H.P. Lovecraft Lives Inside Your Computer
- November 24, 2023
- Posted by: MainInstructor
- Category: Artificial Intelligence Assembly BASIC Game Design Go React
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Video Title: H.P. Lovecraft Lives Inside Your Computer
On the third of march, 2023 the user Veddge uploaded a map to the doomworld forums entitled my house dot wad. At time of writing… they have not posted since. Should you download the map and look at the files, you;ll see Ostensibly, myhouse is a
Simple, personal tribute map to Veddge’s friend Tom who passed away some time ago. The map is supposed to be fairly easy, with an average playtime of around 10 minutes supposed to take about 10 minutes to beat, and to begin with, that’s exactly what the map appears to be.
My house is, on the surface, about as standard of a doom custom map as you can get – it’s a pretty basic model filled with pretty basic enemies and it’s got all the standard tropes and level design elements that you’d expect out of basically any map from the original doom games.
There’s a secret cupboard with a free chainsaw, some cheap enemy ambushes and a standard get the key to unlock the exit structure, but the more you play of Myhouse the more things start to seem very subtly… off. There’s this powerup that’s only visible from inside the house and when you pick it
Up all the monsters have respawned in subtly different positions, It slowly becomes apparent the map has elements that aren’t conventionally possible in doom level like doors swing open instead of retreating into the wall, at a certain point all the animations for your guns completely change.
And once you’ve explored for long enough and have gotten nice and distracted by all this subtle weirdness, the exit door disappears, trapping you inside the house. Bit by bit, my house gets weirder and weirder, closets open up into infinite hallways, parts
Of the map starts to get bigger and smaller without you noticing and the main house warps and shifts into nightmarish alternate versions as the regular doom music starts to distort and corrupt making you think that all the warnings in the readme files about the map
Being haunted might actually have some truth to them. Soon enough the map has dropped all pretence, the conventions of map design crumbling as you wander through non euclidean environments, fight enemies that shouldn’t be real and watch as the house grows and mutates around you revealing new rooms and reflections of
Itself as you plunge deeper and deeper. And yet, even as the rules and expectations of what myhouse dot wad is supposed to be decay around you, it never stops being a doom mod – you’re still fighting enemies and collecting health and ammo and weirdly that anchor to something you understand and are
Familiar with makes the non euclidean geometry of the house, the constantly changing rules and the distressing tricks the house pulls on you all the more unnerving, because they’re not just abstract scary things you’ve never seen before they’re a perversion and a corruption
Of something you used to understand, twisted into new forms that erode and undermine the feeling of security we get from knowing what the rules of reality are and how things are supposed to work. In case you couldn’t guess, I think my house dot wad is fantastic and something that you
Really should play for yourself, trust me I’ve really only been talking about the first thirty minutes of this damn thing. But I don’t just love the mod because it’s surprising, scary and sometimes funny all at the same time, I find myhouse fascinating because it and more recent games like it represent
An evolution in the way horror games are being made and might just represent a wider paradigm shift for the medium as a whole, and to understand why, we need to talk about a guy you may have heard of by the name of HP lovecraft.
HP Lovecraft was an author most famous for his work on what’s been posthumously called the cuthulu mythos, a loose series of horror stories that distinguished themselves by not being directly about deadly monsters or dangerous killers like a lot of work around Lovecraft’s
Time but instead focusing on a more subtle, unsettling brand of horror. The horror in Lovecraft’s work comes not from danger or disgust, but from this pervasive sense of uncertainty and powerlessness that seems to gnaw at your subconscious, making the characters and also you question what we assume to be fundamental truths about reality.
Lovecraft’s works feature themes people getting mutated and disfigured into forms that are distinctly human yet also monstrous, alien cultures and technologies that show just how weak and insignificant humans really are and of our perception of the world being
A comforting lie that hides a far more complex universe – all stuff that breaks down fundamental assumptions the characters have about the world, and their place in it, usually causing them to go crazy as a result. Lovecraft’s personal brand of what he would call cosmic horror has been incredibly influential
In spite of the fact that he was to be honest… not that great of a writer on a craft level and was an S-tier racist. David Lynch’s twin peaks practically creaks under the weight of powerful unseen forces that cause you to question the meanings every single line and shot, junji ito’s manga
Centers around monstrous yet distinctly human horrors that are made all the scarier because of their familiarity and the true fear in Jeff Vandeermeer’s annihilation comes from the creeping realization that the weird mutations and abberations caused by area X aren’t random but serve some unknowable higher purpose beyond the minds of humanity.
Unfortunately, games have never been quite as successful as other mediums when it comes to adapting or being inspired by lovecraft – don’t get me wrong, lovecraft’s sticky little fingerprints are all over gaming culture, from lovecraftian baddies in dungeons and dragons and the ever popular call of cthulhu tabletop RPG, to lovecraftian settings and
Monsters being key fixtures of some foundational shooters like half life and quake. But in my opinion games have never quite been able to tap into the lovecraftian feeling of unease and paranoia in the same way as the real thing, sure stuff like the sinking
City or call of cthulhu the videogame have got the fishmen and the tentacles and the themes of insanity, but the emotional core that feeling of dread that makes you doubt everything and terrified that you no longer understand anything, that’s always missing
In favour of more obvious, direct forms of horror, or just using lovecraft as more of an aesthetic. It wasn’t until I played myhouse that I became aware of a rising trend of titles that do lovecraft right, where his immortal spooky essence is alive and well and in many cases
These games achieve this by deliberately eschewing the surface level lovecraftian elements of outer gods and cyclopean architecture and instead focusing on the thing that makes cosmic horror work and that is the uncanny. The uncanny is a term that was invented by discredited psychologist and big fan of cocaine
Sigmund freud, who originally called it Das Unheimliche or unhomely and basically it references that upsetting, disconcerting and uncomfortable middle ground between something familiar and something totally alien that just sort of puts us on edge. The uncanny stems from objects, creatures and places that we can sort of understand
Or kind of get our heads around but also in some key way defy the way we expect things to look or behave, causing us to doubt all our subconscious assumptions about the world and it’s this fundamental psychology that lovecraft’s work plays with – blending the
Alien and the mundane into something that’s more unsettling and destabilising than either of the two ever could be alone. It’s by truly recognizing the power of uncanny horror and also knowing which underlying assumptions to undermine that games can finally realise their full spooky potential and also reveal
Some hidden, unsettling truths about themselves that we’ve been ignoring in the process, but I’m getting ahead of myself. One of the easiest ways to see the uncanny at work in games, particularly in newer ones is through their visual design.
You might have noticed a weird swell in the popularity of horror games in particular that deliberately use outdated graphical styles like low poly PS1 stuff or pixel art – stuff that modern games moved away from decades ago and really don’t look very good at all by conventional standards.
In many cases, however this is actually a deliberate attempt to heighten a level of uncanny fear. Look at faith’s horrible cutscenes, basically anything by the brilliant Yames, and whatever’s going on in Paratopic – the fact that you can’t clearly observe the world and the monsters in it creates…
I guess you’d call it a sort of psychic smear that makes even mundane concepts look strange and offputting and renders monsters all the scarier because they can’t be easily understood and put into a nice easy visual category right away.
You may have heard of a phenomenon by the name of the uncanny valley and that’s similar to what’s happening here. The uncanny valley is a theory created by a robotics professor by the name of Masahiro Mori and it states that there’s a sharp dropoff in how appealing we find a character
Right at the moment it reaches that uncanny zone of recognizably human but still evidently not one. This is why the vast majority of enemies in horror games take the form of humanoid but distinctly inhuman monsters, robots, animatronics, zombies, etcetera, stuff that’s difficult
To easily categorise into a nice straightforward box and so unnerving us even before they’ve been presented as a threat. Videogames, however, can go a step further – ambiguity in art style and level of visual clarity can further blur the line between the recognizable and the alien not just on
A conceptual level but a visual one too. Compare most of the enemies in resident evil 4 which are technically zombies but basically just look like photorealistic people in need of a dermatologist to these weird pixelly, difficult to make out monstrosities in, say World of Horror.
The ganados are well lit, photorealistic in style and visually easy to parse and so register as just regular people to our brains, which in a small but significant way is a source of conceptual security. On the other hand it’s difficult to put your finger on what exactly world of horror’s
Monsters actually look like at a glance, because the game’s primitive glitchy graphics prevent them from being easily recognizable. As your imagination works overtime to interpret the chunky 1 bit graphics, you’re forced to pour over every detail of the eldrich creatures in an attempt to visually parse them, only
To spot both human and monstrous elements that unsettle your attempts to psychologically categorise what you’re seeing. Not only are these weird baddies both scary and empathetic, they also require some twisting of your brain to even understand, forcing you to drop your defences in the process.
Of course it’s not just the visual design of enemies that can create this uncanny sensation, the look and feel of a game’s environments and UI too can be a huge trigger for this stuff. A great example of this would be games that focus on so-called liminal spaces, areas that
Are ordinarily bright and filled with people that suddenly feel weirdly… wrong when you empty them out and turn the lights off. Equally locations associated with childlike innocence and safety take on an unsettling edge under the right context as your nostalgia and expectations clash with an destabilising
Sense of danger that twists places you previously considered to be safe and normal. Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy is fantastic at this, it takes place in an environment we’re naturally intimately familiar with, the house, and casts it in an entirely new light, turning utterly mundane spaces slowly but surely into horrifying reflections of
Previously comfortable and safe environments, all through clever use of low detail graphics and darkness. Long before the actually monstrous elements start appearing, the juxtaposition between your perception of what a house ought to look like and the house you’re seeing will already
Have you jumping at shadows and scared out of your mind, it’s great. Equally something like cruelty squad’s incredibly upsetting and alien user interface can really creep you out, even though it’s literally designed to help you, simply because it’s a perversion of a gameplay element that normally has a very particular look.
It’s technically and I use that term very loosely, functional, but it’s garish and inefficient design stretches our internal definition of a game UI way past breaking point whilst also still definitely being one. The same goes for Signalis, the game’s constant visual aberrations and distortions mean that
You can’t even rely on the graphics and interface to tell you what’s going on as cutscenes glitch out, your perspective changes to first person abruptly, and enemies warp the screen particularly when it comes to these Kolibri bastards. Rather than being an impartial, reliable depiction of the game, now signalis’ very graphics
And interface are a source of uncomfortable ambiguity, with the very things you’re seeing being both true and untrue in an uncanny juxtaposition. Even beyond the visuals of a game’s environment, your spatial relationship a game’s world and the way you navigate through it can also be surprisingly unsettling.The idea that a
Videogame world should conform to the constraints of something approximating reality is an assumption so deeply wrought that we barely even consider it, but that means that when games do screw with their world’s layout, then the results can be dramatic. The tragically abandoned PT/silent hills is the undisputed king of this, taking place
In a non euclidean loop around the same house over and over again, with each loop causing things to deteriorate and change even more. Each loop you can’t help feel your brain try to reject the idea that you’ll arrive
In the same place as before because it just doesn’t mesh with how you expect videogame worlds to operate. This sort of destabilisation of what we perceive to be foundational rules of videogames can even give non-scary games a horror twist. Look at Manifold Garden for example, it’s an objectively beautiful game with a fantastic
Art style, but equally there’s just something… creepy about its endless repeating world that bumps up against your expectations of how an environment ought to function. This is the core of what lovecraftian horror and the wider uncanny horror subgenre is getting
At, it’s not enough for something to simply be weird, it has to in some way challenge the way you perceive the world, operating in ways that expand the limits of your imagination and in the process revealing how little you really know.
Something truly unknowable isn’t really scary because it’s too alien to really grasp, in the same way that LSD dream simulator can’t do much more than just be weird. Equally a game that’s too familiar isn’t uncanny either because we can easily fit it
Into our existing worldview Dredge for example, despite taking heavy lovecraft influence and being a very good game, fails at being uncanny horror because all of its spooks operate in ways that are too easy to understand and boil down to nice simple objective mechanical interactions,
Like how these ships are always anglerfish and this big dude always travels in the same very limited path something you can quickly master and find a sense of stability in beating. In fact this is kind of why most games that claim to be lovecraftian just don’t quite
Work, they fail to really upset your assumptions or use unknown and unexpected elements to build a sense of unease. Sure the monsters are scary and the concepts can be novel but it’s easy to fit, say, the sinking city’s bad guys and environmental weirdness into distinct videogamey categories
– this is a bulky melee enemy, that’s a static obstacle, this is a hidden door, and being able to reduce this stuff to simple concepts you can completely understand eliminates their horror potential no matter how crazy the main character might be going or how many tentacles are onscreen.
Even most games with insanity mechanics mostly just blur your screen or introduce some weirdo visual effects, it’s the horror game equivalent of the mario kart blooper – they never actually make you feel insane or question the reality of what you’re seeing.
The way to get that feeling of disconcerting, unnerving horror across is to have your perception of how games ought to work, that comfortable safe framework through which you view the world, stretched and warped, because this stuff forms the bedrock of your understanding
Of games and if it’s taken away, suddenly what yout thought was impossible becomes scarily plausible. Stuff like bossfights you’re supposed to lose, hidden endings and surprise character deaths in games where that doesn’t normally happen surprise and upset us because they
Go against those unwritten rules of game design – and titles that know what rules to undermine for greatest effect that wring a lot of emotional payoff out of relatively small changes. As a quick non-horror aside, this is why mario wonder’s wonder seeds are so effective,
They always change elements of mario that we internally consider to be sacred and fixed, like mario’s dimensions, the game’s perspective and whether water belongs on the ceiling or not. Part of the insidious and destabilising effect of the uncanny is that we often don’t recognize
What concepts we’ve latched onto and can find a sense of comfort in until they’re taken away, Iron Lung for example plays on the implicit assumption that videogames, particularly first person ones are going to let you explore and see the world for yourself – but instead
It traps you in a tiny metal coffin and taunts you from the outside with unknowable spooky hints – creating this amazingly oppressive feeling not just from the ocean of blood but the fact that the game isn’t playing by the rules.
Equally, Resident Evil 2’s mister X is uniquely scary because unlike everything else you’ve encountered up until that point he can’t be killed or avoided. Mr X can even, gasp, chase you through doors which previously formed impenetrable security barriers you unconsciously learn to rely on.
And even beyond these examples of mechanical uncanniness, some of the best horror games of all go after not a game’s systems but the fabric of their software instead, games that exploit our fear of glitches, or ones that reach out beyond what we thought were
Their confines can be supremely scary because we no longer know what their limits really are. What if a game remembered all the faceless mooks you killed as individuals, what if a game could fuck with your settings and controls independantly of you?
What if the things happening in a game’s window was not actually the entire game? Simply being forced to consider these ideas is often far scarier than a goblin jumping out at you because the terrifying unknown is no longer contained within the game, it’s within your computer, and inside you too.
As you may recall I mentioned that videogames are the true successor to lovecraftian uncanny horror and I think these kinds of fourth wall busting games illustrate why the best, unlike all other narrative mediums, videogames are the only ones that are by their nature… fundamentally unknowable.
You can skip to the end of a movie to see how it ends, a picture isn’t going to suddenly change what it’s depicting, and whilst books can really stretch our conception of what’s possible, such as in the brilliant inspiration for My House dot Wad House of Leaves, which
Has entire plots nested in footnotes and pages dedicated to single words and phrases, novels still operate using the fundamentally knowable constraints of language. But the nature of games, and digital media at large, on the other hand, is a mutual one
– you can’t skip through a videogame to avoid confronting something because your action is critical to driving it forwards, games can hide hidden details that you may never even encounter let alone see and they react to your attempts to engage with them.
In oneshot and imscared, the games create actual files and in some cases entire executables on your computer whole executables you need to interact with in order to progress, in Slay the Princess, not only are you going against story convention, but it quickly becomes
Apparent that the narrator of the game can’t be trusted and you don’t have quite as much control as you thought you did, and in anything made by the amazing Dan Mullins or Dan Salvado, their games seem to be literally tearing and falling apart around you as they glitch out,
Directly reach through the fourth wall, and alienate you from fundamental gameplay conventions with an intensity that simply isn’t possible in other mediums. But even more than that, to the minds of the overwhelming majority of people the function of games and computing is a complete mystery, whilst we like to imagine ourselves masters
Of the digital world, the reality is we have no idea how it works. Every character you see, world you explore and mechanic you interact with in a game is the product of millions upon millions of lines of instructions written in code which are
Then transcribed into vastly more ancient and arcane languages like assembly that not even the people make games fully understand, and that’s just an intermediary to communicate with the magic rock at the heart of every computer that we inscribed magic runes on
That warps and changes in tiny ways billions of times a second to change the flow of electrons in such a way that you pressing A makes mario jump. Computers are so complicated so as to be fundamentally unknowable on a mechanical level and so we’re
Caught in this weird relationship where we both own and control our computer but are equally utterly at the mercy of their incredible power and complexity. And it’s games that reveal just how little we know about the under the hood function of our favourite titles through tricks and subversions that expose this uncomfortable,
Uncanny relationship. In essence, all computers are, in a small but significant way, eldritch artefacts, defying perception and operating on their own unfathomable logic that we have no way of knowing and would’ve scared lovecraft to death. I think that’s why videogaming culture has always had a fascination with haunted games
Or sentient glitches or hidden eldritch secrets in innocuous places, because whilst sonic dot exe isn’t real, it lays bare the hidden anxiety that we’re not truly in control of technology, we’re just trying to steer it, and as computers have only gotten more
And more powerful and as more and more of our lives have become governed by them so too has the uncanny potential of the medium expanded. WE’ve got uncanny horror games about social media, artificial intelligence, surveillance states, all real life concerns driven fundamentally by our uncanny relationship with technology.
And really you can’t get more lovecraft than a fear of a world you aren’t able to quite understand anymore, as supernatural as the guy’s stories might’ve been, they ultimately drew from his real life fears, try reading shadows over innsmouth and tell me it’s not lovecraft being paranoid and racist about immigrants.
Uncanniness presents a world in which our perception of reality clashes with unreality, where what we know to be real and true is challenged and undermined – but never quite conquered, it just changes and expands. Whilst my house dot wad has a spooky horror story attached, and messed with your expectations
In very clever ways, everything in it is stuff that’s possible within DOOM’s basic engine and widely available editing tools – it just took someone with a different perspective to widen our understanding of what’s possible, and whilst that can be an uncomfortable experience, it’s ultimately a positive one.
Both the upside and the downside of the uncanny is that we will eventually conquer even the most liminal spooks put in front of us, bringing them into our sphere of comfortable understanding, but in the process, we’ll reveal new uncanny frontiers of stuff just outside the limits of our comprehension.
The more we experience art and the more it’s able to surprise us, the more we learn about the medium and the deeper our understanding gets, and that’s especially important for videogames because unlike everything else… all games are uncanny, occupying a superposition of real and fantasy, known and unknown, their
True nature forever juuust out of reach, we just don’t like to think about it. Happy halloweeeeennnn wait what has it already happened? Shit okay fine happy late halloween slash for next year god damn it. Well Hi and welcome to the after the video segment, that part of this very… spooky
Video… ish where I resurrect the video to do my dark bidding which is to say talk about some cool things that I am going to force you to pay attention to until you click the next video button on youtube. Please don’t do that.
THe first thing I’d like to promote is Lost In Cult, a producer of fantastic physical books all stuffed with video game design observations and lovely lovely art. They make everything from compilations of mini essays on a variety of games to full
Art books of some very pretty titles I’ve covered before like Sable and Citizen Sleeper. Seriously these things are lovingly produced and there’s so much passion that goes into them, please give them a look. I’m actually a little conflicted about shouting Lost In Cult out because they were on my list
For ages then they tried to pay me to do so and I don’t do paid promotions so I’m instead just doing it for free because I have more integrity than sense, although if you do want to support me, I might be writing a little something for their latest book all
About video game haunted houses so give that one a little look why don’t you, eh? Next, I’d like to give a shoutout to my wonderful patreons – over the past year or so I’ve been dealing with some personal mental health stuff that’s really taken
A toll on me, and one thing that’s been a lifeline throughout that has been the existence of my patreon as a consistent income stream that’s meant I didn’t need to burn myself out rushing out video after video and making things even worse.
I am eternally grateful to them for their constant support, and in return it’s the least I can do to offer them stuff like early video access, behind the scenes stuff, bonus content and all manner of other things, if you’d like to support the channel and get
Some of that stuff too, please follow the link in the description yes I know the patreon redesign looks fucking awful I hate it to. Speaking of all manner of other things, my top tier patrons, those most worthy of my
Love and respect, they get a special shoutout at the very end, if you’d like to join them, simply donate between five and ten bucks a month and you can join the illustrious likes of these cool people, who are: aaah! Aly Wright Andrew Lubrano Aseran Auno94 Brennan Spaulding Brian Notarianni
Buy More Skyrim For Todd Constantin Amend CoolJamm Cosmix360 Daniel Mettjes DasKänguru David Setser Derk-Jan Karrenbeld digletteer ecton Edward Franklin Woods Eugene Bulkin Gazkul Iofur93 ISAWdano Jacob Dylan Riddle Jinkeloid Jordan Gear KevinHelpUs (on YouTube!) Luke Corcoran Macewindow54 Marika Vladilena Altair Mark Valent Nate Graff NWDD Oliver Maurhofer Patrick Rhomberg Peter D. Tomasic Rederdex
RegalRegex Revelation ReysDad Steamrollerman Steve Riley Ty Guerin Tyler Duncan Uprising WhimsicalWisp Zach Brantmeier Chao Okay thanks for watching I must now return to my endless slumber beneath the sea bbyyyeee!
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MADNESS AND DOOM COMES FOR US ALL! SOCIETY WILL CRUMBLE, THE WORLD WILL COLLAPSE! QUICK! SPEND YOUR EARTHLY WEALTH WHILST YOU CAN! https://www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames
In his house at X, dead Elon waits dreaming, dreaming of twisting reality itself into ever more unknowably lame nerd humor from 15 years ago: https://twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
Elden Ring sneaking in a PT-esque dungeon that seems to loop back on itself made me feel far more insane than most Lovecraft-inspired games.
uncanny reationship with technology? what are you talking about, thas just not knowing enough stuff, assembly for example isnt impossible to understand, but just extremly basic and annoying to actually use directly. Claiming that a Programmer cant understand assembly is ridiculus, no idea how it works? are you kidding me, maybe you should stop calling yourself the architect of games then
das unheimliche doesnt literally translate into the unhomely. unheimlich basicly just means scary in german
I think it's odd that you haven't mentioned Control in some places that would have fit well into what you're saying. The other one that seems like a glaring hole in a discussion of video game Lovecraft style presentation is Eternal Darkness on the GameCube.
"all computers are eldritch artefacts" as a programmer, I fully agree with every word here
Cosmic horror works when it screws with your sense of reality. The trouble is that it needs to screw with your sense of reality, not just the characters', and in games, the story is usually quite separate from the gameplay, and the gameplay is what you're really invested in. So messing with the character doesn't achieve much
I feel like most games that use lovecraftian elements are only using it to screw with the characters: if the player character's wife turns out to secretly be an octopus monster, then that'll really screw with the character, might even drive him insane, but it doesn't have much effect on gameplay so it doesn't mess with the player much
But if the healthbar disappears and the game seems to glitch? that's when you're gonna actually mess with the _player_'s sense of reality
Hey I just wanted to let you know that going through my subscriptions, I realised your videos haven't been recommended to me for a couple months now and I must admit I forgot about your channel till I stumbled upon it clearing my subscription list. Yes, bell was on.
zelda mm does this to
I’m not sure if I’m getting it right, but I got a similar feeling from Rain World, multiple times. The whole game feels odd for a survival Speculative Biology-based game, as the creatures and environment are very wrong in many ways. The birds are giant masked vultures width tentacles instead of wings, flying using gas jets. The environment is industrial and abandoned, getting more decayed the further east you go. A whole region is always dark, somehow. Finding out the truth is perhaps worse.
Even the animation and behaviors, while impressive, feels strange. Nothing moves like sprites should. It’s organic, tripping and walking far too realistically. Enemies will ignore you, attacking other enemies.
Everything he’s mentioned about the wonder flowers doing have been done in previous Mario games😂
It's very obvious that H.P. Lovecraft was a Gamer. He named his cat after the Gamer word.
"hates people" lovecraft
sonic being an "S tier racist" is something I thought I would never see from an Adam Millard video but here we are.
I would like to take this up and talk about the theater. Because everything is possible in the theater, EVERYTHING. You think theater is just a movie happening live then you've never been in a play where the person sitting next to you – watching the play suddenly fakes a heart attack – and that's part of the play which then becomes a detective story where people from the audience are interrogated even those who really paid for the tickets.
This is some 4th wall breaking.
I known it doesn't come off directly as a lovecraftian game (or even as a "true" horror game), but the way that Katana Zero handles its backstory and the drug Chronos really taps into the unnerving and uncanny in a way I haven't seen many games do.
this video was absolutely amazing!!! it expanded the way i look at art which is completely invaluable, thank you so much 🙂
ALSO if anyone has any music that utilizes this lovecraftian style of horror please let me know!!!! im really interested in pushing music in this direction
I had really hoped you would have used some of the electromagnetic static monsters from S.O.M.A. especially since you had already used one clip from the game in the start of the video.
I think the ultimate example of this Lovecraftian Horror in technology are the algorithms that control everything we see online.
I have often joked about this in the following way:
"The Faceless Judge decides what may be, and what may not.
Some utterings cross this mystical boundary.
For safety reasons it is encouraged not to openly utter these, or your voice may be undone."
19:58
Did some double checking and while the dates are a bit messy, Shadows was written in 1931 and the windmill was legally adopted by the socialist workers party in 1933. To make the note stick you'd need to contend that Lovecraft isn't just grabbing it out of the Eastern mysticism bag where it originally comes from.
'Lovecraft was a racist' is true but has been Flanderized into a meme to the point of uselessness for actual reference. You can argue about 'death of the author' but in the corner there is a fight to change the name of the genre to Eldritch Horror and remove his contribution from it. And while I dislike actual racists, I dislike those who would erase history more.
the description of "My House" sounds like its inspired by the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and not so much HP lovecraft. Sounds super cool ill have to check it out
shadows over innsmouth was written in 1930, in a period where you could be mistaken into thinking Mr. H was a swell guy.
Plus swastika isn't exclusive to nazis, it's a religious and peace symbol in eastern countries.
Trying to "link" nazism as we know today on Lovecraft is not a fun fact, the guy was a paranoid racist… in 1930 america, Black people were treated better in Nazi Germany than they were in America at the time.
me at 14:00 going "oh is he gonna mention eternal darkness? is he? he has to"
16:04 "YES HE DID"
unhomely is NOT the proper translation of the word Unheimlich, the actual translation is "eerie" and/or "spooky".
also the word Unheimlich has not much to do with the word Heim (meaning home), they just look similar.
He mentioned Oneshot!!!
Lovecraft was a good writer and in later life regretted and recanted his earlier world views (these skewed values were most likely originally instilled by those around him and society at that time – context). Why even mention the second (and not looking into it further before making statements) and where did the first come from?
get him out of there
One of my favourite bits about cosmic/eldritch horror is that, before ramping up, it can be really subtle with how wrong something is, so only the observant and/or knowledgable will notice it
Here's an example from MyHouse.WAD (Which I learned from Power Pak): The house has two floors. A main floor, and a basement floor. While that might not sound weird to you or me, people who know a bit about Doom and its engine will know that that shouldn't be possible. Doom's engine takes a 2D map, and projects it to make a 3D space
You can't have a room on top of another room. The engine is incapable of doing that
It's such a small and subtle detail that really means nothing in the grand scheme of the whole map. But, if you've played a lot of Doom, it throws you off. Makes you uneasy. You know something's wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on what. And that's why it's so good. It's that little detail that says "That's not right", that fucks with you for the rest of the experience. I love it so