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[nenjin]

@MorleyDev Perhaps you're right. But I think maybe it still undercuts dramatic tension. No matter what genre you're writing for, keeping some level of tension matters. And Lovecraft works already have a tension problem just due to his prose style.

(I think Cool Air was an attempt to do HW:R "right". The theme is very similar but it's a superior piece).

No actual vengeful reanimated dead in Cool Air though. Which I felt like, setting aside the entire build up to Reanimator, is the point of the story.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, I was trying to remember if it was TotD or Reanimator.  Reanimator I think most people consider his worst.  You gotta remember Lovecraft was writing to put food on his table, with limited success.  He had to crank them out quick and dirty, which weakened a lot of them.  My faves are Colour Out of Space, Dagon, The Hound, Nyarlathotep, his micro-fiction is definitely his best.  You gotta wonder what it'd be like if he'd had enough money to write purely for writing's sake.

The Reanimator movie is fucking great though.

[nenjin]

I think Yahtzee just torpedoed my last desire to try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de58-xIdZU4

Guess I'll wait for a big sale.

[AzyWng]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E34-OBn-oQc

Suffice it to say that the design isn’t the only issue that the game has.

[nenjin]

The mind recoils.

[MorleyDev]

Jim Sterling has an interesting video on the game. Utterly tears it apart, yet does more to make me play it than I think any review for any game has ever done before?

[ChairmanPoo]

I kind of want to play it even less after that.  Tbh sounds awfully grimdy

[Imic]

I really want a Game to pull off true Lovecraftian horror- The creeping dread, the genuine fear of things made difficult to understand, given little or no explanaition, that change in strange ways. The existential horror- maybe not of insisgnficance, since Humans have become a very self-deprectaing Species of late, but perhaps the horror of not knowing what’s real. Genuinely not knowing if what’s going on is fevered insanity or reality, not knowing if anything is right or wrong, never knowing if you made the right choice, always regretting, until you realise that they’ve won. That by your fear, your distruct of the things in front of you, they’ve manipulated you, another Pawn that got one step too close to the finishing line, and yet so far, fqr away, only to be gobbled up by the endless queens of the enemy. That’s the kind of horror I want to see from Lovecraftian games.

[nenjin]

Part of the issue is that:

A. Games cling to the established mythos.

And

B. Most people that play these games are incredibly genre savvy.

It’s hard to genuinely surprise people when they’re expecting all the plot points. Like in SC, like Yahtzee said, you start the game surrounded by Innsmouth folks. It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s just no one gives an original story the time it needs to be interestingly good. They’re not inspired by, they’re just cribbing.

[MorleyDev]

I really want a Game to pull off true Lovecraftian horror

May interest you: this guy puts forward an interesting argument that S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl is amongst the most "Modern Lovecraft"-feeling of games.

[Cthulhu]

To be honest I don't have enough faith in game devs to successfully pull off that kind of horror.  STALKER might be in the ballpark but it's so buggy and wonky that it gets in the way of itself.

And I think we've gotta distinguish the "trappings" of Lovecraft from the substance.  This is what I mean when I say I hate basically everything Lovecraftian that isn't Lovecraft.  This game falls hard into that.  To me at least, Lovecraft is about violation.  It's about a person whose world has clear and seemingly inviolate boundaries:  Physical boundaries like the border between civilization and savagery, the laws that maintain those boundaries, laws of physics and reality, racial and cultural boundaries, etc.  They're really the walls of his identity, whence comes his sanity.  Then something from outside, which could be a god or monster or a person or just an idea, pushes through that boundary and just by demonstrating that such a thing is possible, the whole fortress shatters like glass and the entire structure underpinning his reality (and his identity, his sense of place in this reality) is obliterated.  And that's why he goes insane.  He forms a psychic cyst around it, pushes it out, changes to accommodate it, because to look directly at it is to be utterly destroyed.

The mind recoils.

Sinking City:  Occasionally scary, not horror.
STALKER: Often scary, not horror.
SOMA:  Not scary, horror.  Specifically the way it calls into question the integrity of the self.

Can't think of any other games that really do it.  Darkwood maybe, which makes the idea of boundaries and violation really clear with its home invasion mechanics

[Imic]

Try Echo Bazaar. Or Sunless Sea.
Sunless Sea can be fucking terrifying, but it’s mostly through text boxes. It helps that the fellah who did the writing is some kind of God of writing, but it’s not for everyone. If you don’t like Sunless Sea’s text boxes though, you won’t like Echo Bazaar.

It’s a unique setting, where everything normal has become strange, and all of the strange and confusing things that inhabit the world are barely explained, because they’ve become so commonplace. And yet, the rabbit-hole goes deeper. There is a Sea more Sunless, there is a deeper depth. The eye is always watching, and the stars are always judging, even where they cannot see. Your lamp is small and your ship is an ant in a vast sea of the things that creation deemed unworthy. You can never see the light again. You can never go back. All that remains is darkness. Gant. And North. It always calls. The hunger. The candle, jesus christ the candles. And London is down there. Somehow. No amount of that  Victorian bravado can help them now.

It’s not pure Lovecraft, but it’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen. The textbox thing turns a lot of people off, but if you like reading, it’s a grand masterpiece.

[MCreeper]

I don't remember that much scary moments in fallen london aka echo bazaar, though, and few select ramblings from darkest questline ain't gonna change it.  Don't sure on it being lovecraftian, i somehow didn't read him at all. Still. Damn.

[nenjin]

Sunless Sea is loosely Lovecrat inspired. But there's a lot of the fantastical and whimsical in it. If you're looking for something dry like Lovecraft, I'm not sure SS is it.

I think Darkwood is closer to Lovecraft, although there's a miasmal air/dark fantasy air about the game. It is, however, x10 as creepy and spoopy as Sunless Sea. Lovecraft stories are about people briefly departing the normal everyday world to experience the Mythos. Darkwood is like an extended vacation. It is unrelentingly spoopy.

[forsaken1111]

Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies are scary in an offhanded casual way, like oh yeah it's totally normal to have living dead being shipped around on boats fighting giant crabs and spooky fungus monsters, using one-eyed owls as scouts, in the massive underground sea into which london fell. Whoop, ran out of rations. Better eat the crew!