1. SPS Accounts:
    Do you find yourself coming back time after time? Do you appreciate the ongoing hard work to keep this community focused and successful in its mission? Please consider supporting us by upgrading to an SPS Account. Besides the warm and fuzzy feeling that comes from supporting a good cause, you'll also get a significant number of ever-expanding perks and benefits on the site and the forums. Click here to find out more.
    Dismiss Notice
Dismiss Notice
You are currently viewing Boards o' Magick as a guest, but you can register an account here. Registration is fast, easy and free. Once registered you will have access to search the forums, create and respond to threads, PM other members, upload screenshots and access many other features unavailable to guests.

BoM cultivates a friendly and welcoming atmosphere. We have been aiming for quality over quantity with our forums from their inception, and believe that this distinction is truly tangible and valued by our members. We'd love to have you join us today!

(If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you've forgotten your username or password, click here.)

Call of Cthulhu - Can it be a Good Game?

Discussion in 'Game/SP News & Comments' started by RPGWatch, Aug 27, 2016.

  1. RPGWatch

    RPGWatch Watching... ★ SPS Account Holder

    Joined:
    Jul 28, 2010
    Messages:
    30,191
    Likes Received:
    30
    [​IMG]PCGamer asks the question of Call of Cthulhu. Can the game use its source material effectively and make a good videogame?

    The part of me doing my job is sitting with developers from Cyanide Studios to talk about their game Call of Cthulhu, to see what's unique about it, if it looks promising. They're friendly, especially lead developer Jean-Marc Gueney. He's lively, and as soon as we start talking about Lovecraft we develop a quick and easy rapport.

    The other part of me is on a witch hunt. While prior games emulating Call of Cthulhu have been fun, they haven't captured what makes Lovecraft great. And Cyanide hasn't just set out to emulate Lovecraft. They're making an official adaptation of the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG, the best game adaptation of Lovecraft ever. The risk is palpable. The Lovecraft fan in me is ready to crucify these men in the most florid prose should they fail my ideological purity test. I pepper them with hard questions (unfair, even) both in-person and later over email.

    "Call of Cthulhu will be an investigation game with strong RPG elements," said Gueney. "The hero, Edward Pierce, will have to find out the truth about the death of a famous artist." Of course, like any Lovecraft story, Cyanide intends for it to get darker from there. The hero will make their way to Dark Water Island, an island off the coast of Lovecraft's favorite New England setting. They'll have to use their character's skills to "discover, explore, and survive" what they find there. Most gameplay will be stealth, investigation, and psychological horror-carefully managing your character's tabletop-faithful Sanity score.

    [...]

    To say that Lovecraft's monsters are "in" right now would be an understatement.

    They are flaming hot. Cthulhu, his face-tentacled Great Old One brainchild, has squirmed its way into the permanent pantheon of geekdom. Video gamers are spoiled for tentacular horrors from other dimensions and the accompanying spirals into madness. Every era of World of Warcraft has included at least one section of content themed after Blizzard's own knock-off brand of Lovecraft. Dark Souls creator Miyazaki's Bloodborne is rife with Lovecraftian gods. The monster from popular Netflix series Stranger Things may well be a Dimensional Shambler.

    But for all this representation, it's rarely true to Lovecraft's writing. Lovecraft's horror is a difficult literary genre to capture because it's really about a problem with no solution. The desire to explore and rationalize, set against the idea that not everything can be understood or perceived by human beings. In the words of critic Jess Nevins, "What Lovecraft created was a specifically twentieth century idea: the universe as an empty, materialist one, in which there is no spiritual meaning to any actions and in which human existence is not significant in any way." The title of Nevins' piece is, in itself, a perfect summation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror's ethos: "To Understand the World Is To Be Destroyed By It."​
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 27, 2016
Sorcerer's Place is a project run entirely by fans and for fans. Maintaining Sorcerer's Place and a stable environment for all our hosted sites requires a substantial amount of our time and funds on a regular basis, so please consider supporting us to keep the site up & running smoothly. Thank you!

Sorcerers.net is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to products on amazon.com, amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.