Lovecraftian Game Mechanics

[Ripley Marquis]

I am working on a project related to the influence of H.P. Lovecraft and his brand of horror on video games.Right now, I'm just looking for different resources related to the subject, seeing how games have tried to convey cosmic horror in the past, and some ideas for how they might do so in the future.

I am especially looking for specific design decisions or game mechanics that help enforce the horror of cosmicism, such as the sanity meter in Amnesia:The Dark Descent or the limited combat ability.

Any help that could be provided would be appreciated.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I've never actually read any Lovecraft, so I don't think I can be of much help. But off the top of my head, some games inspired by Lovecraft are.

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker.Interesting story. Doesn't make great use of the mechanics to enforce any cosmic horror though, because the text parser is TERRIBLE on the whole. However, there is one thing, where sometimes certain characters will say something weird or do some possibly supernatural thing, but when you replay the video it won't actually show it.

Eternal Darkness. Good game. Has sanity mechanics, where bizarre stuff will happen when your sanity is low. Stuff like making it look like your volume is being turned down doesn't really work that well, since it looks different than your TV 100% guarantee, but other moments are quite effective.

The Consuming Shadow. Yahtzee made this one. Haven't played it and don't know anything about it other than it's a procedural survival horror adventure inspired by Lovecraft.


Also try posting this in the subforum called Game Industry Discussion. Might get more hits, as Gaming Discussion was abandoned for a while and isn't really back in use yet.

Edit: Wait. This was in Gaming Discussion wasn't it? Mods moved it, right? I'm not going crazy!

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

For sanity meter stuff, the go to is probably Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth [http://store.steampowered.com/app/22340/Call_of_Cthulhu_Dark_Corners_of_the_Earth/], which is also a decent adaptation of Shadows over Innsmouth for the first half or so of its' playing time (it shifts tone abruptly around the halfway mark). It is undoubtedly Lovecraftian and it straddles the line between pure horror game and survival horror, slanting more towards the latter the further you progress.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

I think part of what makes Lovecraft terrifying is its mundanity. My ideal Lovecraftian game would probably be one where you can get from start to some version of the end without realizing something is amiss.

As an example of something that freaked me out recently: No Man's Sky's Abandoned Outposts.

See, in NMS, there's these little tentelcle plants that will reach out and attack. On their own they're just some random plant type made to be mildly annoying. But if you read into the stories of the Abandoned Outposts a bit, tales of physical corruption, mental instability, and glimpses of things, and you realize Abandoned Outposts are chock full of mysterious oozes and bountiful numbers of those plants...and those plants will also just be around, unchanging except for color, on nearly every planet that can support life...

Freaked me out quite a bit, I'm not ashamed to say. In ways that "horror games", with their grotesque monsters, planned jump scares, and gore just don't.

 

[Borty The Bort]

Don't Starve, a survival game. I don't know if this one technically counts, but the game's bizarre art style, as well as the unpredictable nature of enemies in that game, tend to reinforce the idea that you are in a world which has a loose grasp of reality. Whether it be scrawly, winded hands forming from nothing, or when you pull a mandrake out of the ground only to realise it will follow you until midnight, screaming like a banshee throughout the day, slowly lowering your sanity meter, everything in this game is designed to confuse and unnerve you.

Klei, the developers, deliberately made their game as weird as possible in order to provide a unique, but horrible experience. One specific game mechanic I can think of would be the fact that they made it so that if you don't explore often and you veer away from the weird crap when you find them, you'll probably do fine, but the problem which will arise is that those very things you try to avoid might have something cool involved with them(or you think they might have something cool), so these freaky creations will draw you in to mess around with them, even if it ends with you getting mauled to death by a giant chess-piece or something of that calibre.

It's hard to tell whether it is directly influenced by Lovecraft, but there is certainly a leaning towards cosmicism. To be honest, you have to play it and experience it for yourself if you really want to understand what I mean, and if you haven't played it before, DO NOT LOOK IT UP ON THE INTERNET. Try and play it fresh, without expectation or knowledge of any of the games rules. Hope this helps.

 

[shrekfan246]

As far as portraying cosmic horror and its relation to sanity goes, just to avoid repeating the games other people have already mentioned I'll bring up Darkest Dungeon, which tackles it as a more roguelite D&D RPG sort of thing. The characters you bring on expeditions progressively get more and more stressed, and will frequently gain quirks that negatively impact how they perform on subsequent expeditions. They can break in the middle of a fight, as well, causing them to do all sorts of things against your will and having a negative impact on the rest of the party, which could inevitably snowball into the entire party dying.

Detaching specifically from the sanity aspect as an explicit mechanic, there's also, of course, Bloodborne. It's not too subtle a game after about the halfway point, but it approaches the subject of cosmic horror on the more grand scale of how it would impact an entire city, and what would it look like if you were trying to fight against something that was so deeply rooted in the city and all of its people already. It has one little mechanic faintly tied into the idea of the player character's sanity in the "Insight" mechanic, which you gain naturally every time you see some sort of cosmic horror event, but the actual changes that makes to the game itself are pretty few and far between (after you gain a certain amount of Insight there are enemies in specific areas you can see that are normally invisible until you get an item, and the amount of Insight you have is directly proportional to how quickly enemies can inflict the Frenzy status on you, which basically makes your head explode and you take like, 80% of your health in damage; fortunately the number of enemies that can inflict Frenzy isn't that high).

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

World of Warcraft has this in spades with the Old Gods and thier minions. Some of them like C'thun and the Sha have these debuff mechanics that just completely ruins your charcater in a variety of ways, like Yogg-Soran turning people into Lovecraftian Abominations when you get 100% insanity:

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'd nominate Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, though purely from an aesthetical point - setting, art direction, etc.
Gameplay wise it's you run of the mill, fixed camera angle survival horror game.
There's a sanity meter in Haunting Ground and some apocalyptic subject matter, but ultimately the game is closer at heart to "rape and revenge" 70s exploitation schlock than anything resembling cosmic dread.

 

[CaitSeith]

I am working on a project related to the influence of H.P. Lovecraft and his brand of horror on video games.Right now, I'm just looking for different resources related to the subject, seeing how games have tried to convey cosmic horror in the past, and some ideas for how they might do so in the future.

I am especially looking for specific design decisions or game mechanics that help enforce the horror of cosmicism, such as the sanity meter in Amnesia:The Dark Descent or the limited combat ability.

Any help that could be provided would be appreciated.

Bloodborne had its own way to implement Lovecraftian horror in both their aesthetics, narrative and game mechanics. Here is a video about it.


One of them is insight: a representation of the inhuman knowledge that the character acquires along the game. Having more insight lets you see beyond some illusions in the game and gives you access to certain items (you require to hold at least one insight to even level up); but it also makes some enemies stronger or appear more frequently, and it reduces your frenzy resistance (madness caused by being on the line of sight of certain enemies in the nightmares).

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I think part of what makes Lovecraft terrifying is its mundanity. My ideal Lovecraftian game would probably be one where you can get from start to some version of the end without realizing something is amiss.

As an example of something that freaked me out recently: No Man's Sky's Abandoned Outposts.

See, in NMS, there's these little tentelcle plants that will reach out and attack. On their own they're just some random plant type made to be mildly annoying. But if you read into the stories of the Abandoned Outposts a bit, tales of physical corruption, mental instability, and glimpses of things, and you realize Abandoned Outposts are chock full of mysterious oozes and bountiful numbers of those plants...and those plants will also just be around, unchanging except for color, on nearly every planet that can support life...

Freaked me out quite a bit, I'm not ashamed to say. In ways that "horror games", with their grotesque monsters, planned jump scares, and gore just don't.

Eh I feel like that's kinda' a waste of the Lovecraftian premise. Like when people think Imperial Guardsmen are the most interesting part of 40k, a universe packed with robots the size of mountains, legions of genetically engineered werewolf space vikings, gothic space stations, etc...

Lovecraft is at its best when you're dealing face-to-face with otherworldly horrors from beyond the veil. A bunch of messed up people doing messed up things?! Every IP and their grandma has that!
Lovecraft has sentient stars coming to end all life on Earth, and giant monsters sleeping beneath the ocean, and cults of a thousand breeds that need 1930s era stopping!

 

[DoPo]

I think part of what makes Lovecraft terrifying is its mundanity. My ideal Lovecraftian game would probably be one where you can get from start to some version of the end without realizing something is amiss.

Indeed. If we were to go for something truly Lovecraftian, as in, "like in Lovecraft's stories", then a game can hardly do it justice. Even Amnesia's sanity meter isn't truly representative. The main focus of a lot of his stories is that a normal person may come across something slightly odd but overall not truly unnatural until they start to look into it more and then it culminates with a revelation that it's actually something completely bizarre. Yet they could have easily avoided the revelation.

It's a bit hard to represent that in games.

Moreover, there is the problem with power - a video game protagonist is usually given too much power in comparison to what a protagonist in a Lovecraft story has. Even if you make the video game protagonist completely unable to fight or deal with enemies, they could still have too much agency. It's hard to represent utter hopelessness in a video game terms that works naturally. Stuff like Outlast does manage to do something similar - your character will sometimes be captured by enemies and you would be completely stripped of all control. Then again, that can also work to lessen the impact of such an event - making the PC incapable of influencing things also means that they would have to survive the encounter. So, although you would be mechanically powerless, meta gaming knowledge would tell you that you aren't at danger.

While not really Lovecraftian in the sense of cosmic horrors and such, the there is one game I can think of that pulls off powerlessness well: Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura and the quest for Half-Ogre island.

Spoiler: Spoiler for the quest

It starts off as some rumours about disappearances that you can follow and eventually you can start to look into somebody's missing relative. It's actually quite a long quest that starts off near the beginning of the game and can be finished well after the middle of it and you are going around looking for somewhat insubstantial clues. There is little information overall but eventually you find a guy who claims that the woman was kidnapped by a conspiracy and is part of a larger scale operation and asks you to help him in revealing it to the world. There is some information about a mysterious island that is not marked on any map that apparently exists in that universe's version of the Bermuda triangle and that island being linked to the kidnappings. The guy who told you about the conspiracy implores you to go there and find some actual concrete evidence. You go through some hoops to finally manage to do that and you do.

You do get to the island but it seems the island had recently been abandoned with very little being left behind. You do manage to find...stuff (spoilered below) but not the active base of operations you expected. You do find some evidence - few journals and notes and you go back to report to the seemingly only other person in the world who knows about this conspiracy. And here comes the truly awesome part: he's not there. There is a gnome who basically tells you "You managed to find our base but you're too late - we've already moved it. By the time you get anybody else to that island we would have thoroughly cleaned all the evidence. Your friend has been disappeared and we don't need to worry about you - nobody will believe you." It's a huge gut punch but oh so satisfying. You did everything right, you had to do a lot to even get to Half-Ogre island and to be told "Good on you. You still lose" is a biggie. The ultimate insult to injury and show of how powerless you really are comes when the gnome tells you "I am leaving. You can kill me but that would change nothing" and...leaves. The quest is finished and from then on, he is a normal NPC and you cannot do anything special with him. You can indeed kill him but it's no different to killing any other NPC in the game. You don't get more any more rewards for doing it, there isn't a quest update, there isn't any continuation you can do. By that point in the game you could be decked out and have the power to literally reduce people and objects to nothingness yet even with all your mighty your character is, they are still utterly powerless to stop the conspiracy. Moreover, you are not even considered a threat by it.

While you are not dealing with a cosmic monstrosity, it does manage to show how a Lovecraftian protagonist should fare against one. And that's to say the discrepancy of capability is so large that you cannot even pit them against each other. Moreover, you wouldn't even be able to.

Spoiler: The chilling truth with Half-Ogre island

The first sign of something truly unsettling starts off when you land on the island. I was prepared to face bunches of enemies but there was literally nobody there. You find the entire place empty - there are some cages buildings and what looks like torture devices in those. But not a living soul, nobody to fight, nobody to talk to. Just some notes that reveal what was happening.

This is honestly one of the most unsettling things I've seen in games. The entire thing is the following - in the Arcanum world gnomes had trouble being accepted into the society at large. Not that hey were shunned but they found it really hard to open and keep businesses and such since they could be smart and shrewd but are also small and weak, so they could be muscled out sometimes literally. What is a shopkeeper that's pretty much as capable as a child going to do if you go to rob their store? Merchant guilds/unions are also run primarily by humans and gnomes find it hard to get into them through some casual (literal) racism.

So, some gnomes came together and hatched a plan. They started to kidnap relatives of human merchants and blackmailing them. This gave them political leg up and allowed them to start amassing power - relations and favours, as well as money. At the same time, they made sure to kidnap female relatives. The reason is that they started breeding half-ogres - a mix of a human and an ogre. An ogre by itself is big and strong but also quite feral and hard to control, while a half-ogre is more intelligent and easier to train and manage. The gnomes needed some literal muscle, so these were given out to gnomish businessmen as bodyguards, so they could better protect themselves. They serve pretty well - they are stronger than humans and intelligent enough to not be a burden, but also usually not enough to pose a problem which makes them loyal.

The base in Half-Ogre island was the breeding ground where females were used against their will. The notes go into some detail about the procedures and the "harvesting". Human women are taken there and raped by ogres, then kept during the pregnancy. When the child is born, it's also kept and the process repeated until the female expires. Male half-ogres are trained and sold as bodyguards while female ones are kept as more breeding material - apparently they are more durable and can bear more children without dying.

Again, not really the unnatural that Lovecraftian stories deal with but it's a similar level of sheer distressing revelation.

 

[Jonbodhi]

Fallout 4 is set in New England, and has dungeons inspired by Lovecraft which are some of the creepiest encounters in the game: The Dunwich Borers and Pickman's Gallery. Different companions will comment on the insanity/evil present or just how wrong everything feels. Those areas finally inspired me to go read Lovecraft after decades of seeing stuff based on his work, only to find that he's inspired even more stuff than I knew.

 

[sXeth]

I think part of what makes Lovecraft terrifying is its mundanity. My ideal Lovecraftian game would probably be one where you can get from start to some version of the end without realizing something is amiss.

Indeed. If we were to go for something truly Lovecraftian, as in, "like in Lovecraft's stories", then a game can hardly do it justice. Even Amnesia's sanity meter isn't truly representative. The main focus of a lot of his stories is that a normal person may come across something slightly odd but overall not truly unnatural until they start to look into it more and then it culminates with a revelation that it's actually something completely bizarre. Yet they could have easily avoided the revelation.

It's a bit hard to represent that in games.

Moreover, there is the problem with power - a video game protagonist is usually given too much power in comparison to what a protagonist in a Lovecraft story has. Even if you make the video game protagonist completely unable to fight or deal with enemies, they could still have too much agency. It's hard to represent utter hopelessness in a video game terms that works naturally. Stuff like Outlast does manage to do something similar - your character will sometimes be captured by enemies and you would be completely stripped of all control. Then again, that can also work to lessen the impact of such an event - making the PC incapable of influencing things also means that they would have to survive the encounter. So, although you would be mechanically powerless, meta gaming knowledge would tell you that you aren't at danger.

Prettymuch this.

While the general canon of Cthulhu Mythos makes more decent videogame fare, bizarre cosmic entities that operate outside the realms of our conventional morality with little regard for humanity. A good setup for a villain, or a catalyst for events, while not necessarily setting up a bland Good vs Bad confrontation or inevitable boss battle.

The actual horror elements, not so much. Lovecrafts horror works at its best as something that is presented through the distorted lens of a narrator. When you get a direct unobstructed view, nevermind the ability to explore and interact with it hands on, the unknowable and intangible starts becoming too known and tangible to function on the same psychology. Added on is that you'd need some incredibly good audio and visual design sensibilities to render something that conveyed the concept of a truly alien experience on those fronts.

Sanity meters tend to be the same kind of boring chore as any other meters in survival games. Don't Starve had one of the more interesting variations (where you had to become partially insane to harvest materials from things that otherwise weren't there, and thereby acknowledged the insanity hallucinations as dangerous omnipresent reality, yet invisible). The ones where it just starts mucking about with the screen or making you listen to some terrible voice actor try and hyperventilate are all pretty bad.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

There's LOTS of board games themed on Lovecraftian horror. Even the rather popular Betrayal at House on the Hill (found at Target) isn't technically Lovecraftian by it might as well be.

 

[DoPo]

Sanity meters tend to be the same kind of boring chore as any other meters in survival games. [...] The ones where it just starts mucking about with the screen or making you listen to some terrible voice actor try and hyperventilate are all pretty bad.

Yeah, I agree. They can be quite effective, but they very rapidly lose that advantage the more they show up. I remember in soma SOMA being around monsters would screw up your visuals, becoming worse the closer they and looking directly at them would seriously mess it up. Yet it very quickly turned from a cool effect to a nuisance - you'd be locked in an area with a monster patrolling around and you have to hide and evade it while your display goes slightly or severely nuts. All sense of dread was replaced with annoyance when I played those sections. Although the visual distortion did come back a couple of times in a genuinely interesting way - when there was no monster there yet something would slightly trigger the distortion.

 

[DoPo]

There's LOTS of board games themed on Lovecraftian horror. Even the rather popular Betrayal at House on the Hill (found at Target) isn't technically Lovecraftian by it might as well be.

Really? It's pretty much "Horror movie: the board game" - I wouldn't really consider it Lovecraftian.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

There's LOTS of board games themed on Lovecraftian horror. Even the rather popular Betrayal at House on the Hill (found at Target) isn't technically Lovecraftian by it might as well be.

Really? It's pretty much "Horror movie: the board game" - I wouldn't really consider it Lovecraftian.

It has the sanity meters and it feels like it's Lovecraftian but not technically because they didn't get the license. I guess I'm not the only one either:
https://www.slant.co/topics/4296/~co-op-boardgames-inspired-by-the-works-of-h-p-lovecraft

 

[sXeth]

Although the visual distortion did come back a couple of times in a genuinely interesting way - when there was no monster there yet something would slightly trigger the distortion.

There's actually a goofy part in the new Prey like that.

Spoiler

There's a "Poltergeist" monster, thats invisible, but still causes stuff to move around and triggers the fear effect (which is screen distorting generic filters and so on. Anyhow, before the game introduces you to one properly, theres one in an adjacent room.
So you get the fear effect cause it sees you through a window and starts freaking out. With no indication that something hasn't just completely glitched out and gottten stuck in the "You're being hunted by some scary thing" mode.

 

[DoPo]

There's LOTS of board games themed on Lovecraftian horror. Even the rather popular Betrayal at House on the Hill (found at Target) isn't technically Lovecraftian by it might as well be.

Really? It's pretty much "Horror movie: the board game" - I wouldn't really consider it Lovecraftian.

It has the sanity meters and it feels like it's Lovecraftian but not technically because they didn't get the license. I guess I'm not the only one either:
https://www.slant.co/topics/4296/~co-op-boardgames-inspired-by-the-works-of-h-p-lovecraft

I can't quite recall sanity meters being a thing in Lovecraft's stories. Which one has the "...and when I gazed upon the monstrosity, my sanity meter dropped 10 whole points and I my vision started to go all crazy, yo"?

Even that article does a very bad job at explaining how the game is related by H. P. Lovecraft's works. In fact, it doesn't - it literally just says it's "inspired" which is something too easy to claim about a lot of horror. Heck, modern depictions of zombies are inspired by Lovecraft, too - I wouldn't call them "Lovecraftian" though.

Betrayal on the House on the Hill draws a lot more from classic horror movies and stories than directly from Lovecraft himself.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Skyrim's Dragonborn DLC has more than a fair share of Lovecraftian influence in both story and visual design.

Spoiler: Some images

A few missions have you going to villages where all the villagers have been seemingly overtaken by some unknown forces and are constructing strange monoliths. It's not exactly from any Lovecraft story, but plays into the themes of greater forces guiding mankind, and us being unable to do anything about it. It also has the player entering worlds unknown by gaining knowledge mankind was not meant to see. The levels in Apocrypha, the aforementioned world, play with the concept of impossible geometry by having the levels twist, bend and stretch in impossible ways. Then there's the quest in the main game where you aid one of the Daedric Princes, Hermaeus Mora, and receive knowledge undreamed of by mankind as a reward from a special book.

The Binding of Isaac has a few nods towards Lovecraft, most notably in the form of the Necronomicon usable item that deals damage to all enemies in the room.

Then there's the Leviathan transformation, which you can get by collecting certain items