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[stabbymcstabstab]

Oh man, catmeat? I'm honestly not surprised. He kinda spooked me.

 Mainiac lasted a while though. He was nice when we wasn't salty.

election drama happened to Mainiac.

[Lord Shonus]

Not sure where you are Shonus, but it launches tonight across most of the world.

It goes active at midnight. That is tomorrow.

[Sirus]

Oh man, catmeat? I'm honestly not surprised. He kinda spooked me.

 Mainiac lasted a while though. He was nice when we wasn't salty.

Basically my thoughts. And mainiac's been awful salty lately, pretty much any time I read one of his posts in recent months.

[Draignean]

Hermaes Mora... Ah, the Lovecraftian inspiration there made me very happy the first couple times through.

Then started to get old.

Then it DEFINITELY got old.

Sort of like the Oblivion towers in 4. Cool idea, good concept, PLEASE ADD VARIETY BEFORE I GOUGE MY EYES OUT.

Speaking of Lovecraft, I've been somewhat having a WTF over the lack of a decent Lovecraftian detective/horror/adventure/whatever coming out in recent years. WTF, and slightly depressed. Lovecraft is typically just after zombies in terms of things that new game devs try to make.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Lovecraft doesn't lend itself very well to the ludonarrative. As a genre, it's all about the vastness, the terror of the Darkness Out There. Making a game work with that in any way other than aesthetic replication is something I can't even conceive of. I know for my part that my favored Lovecraft stories would all have difficulty making a good game (Music of Erich Zahn, The Forgotten City, The Shunned House).

Tentacled sea creatures are not what's important about Lovecraft.

[ChairmanPoo]

 [

My Lovecraft top three would be the following:

#1 The Color out of Space, for all-around creepyness. First Lovecraft story I ever read, before I knew anything about Lovecraft (I was... 15 at the time, I think), and left me shivering. My all-around favorite.

#2 The Haunter of The Dark, for similar reasons.

#3 At the Mountains of Madness. Creepy antarctic terror, claustrophobic. Predates "Who goes there" by seven years. While it lacks the latter's shapeshifting paranoia, I'd argue that overall it's far more creepy (WGT is overall optimistic and not a horror story). I'd also argue that John Carpenter's adaptation successfully merged the former's creepyness into the latter.

- I'm going to make a special mention for the Very Old Folk: While I'd not rank it among the best, I think it's underrated, and I have a soft spot for it because I read it for the first time during a dark and stormy night, in the very city it takes place.


I'm also going to include a Shit Three tier: Stories bad as shit, that must be avoided

- Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
- The Street
- Medusa's Coil

All three are basically racist tracts. Avoid at all costs.



As a bonus middleground, I'll mention two stories that make it out of the scrap above by virtue of not being that bad, in and of themselves, once you get past the bigotry


- Cool Air:  It has also obvious racist undertones. Curiously enough, of the same brand of strange bipolar racism that often lies at the core of anti-Spanish prejuice: "Spaniards are short, swarthy and lazy goblins, and their women have beards. Except if you're actually white(r?). Then you're handsome, cultured, and part of the mighty whitey club.". In the story it's particularily blatant because Dr Muņoz gets a pass -which the rest of his countrymen don't-  even though he's fucking undead - granted, a particularily friendly sort of undead, but it says something about Lovecraft's racist prejuices when it's worse to be swarthy than to be a zombie

However, despite all this:

 I'd say that it's Herbert West- Reanimator done right. Mind you, I think that the critics are unfair on HW-R itself (despite it's flaws, I argue it's nowhere near as bad as they say, and it has some interesting tidbits. It's arguably the first "modern" zombie novel). But Cool Air is better and far more Lovecraftian.


- The Temple: The story's biggest problem is that it goes out of it's way to depict the Germans, particularily the U-Boat commander, as a moustache-twirling villain. I can kind of understand that they were barely out of WWI and that people were still caught in jingoism. Still, it makes you groan every time the U-Boat commander makes some evil reflection in his diary, to underscore how evil he is.

However, despite all this:
If you manage to ignore the anti-German prejuice, it's a pretty darn good horror story about people trapped in a cursed submarine. I'm pretty sure it has inspired -even though it goes uncredited- a number of more modern horror movies and novels.

[Silverthrone]

One oddity about Lovecraft stuff is that people expect it to be scary, just because it's there. I mean, Lovecraft and the sort of stuff that grew from it isn't very scary. Engaging and interesting, yes, but not very creepy. I suppose it was a vastly different time, but it always struck me as silly how people saw some weird, slimey alien and immediately went comic book-type insane. Particularly in newer works, if it's a 60's paranormal agent or a present day secret society goon. Their psycological constitution must've been made out of meringue to begin with.

I like it, though. Old Gods, star creatures, interdimensional secrets, cults, mutation, the lot of it. It fascinates me. But it ain't very scary just by itself. Herma-Mora was really cool, loved the chance of visiting its house (until it got too familiar), but never particularly unnerving. Hell, chances are, I'd ask for its autograph if it contacted me.

[Flying Dice]

If someone is talking about Lovecraft in the sense of a coherent pantheon or canon and all the spoopy scary shoggoths and fishmen, they're kinda missing the point. His work is at the heart of it about a philosophical fear, and one which doesn't actually mesh very well with modern culture or knowledge. It's why I think a lot of people fixate on the overt horror, the horror of what he wrote isn't actually particularly scary or jarring for the modern reader.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

As I said, the true value of Lovecraft is not oceanic biology. The horror, the real horror of Lovecraft is the feeling you get when you look through a high-quality telescope for the very first time, and have a panic attack. Because now, you know. You might deny it day to day, but you know the universe's vastness and your own small shore within it.

[ChairmanPoo]

That's precisedly what MSH meant.  All that stuff you mentioned -old gods,  mutations, star creatures- are the trappings for the actual theme -cosmicism, alienation-

Edit: ninjaed by msh

[RedKing]

What, no love for The Picture in the House? That's a great story, and not even a Mythos one.

[NJW2000]

Loads of good stuff which people who haven't read lovecraft might call the Lovecraft aesthetic has been made, imo, but that's sort of the more banal and in-your-face portion of a view derived from the most explicit and in-your-face bits of Lovecraft. i.e. tentacle monsters (don't look at me like that) which can be fun but aren't really Lovecraft.

Then again, Bloodborne did the Lovecraft aesthetic relatively well, alongside as the scary-through-not-telling stuff which is what Lovecraft is good for in the literature sense. Though I guess the unrevealed bits of Bloodborne were more interesting than scary, so Fromsoft did there own thing a bit there which was better.

E:Dirty Ninjas, posting anyway.

I thought that not-telling stuff was the way Lovecraft got actually scary, but haven't read it that recently.

[Lord Shonus]

One oddity about Lovecraft stuff is that people expect it to be scary, just because it's there. I mean, Lovecraft and the sort of stuff that grew from it isn't very scary. Engaging and interesting, yes, but not very creepy. I suppose it was a vastly different time, but it always struck me as silly how people saw some weird, slimey alien and immediately went comic book-type insane. Particularly in newer works, if it's a 60's paranormal agent or a present day secret society goon. Their psycological constitution must've been made out of meringue to begin with.

I like it, though. Old Gods, star creatures, interdimensional secrets, cults, mutation, the lot of it. It fascinates me. But it ain't very scary just by itself. Herma-Mora was really cool, loved the chance of visiting its house (until it got too familiar), but never particularly unnerving. Hell, chances are, I'd ask for its autograph if it contacted me.

In the original Lovecraft stories, virtually nobody went insane from the sight of the alien creatures and architecture that they saw. They found the sight disturbing, horrifying, hideous, and sometimes physically painful, but the insta-crazy was an addition of later authors. Part of the horror was generally in the fact that the things they were seeing should not have been able to be - imagine if somebody walked up to you and handed you a Penrose Triangle, amplified up to a million. The other part is of an existential sort - not only is humanity's influence on the universe going to amount to nothing, all of our science and understanding is but the grandiose imaginings of a demented child, and we are no more able to comprehend the truth of reality than we are to breath in space.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I thought that not-telling stuff was the way Lovecraft got actually scary, but haven't read it that recently.

It's not the mystery of the perpetual unknown. It's confronting you with something to which the only reaction is "how in fuck what even is this". Take the Shunned House. Weird, house, nobody wants to live there. Strange anomalies centered around the basement, so start digging, maybe everybody has radon poisoning.

And then you find...a thing. Just this...wall of technicolor material that you've never seen anything reminiscent of and doesn't seem to be any sort of normal geology. So you keep digging around, because it looks like there's a shape...and it's a fucking human elbow on x1000 scale.

In a way, Lovecraft protagonists are honestly kind of savvy because they need to be, and the reaction in this particular story was "hah, nope, I don't need to see any more of this shit" and flooding the basement with industrial acid to try and kill the thing as it screams from far below, shaking the very Earth.

[Silverthrone]

As I said, the true value of Lovecraft is not oceanic biology. The horror, the real horror of Lovecraft is the feeling you get when you look through a high-quality telescope for the very first time, and have a panic attack. Because now, you know. You might deny it day to day, but you know the universe's vastness and your own small shore within it.

Well, true. Maybe I haven't looked for it enough, but I've just never had that sort of panic, or been really unnerved by that fact. I can understand it, but it feels more like a fascinating observation than anything.

In the original Lovecraft stories, virtually nobody went insane from the sight of the alien creatures and architecture that they saw. They found the sight disturbing, horrifying, hideous, and sometimes physically painful, but the insta-crazy was an addition of later authors. Part of the horror was generally in the fact that the things they were seeing should not have been able to be - imagine if somebody walked up to you and handed you a Penrose Triangle, amplified up to a million. The other part is of an existential sort - not only is humanity's influence on the universe going to amount to nothing, all of our science and understanding is but the grandiose imaginings of a demented child, and we are no more able to comprehend the truth of reality than we are to breath in space.

Odd, I seem to remember a lot of trips to the looney bin in the original works. Of course, it wasn't nearly as prevalent as the trope turned in to later. A lot of Lovecraft OG characters did relatively well under pressure, now that I retink it.

Loads of good stuff which people who haven't read lovecraft might call the Lovecraft aesthetic has been made, imo, but that's sort of the more banal and in-your-face portion of a view derived from the most explicit and in-your-face bits of Lovecraft. i.e. tentacle monsters (don't look at me like that) which can be fun but aren't really Lovecraft.

Then again, Bloodborne did the Lovecraft aesthetic relatively well, alongside as the scary-through-not-telling stuff which is what Lovecraft is good for in the literature sense. Though I guess the unrevealed bits of Bloodborne were more interesting than scary, so Fromsoft did there own thing a bit there which was better.

E:Dirty Ninjas, posting anyway.

I thought that not-telling stuff was the way Lovecraft got actually scary, but haven't read it that recently.

Bloodborne actually did manage quite well with being unnerving. The cursed, rotting city, the church, the moon, all the implications, all the cancerous mutations, et cetera. It was more icky than profound, but it worked very well indeed. It was a damn solid job.