Moons of Madness isn't mysterious, or arcane, or particularly threatening. And the difficult nature of the game means that the player certainly feels like you can be snuffed out of existence at any moment. Bloodborne's esoteric and arcane lore, and the indirect nature in which it communicates its backstory, actually does create that sense that the player is just a small piece of a much larger puzzle that you will never fully comprehend. That is why I think that FromSoftware's Bloodborne is perhaps the best video game adaptation of Lovecraft's concepts (even though it is not a direct adaptation of any of his stories). The closer a story adheres to Lovecraft's ideas, the more familiar it becomes, and the harder it is to create that sense of being overwhelmed with unfathomable knowledge that drives a person insane.

In the century since Lovecraft wrote his stories, Lovecraft's monsters have become so iconic that Cthulhu is pretty much a universally-recognized, cliche monster along with the likes of Dracula and the Xenomorph.

It wasn't just that they were ugly or deadly the horror came from the realization that these monsters were part of a much greater cosmos that humans can barely comprehend, and that we are little more than ants to these god-like beings who could snuff us out of existence at a whim - if they even cared enough about us to do so. The key to Lovecraft's horror was the mysterious intractability of his cosmic abominations. It's hard to make a good Lovecraftian horror game. ( < indicates platform I played for review) XBox One (via XBox Live digital download).Ĭoming soon to PlayStation 4 (via PSN digital download), Missed almost all the attempted jump scares because my attention was somewhere elseįalls flat at almost everything it tries to do.Came off as more Resident Evil than Lovecraft.Needing to keep line of sight with certain monsters.

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