These are the writers and artists who’ve picked up Lovecraft’s torch and made it work while acknowledging the horror of the man who created it.Ĭall of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game feels tired and cliched, a game from an era when reintroducing Lovecraft to pop culture in the form of a video game was a novelty. But there’s also The Ballad of Black Tom, Lovecraft Country, Alan Moore’s Providence, the work of Thomas Ligotti, and the books Caitlín R. The first season of True Detective is the biggest and flashiest example.
There’s a whole new generation of writers and artists who have taken his themes and done it better, and mostly without all the baggage. His legacy is important, but ultimately, we need to move past it. At his worst, he’s an overwrought and paranoid racist. At his best, he helps us articulate the dread that comes from realizing how small humans are in the grand schemes of things. Lovecraft grotesquely cataloged the fears of white 20th century Americans, but he also gave us a language that we still use to talk about cosmic horror-dread in the face of an unknown and unknowable universe. The Horror at Red Hook is a paranoid catalog of thriving turn of the century New York City culture as viewed through the hateful lens of an unapologetic racist. The Shadow Over Innsmouth implies that miscegenation with Pacific Islanders lead to the deterioration of hearty New England folk into fish people. Even for a person of the time-Lovecraft was born in 1890-Lovecraft’s views were extreme. The other problem with Lovecraft is that he’s deeply and horrifyingly racist. And that story is a problem-it’s the problem. I enjoyed it, but I also got the feeling that my choices didn’t really matter and that the points mainly helped fill in the blanks of by-the-numbers Lovecraft story. There’s some light shooting and forced stealth sections, but Call of Cthulhu is mostly a game about talking to people and looking for clues. “Spot hidden,” for example, reveals new clues that wouldn’t otherwise be there, “medicine” allows Pierce to make more informed judgments about crime scenes, and the “occult” stat increases his grasp of the Lovecraftian mythos.
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It’s a detective game with small RPG flourishes, so Pierce earns investigator points which you can use to upgrade different stats that make it easier for him to gather information from his surroundings and talk to people. It’s set in first person and mostly involves Pierce talking to people and searching for clues. Still, I liked the gameplay in Call of Cthulhu.
This makes for a suitably creepy atmosphere, but it’s all a bit too familiar for anyone with even a passing interest in Lovecraft. There’s also an asylum on a hill, and mysterious hints abound that something strange is going on. When Pierce first gets to the Hawkins Mansion, he finds the inhabitants aren’t too happy that he’s there. The case at hand involves hunting down a famous artist known for her grotesque and macabre paintings. Pierce, a former soldier is haunted by his memories of the war, drinks too much, and uses sleeping pills to block out the nightmares. The result is a drearily familiar narrative culled from deeply toxic material without anything interesting or productive to say about it.Ĭall of Cthulhu is set just after World War I and follows private detective Edward Pierce as he tries to solve a mystery on an island off the coast of New England. To ignore that as Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game does, to not even attempt to reckon with it, is a misstep. Many of his stories, including Call of Cthulhu, include thinly veiled references to cultures and people Lovecraft found alien and objectionable. Call of Cthulhu is not an overtly racist or misogynist game, but the problem with Lovecraft is that the latent themes of xenophobia are inescapable in his work. Lovecraft was a racist who was terrified of women. I own a pair.īut there are good reasons to dump Lovecraft beyond over-saturation of the source material. You can buy Cthulhu-shaped slippers online. Searching for “Cthulhu” on Steam returns more than 1,000 results. In addition to Call of Cthulhu, The Sinking City-another Lovecraft-sourced game-is coming out in March. The consequence of that is, now some 20 years after first reading Lovecraft, I know all his tricks by heart and I’m growing weary of them.
Horror fiction, my favorite genre, exists in his shadow. I’ve been reading Lovecraft and his derivatives since I was a teenager. I didn’t want to have this revelation and I especially didn’t want to have it while playing Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game, a new first-person horror game developed by Cyanide Studios and adapted from the 1981 roleplaying game.
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