Gamertell

In the early 1900s, Howard Phillip Lovecraft birthed a pulp horror phenomenon that featured real madness and good writing. Since then his works have inspired multiple movies, games and new fiction being added yearly to the Cthulhu Mythos. The Cthulhu Mythos is a cornucopia collection of works that began with Lovecraft and includes gods, demons, forgotten evils with their attempts to re-manifest themselves into our world and the forbidden knowledge that helps them. Some of the stories that have a bigger showing as part of the Mythos are Call of Cthulhu and The Nameless City.

For a spooky good time, Lovecraft is always worth a read, watch or a play. Enjoy the madness.

One of the first graphics-based games released to the public inspired by Lovecraft was Alone in the Dark. AitD was not based on a specific story but the Cthulhu Mythos as a whole. It takes place in a remote part of New England and deals with dark forgotten evils breaking back into our reality. People involved either end up dead or insane often caused by the dark evils or by the acquiring of forbidden and forgotten knowledge that is usually acquired by the reading of evil tomes.

It’s easy to see how Lovecraft’s stories influenced this game.AitD was coupled with the release of Daughter of Serpents in 1992. The game was rich with Lovecraftian overtones and Egyptian mythology. It also had some of the richest graphics for the time but its shortcoming was that it was too linear and short.

There are numerous other games out there but for, the sake of brevity, I’ll skip to some of the more recent games.

In 2001, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare was released for Playstation and PC. Although it was the fourth game in the series, it was the only one that stayed close to horror roots by taking a turn back to the suspenseful and eerie atmosphere of the original game. While there were no obvious Lovecraft themes, it was the closest the series came to being remotely Lovecraft-related since the first game. It also dealt with forgotten evil trying to break back into our reality and other favorite topics for the Mythos so while it isn’t obviously Lovecraftian, it is based off the Cthulhu Mythos.

The following year, (2002) Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was released on the Nintendo GameCube. After the mysterious murder of her grandfather, the main character stumbles across a strange room with different occult objects and books that are reminiscent of those in Lovecraft’s written reality. It also deals with the “Ancients,” Lovecraft’s Elder Ones, trying to manifest themselves in our reality. The game was the first to use a dynamic sanity system in which the game simulates different glitches, sound errors and even TV errors if madness takes its hold.

The most recent trip into Lovecraft’s mind was released in 2005 for the Xbox and PC. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a mixture two of Lovecraft’s stories: Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Outsider. The game follows Jack Walters, a detective, when he is called in to investigate some disappearances that happened in Lovecraft’s town of Innsmouth. As with all Lovecraft stories, there are cults, monsters, a generally forgotten god (Dagon) and people transforming monsters. It took dynamic sanity system to a new level since it is a first-person survival horror game. Also, unlike most other games, you had to treat your injures. Rather than relying on a HUD however, you had to rely on physical indicators to show what kind of injuries you had to treat.

Site [The H.P. Lovecraft Archive]