach temporary leagues had demons invading the world as a game mechanic, mostly so you could farm them for loot.
  • An expansion introduced the Elder, who for the most part acts like a more standard Eldritch Abomination. It's a freakish four-armed creature who carries a vile tentacle-sprouting fungus that drains color from the world and drives those afflicted by it slowly insane. It is the creator of the Dreamlands, a set of interconnected pocket dimensions that you explore as "maps", and taught the Shaper (himself one of the endgame bosses) all of his current reality-manipulating powers. A group named the Watchers of Decay attempted to contain the Elder to its Dreamlands, and even succeeded in sealing it away with the space sword Starforge, but still they dwindled away until all that was left of them are the Watcher's Eye trinkets that the Elder drops in the present. The Shaper is similarly descending into madness, until the final battle where he is fully corrupted and you must confront both of them at the same time. The Elder is never truly killed for certain, the most you can do is banish it back to the formless void from which it sprang. And you need to do it soon, because the color-draining fungus has started to seep out of the Dreamlands into the real world. But, by the nature of the genre, you *can* defeat it, and skilled players can fight the battle repeatedly to obtain its item drops, which saps the power of the Cosmic Horror Story.
• The Trope Codifier may well be the Persona series, itself an offshoot of Shin Megami Tensei. This is especially true of Persona 2, which not only borrows the character Nyarlathotep (portrayed more or less faithfully) as a whimsical villain, but also from Jungian philosophy. However, as dark as the saga gets, it ends with a typical JRPG Aesop about friendship and love triumphing over darkness etc. More specifically, each installment has an eldritch abomination that spawns from the collective wants and desires of humanity that threatens the entire world fitting the Lovecraft aspect. However, the power of the will of humanity is always able to defeat these abominations in the end, fulfilling the Lite aspect. But it still also leans back towards Lovecraft as the main characters don't destroy the dark impulses of mankind so much as abate them for a while, and victory does not always come without a price. See Persona 3 for an example.
• Many Pokémon are creatures with strange, alien, and incomprehensible powers and appearances, such as many Olympus Mons, the Ultra Beasts, and even glitch Pokémon if you're willing to count them. All of them, without exception, can be defeated, captured, trained, and befriended just like any other Pokémon.
• Quake has a few monsters that take inspiration from Lovecraft's monsters, though rather than going mad, you blow them away with rocket launchers. And at the end, you get to Telefrag Shub-Niggurath. Subverted in that, according to Quake Champions, the player character of Quake 1 ends up stranded in Shub-Niggurath's dimension after winning the fight and slowly goes insane.
• Rogue Stormers reveals itself to be this in its ending, with the revelation that the black "goop" which powers the Dieselpunk technology of the setting is in fact the blood of Vori'thel, an elder goddess enslaved by the Big Bad. She is in fact benevolent and finds humans to be very cuddly, and deeply regrets any associated mental degradation.
• The Telltale Sam & Max episodes have been dropping the occasional Lovecraft reference as far back as Episode 201. In the third season, it becomes increasingly obvious that Lovecraftian Eldritch Abominations are going to be part of the main plot. In Episode 304, an Elder God lays out an extremely Lovecraftian prehistory, the summoning of an infant abomination is attempted, and Max himself becomes Maxthulhu. This is almost played straight, but since it's in the Sam & Max universe, it comes off more as Dark Comedy rather than true cosmic horror. Also Yog-Sothoth is actually rather nice and helpful for an Eldritch Abomination, saying that age has mellowed him out some. Being only a tiny fraction of his former self symbiotically attached to a human sorcerer and stuck in our universe after his summoning technically failed probably has something to do with this. The real villain turns out to be not an interdimensional monstrosity but Max's own superego, annoyed at being ignored for so long, thanks to Max being all id.
• Shadow Hearts. Not only does your party step up and beat up Eldritch Abominations on a regular basis (one of whom is God), but under the right circumstances the protagonist can actually force an apology from four of them. Sanity loss isn't even permanent or damaging for the protagonists.
• The Shin Megami Tensei series in general, on that note. While the specifics vary game-to-game, the basic premise is the same: a war between the tyrannical YHWH, who wants to extinguish free will and enact in its place a World of Silence that eternally worships him, and Lucifer. As in The Devil. While Lucifer DOES have the best interests of humanity at heart, his methods are morally ambiguous at best, and ultimately his idea of paradise is bloody, chaotic, unrestrained anarchy. Humanity inevitably finds itself embroiled in this war between cosmic, incomprehensibly powerful beings that either actively hate them, see them as convenient tools or have very different ideas on how things should be run. Fortunately, there is an option in every game to date that involves humanity forming a faction of its own, taking control of the demons and angels running around, and making both God and Lucifer sorry they ever got us involved. Judging by the (shaky) continuity of the Megaten games, these are often considered the Canon endings, and in spite of this, the world often has this happen again, with YHVH's and Lucifer's plans derailed for a brief period of time. This is even acknowledged in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey's Neutral+ ending, where you fight a Forever War with the force that threatened the world, as you can't do anything but banish it temporarily.
• The Cra'Than breed in Sipho has a visceral aesthetic and Lovecraftian naming schemes, but they are not just as vulnerable as the other breeds, but you can play as them once they're unlocked.
• Skullgirls takes place in a bright and colorful Dieselpunk world, that just so happens to be frequently threatened and terrorized by the Skullgirl, and her servant Double.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Since 1999, we've been delivered a mutated cutesy animal who committed genocide and flooded a whole city, an Ultimate Life Form prototype that nearly committed a Colony Drop at the request of its creator, an old rival that copied data from several heroes and became draconic kaiju robot thing, an alien who's been trying to harvest all life on Earth for food for over 2,000 years and helped sire one of the major heroes, a god who's been kidnapped and experimented on and split into two entities that were sealed away for ten years, a primordial organism that sleeps at the center of the planet and helps maintain the planet's cycle of destruction and creation by ripping the planet to pieces every millions of years, and so many more. And Sonic defeats every last one of them.
• Star Control features at least one Eldritch Abomination, the Orz. Given what little we learn about Orz and what it is capable of, it's quite possible that Orz could destroy all life in the galaxy without even putting in much of an effort — given the right conditions. And although the parts of the story that do focus on Orz are quite dark, it is hard to ignore the fact that Orz manifests itself in our universe as a race of green parrotfish, who speak in funny words like "Happy Camper", "Parties" and "Dancing" (though the actual meaning of these words is significantly more serious). A more tangible unspeakable power comes in the form of the Kohr-Ah and Kzer-Za (who are ultimately defeated through the collective power of the New Alliance races). The Dnyarri, another incredibly severe threat that had already caused serious harm, is a race of funny-looking hypnotic toads, and the only specimen you meet is actually quite amusing once you neutralize its power.
• Among the inspirations for the Stellaris are Warhammer 40,000 and Star Trek. From the former is drawn inspiration for many nasty entities — the Tyranid-esque Prethyon Swarm, the all-devouring Unbidden, and the deadly, Warp-like Shroud, among others. But the latter's idealism and optimism are also present. The species of the galaxy have a hope of unifying, banding together, and turning back the horrors of the cosmos. There are only two notable exceptions that go into Cosmic Horror Story territory, but the Worm-in-Waiting can leave the civilization in question Cursed with Awesome (or be sent back to the place from whence it came), and the End of the Cycle is clearly labeled Press X to Die and won't necessarily succeed in its Omnicidal Maniac quest (although the empire that made a pact with it is totally screwed).
• Strange Aeons is a Doom mod with a Cthulhu Mythos reskin but the same action packed gameplay. The plot is about an archeologist looking for his son in the Cthulhu Mythos' Dreamland, while blasting various cultists and monsters with a large arsenal including an assault rifle, a shotgun, or an alien lightning gun. Over the course of the five episodes, the bosses you slaughter include Atlach-Natla, Nyarlathotep, and two star-spawns of Cthulhu.
• The Suffering: Eldritch embodiments of man's inhumanity to man wreck havoc on the darkest, most horror-ridden structures and settlements of man; yet you also have the opportunity to lay waste to them with machine guns and grenades.
• Super Robot Wars is Massive Multiplayer Crossover based on various Humongous Mecha series. Most of games feature Sufficiently Advanced Alien either want to destroy or enslave humanity, Eldritch Abomination or Multiversal Conqueror that could destroy the world, or even the universe. Yet you beat them all with your Badass Army of Humongous Mecha.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. The Lovecraft part: the Angelic Abomination Galeem attacks, completely wipes out the fighters, and proceeds to destroy the entire universe and create a new one from the ashes. The Lite part: it is entirely possible for the fighters to pummel him to death. Which also goes for his counterpart Dharkon, a more traditional Eldritch Abomination.
• Tattletail: The titular characters are Eldritch Abominations, and the Big Bad is one you can only run from. That said, most of said abominations are on your side in the end, the Big Bad can be ultimately destroyed, and the Golden Ending is unambiguously happy.
• Terraria is a nice, happy, 2d Minecraft-like game. Also like Minecraft, it has some pretty warped and grotesque enemies, especially the bosses. A lot of the enemies from The Corruption look like animated clumps of rotten flesh, and they presumably conjoin together to make the Eater of Worlds boss. However, it gets ramped up further when you attempt to activate Hardmode. By making a Human Sacrifice by throwing a Guide Voodoo Doll into lava, you summon the Wall of Flesh — an enormous Advancing Wall Of Boss that is comprised of unidentifiable fleshy matter, with lots of miniature creatures attatched to it that try to eat you. The sheer sight of this thing inflicts a temporary case of magically induced terror that literally reads "You have seen something nasty, there is no escape". But all of the above are killable, and they could be a lot more horrifying looking than they are. Not to mention the cutsey look of everything else. The Hardmode end boss is literally Cthulhu. While incredibly hard initially, it doesn't stop you from farming him for materials to make the endgame items.
• The Old Gods are Lovecraftian analogues in Warcraft. When first mentioned during Warcraft 3, they were treated ominously, but didn't have any focus. They started to be confronted directly in World of Warcraft, but they were only in raids not tied to the main story. Slowly, they were revealed or implied to be behind major events in the series. For the most part, however, while their cultists assumed victory like any villain, there was nothing particularly more hopeless about fighting these villains than any others (and the Cataclysm expansion ended up with foiling their planned apocalypse that was arranged 10,000 years prior).
• The Witcher features a quest where Geralt can fight and kill Dagon. Also, the Vodyanoi, who serve as stand-ins for the Deep Ones, are not evil. The ones that worship Dagon are, but the rest just want to coexist with the local human villagers.
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has this in the Hearts of Stone questline, where Geralt ends up confronting the jaunty, friendly Gaunter O'Dimm, who is otherwise known as Evil Incarnate, and is explicitly a reality-warping entity from beyond the normal universe who would drive Geralt insane at just learning his true name. During the course of the storyline, if Geralt follows through on a certain sidequest, he can challenge Gaunter to a battle of wits to save Olgierd's soul and, if successful, Geralt banishes O'Dimm from his world.
• World of Horror zig-zags back and forth on this. On one hand, the majority of the monstrosities you encounter can be beaten back. However, the majority of the mysteries end by noting that your actions have only temporarily thwarted the threat, and that they will likely return. If not necessarily to your village, then elsewhere...

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