Lovecraftian Horror

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth wasn't the best game, but it was fairly faithful to the tone of the Mythos and had some good references. The Innsmouth escape sequence, rightly regarded as one of the highlights of the game, really captures the terror one would feel trying to escape a whole town full of people who want to kill you.

And then there's the encounter with the Flying Polyps. While the original story was vague in its description, this game's portrayal of them is viscerally terrifying. You can really get why a race of super-advanced psychic aliens would be so afraid of them.

One of the sadder bits of this game though is the ending. The protagonist ultimately cannot bear what he has endured and commits suicide. Even worse, there's an implication that he wasn't truly driven mad by the eldritch horrors. Instead, he's been driven mad by guilt over being indirectly responsible for the death of a little girl.

Agreed.

CALL OF CTHULHU (2018) the video game is somewhat of a failure in my opinion because it is too short, has little gameplay, and the story has a really great set up (Sarah Hawkins and her paintings) only to abandon it to do another story pf the apocalypse. Which is a frequent problem in these games. Too much, The End of the World as We Know It. Ironically, something Dark Corners of the earth avoided.

THE SINKING CITY is actually surprisingly good but it's less HPL's Mythos and more Brian Lumley's Mythos (there's a lot of homages to the Titus Crow books throughout and the fact it uses some of his GOO). There's a strong anti-racism message throughout the game and some of it is a Broken Aesop (sadly, the Deep Ones are Invading Refugees linked to a doomsday cult so any pro-tolerance message gets...muddled no matter how I support the politics) but the Mythos being much more open and the world being much more weird makes it work very well.

Oddly, my all time favorite Lovecraft game is probably SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE AWAKENED which is exactly what you think it's about. They were doing a remake and still are but I can't really imagine the kind of courage to work under the conditions they are since, well, they're a Ukranian developer.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/frogwares/sherlock-holmes-the-awakened

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 15th 2023 at 4:22:17 AM

Call of Cthulhu (2018) did get one thing right in its depiction of Cthulhu. Just seeing him is enough to drive people insane.

The path for the Good Ending is also the one truest to the Mythos. Namely, just going "nope" and getting the fuck away from it all to get drunk.

That ending just confuses me in both COC and The Sinking City.

I'm like, "So, just leaving is an option? No one tries to stop you? That's all that's needed to prevent the apocalypse?"

Odd fact, though, Cthulhu is one of the few monsters in HPL that the protagonists actually fight. They hit him with a steamship. It's just Cthulhu isn't a Mighty Glacier, he's a creature like a T-1000.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 15th 2023 at 4:37:32 AM

In the 2018 game at least, you do at least have to still be of sound enough mind to realize that it is an option.

True.

Weirdly, I also give props to COC for its feminism. There's more important female characters in that game than in all of HPL's mythology.

One of the few stories with an important female character is "The Shadow over Innsmouth". Namely, the protagonist's Deep One great-great-granny Pth'thya-l'yi. And even then she only shows up in a telepathic dream.

There's more women in HPL than he gets credit for, like Keziah Mason in The Dream in the Witch House, but its still conspicuous.

And then there's the game Cthulhu Saves the World. An obvious parody, but it's clear the creators knew the Mythos. One boss is even the white ape princess from "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family".

Come to think of it, The Sinking City also references that story with the Throgmorton family.

Edited by M84 on Feb 15th 2023 at 9:01:47 PM

Oddly, it's the focus of my THE TREE OF AZATHOTH book I'm writing now too.

The Jermyn family tale is basically the Innsmouth story except not as good.

Plus, a family of apemen is almost pedestrian compared to the Deep Ones.

My review of Nick Cage's THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE. I really liked it.

https://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-color-out-of-space-2019-review.html

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 15th 2023 at 5:33:13 AM

Nick Cage was born to play the role of a relatively normal family man driven to murderous frenzy by eldritch supernatural forces.

Heck, if they ever did a remake of the Shining movie, he'd be a shoe-in for Jack Torrance.

Can one said the mythos is the first expanded universe of all? I mean with a lot of adiction to the universe set by lovecraft and him approving a lot of stuff, it feel why for many the mythos is so good.

Lovecraft, Bloch, Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith all loved sharing each other's concepts and ideas. So there's a good argument there. It's also interesting how Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard both had "Super Fans" take ownership of their IP to publish after their early deaths despite dubious claims to it.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 15th 2023 at 9:53:06 AM

There's an argument that it could be the first deliberate attempt at one.

I've seen arguments that the 1001 Nights is an expanded universe, because the original version only had a fraction of the stories you'd expect and the rest were written by translators or were other stories with similar vibes being added in.

And I guess you could say everything made after HP's death is fanfiction.

acktully the correct term

is expanded universe

Not even saying fanfiction in a derogatory sense.

Like a lot of the mythos was continued by fans of his work after he died yeah?

Oddly, HPL is the one time where fanfiction wouldn't be appropriate. Because HPL believed in open source concepts unlike, say, Anne Rice. So he'd say the books people wroting using the Necronomicon are just as valid as his own.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 16th 2023 at 6:15:12 AM

x5 I don't think the concept of a "shared" or "expanded" universe works all that well before copyright exists.

Because before that, it's just mythology or folklore, and there's plenty of texts that have stories added over time.

The Mahabharata is a big example.

The reason the 1001 Nights is different is because it wasn't just "oh, it collected stories over time".

The Arabic version had somewhere around 300 stories in it and it just kinda stalled out there because it wasn't considered a valuable piece of literature, because it was prose, not poetry. The translators and other people who wrote additions to it to try and get up to 1001 stories were doing it specifically to add to that specific work. It wasn't at all organic or from someone compiling stuff after the fact, it was a deliberate effort from a large range of unconnected people to add to the text of a specific work.

I really enjoyed this comic book, MISKATONIC, by Mark Sable.

https://beforewegoblog.com/graphic-novel-review-miskatonic-by-mark-sable-mike-marts-giorgi-pontrelli/

Unlike Alan Moore's HPL comics, it lacks the gross misogyny.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 16th 2023 at 1:10:19 AM

"So he'd say the books people wroting using the Necronomicon are just as valid as his own."

Not only that he downright used their concept and reference in his book too.

I like how bloke wrote a story were lovecraft die so howie respond by doing a sequel were bloke himself try to find why he dies and he dies there.

Edited by unknowing on Feb 16th 2023 at 5:48:23 AM

WTF? That sounds wild. When did that happen?

Robert Bloch and Lovecraft both wrote stories about each other.

"The Haunter in the Dark"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Haunter_of_the_Dark