Halloween is just around the corner, so in the spirit of spookiness, I’ve been playing a bit of Forgive Me Father, a retro-styled FPS by Byte Barrel inspired by the work of H.P Lovecraft. As a sucker for cosmic horror, I felt I had to give it a go, and while I certainly had fun with the game, it also reminded me that games that cite Lovecraft as an influence are usually playing fast and loose with the truth.
Forgive Me Father is a perfectly competent retro shooter that looks great, handles smoothly and borrows superficially from novels like The Call of Cthulhu and The Colour Out of Space, but It isnot"Lovecraftian" in any meaningful sense.
I was disappointed, but it certainly isn’t the most egregious misuse of the Lovecraftian label I’ve ever seen. Boomer shooters are power fantasies at their core, and cosmic horror is very much the reverse. Just… maybe next time don’t namedrop Lovecraft in the game’s description if you’re not going to meaningfully engage with it, hmm?
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Before we go on, a quick note on what I mean by Lovecraftian, or cosmic horror. Cosmic horror is a horror sub-genre that has its roots in the novels and short stories of early 20th-century author Howard Phillips Lovecraft (hence Lovecraftian). The key idea is the total insignificance of mankind in the face of a vast and incomprehensible universe. The monsters encountered in stories like At The Mountains of Madness are not there so that the protagonists can overcome them, because to even look upon them is to go insane. Some mysteries of the universe are best left untouched.
The genre is not a natural fit for a video game adaptation. Video games are (for the most part) something that you win, or at least try to win, which isn’t a natural fit for cosmic horror. As soon as the enemy becomes something you can fight, or even has a health bar, the sense of futility and hopelessness is slowly eroded. You can certainly have combat and still be cosmic horror, there’s just a very fine balance to it.
Whatever the antagonist may be, it can’t be something the player can defeat by shooting it.
This is the trap games like the 2005 Xbox gameCall of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth fall into. It’s a retelling of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, starting out with subtletybut relying more and more on action-heavy first-person shooter sections as the game goes on. There’s an obvious enthusiasm for Lovecraft’s work, the town of Innsmouth is recreated wonderfully, and the sanity mechanics (similar to those in Amnesia: The Dark Descent) are a nod to one of the more enduring Lovecraftian tropes, but it all goes to waste.
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It all started off so promising too, with private detective Jack Walters having to rely on just his wits to explore the town while avoiding murderous cultists and a corrupt police force. It felt as though the game was building towards something a little more subtle than handing you a machine gun and hurling what might as well be zombies at you for the next eight hours, but unfortunately, that’s exactly what it did. I vividly remember my enthusiasm ebbing away as the rattle of gunfire and the howls of Deep Ones became so much white noise. It wasn’t an awful experience, it just wasn’t what it had led me to believe it was going to be.
2019’sThe Sinking Cityhas similar problems, though at least survival horror is a step closer towards cosmic horror than a first-person shooter is. There’s not quite as much of a bait-and-switch going on, but lacking the confidence to base itself entirely around its narrative and investigative elements, The Sinking City uses combat as a crutch. Battling wylebeasts in the “Infested Zones” felt more than a little jarring, and didn’t do much other than undermine the grim, oppressive, atmosphere the game had been building so carefully. The game has a problem with subtlety generally. There are moments when you venture underwater and watch nonplussed as gigantic Kraken casually drift by. Pelagic Lovecraftian horrors don’t have quite the same impact when you’re looking at them like you would at big fishies at the Sea Life Centre.
If this was a Lovecraft novel, those Krakens would be glimpsed only briefly or kept back as some kind of grand reveal for the finale. There is more to cosmic horror than borrowing monsters from the Necronomicon. So what can developers do to avoid these issues?
Well for a start they can have more confidence. Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope,which made our top 10 games of 2019, proves that narrative, pseudo-1-bit graphics, atmosphere, and clever deductive puzzles are plenty enough to carry a game. Obra Dinn also successfully evokes the eerie otherworldliness that Lovecraft is known for. The fragments you can piece together of what went on aboard the ship hint at forces beyond human reckoning.
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Making the player character a lowly insurance inspector was a stroke of genius. You aren’t a gun-toting private eye or knight in shining armour out to save the day, you’re just there to work out what went wrong. The full horror of what happened to the crew becomes clearer and clearer as you investigate.
If you really want to include some kind of combat, then look tothe brutally difficultbut highly addictiveDarkest Dungeonfor how to do it right. Darkest Dungeon is a rogue-like turn-based RPG where you send small teams of adventurers on expeditions to various dungeons to slay monsters, gather intelligence and prepare yourself for a final assault on the titular “Darkest Dungeon.” Interesting side note: the game’s narrator actually got the job because one of the developers heard himreciting the works of H.P Lovecraft.
The game’s USP, and what makes it work as cosmic horror, is how expendable these heroes are. You have to manage a whole roster of them, and the odds of any of them surviving very long are pretty minimal. They need time to recover from both physical and mental fatigue and the sanity system leaves open the possibility of them losing their minds in all manner of interesting ways. Prolonged exposure to the game’s variety of eldritch horrors might make people selfish and start stealing other heroes' hard-won loot for themselves, or become completely irrational and refuse to eat and restore their strength while camping.
Alternatively, they might just get chopped in half by an enormous pig-man with a halberd.
It’s all drenched in misery and despair, which really lifted my spirits. It’s nice to see a game really embrace cosmic horror so thoroughly. The situation is hopeless, and the best you can do is put off the inevitable; even once you complete the Darkest Dungeon, the canonical ending (which I won’t spoil) sticks resolutely to the game’s themes, to say the least.
So it can be done. All it takes is a bit of imagination and a new perspective. To make a game work as a piece of cosmic horror you have to take a different approach. The gameplay either has to focus on something other than combat, or the combat has to in some way reflect the genre’s themes. It’s no good borrowing a few shoggoths to set the mood, only for them to be mowed en masse when the player is given control. Despair and hopelessness are the name of the game, as bizarre as that may sound.
