The madness in a lot of Lovecraft's stories also could be chalked up, at least in part, to some severe PTSD from being in a life or death encounter with extremely bizarre and alien entities. Extreme trauma and fear leading to a mental breadown. "Madness" wa defined a little more loosely back in Lovecraft's day and a lot of mental disturbances could be classified as madness. The characters in Lovecraft's books end up mentally shaken and damage by their experiences but they don't ALWAYS end up as gibbering madmen slaming their head into a wall repeatedly while chanting alien phrases.
Or: imagine if you uncovered incontrovertible proof of something that shakes the foundation of everything you know.
Imagine coming across previously-censored research, documentation, and religious materials which all confirmed that every single person goes to hell when they die, no matter what, to be tortured forever.
You'd spend the rest of your life in silent doom, or trying to find some strange code by which to live so you can escape judgement, or trying to uncover information that disproves what you've seen, or making millions and spending every dollar trying to become immortal. You would seem to be mad, especially if you tried to explain why.
What made bloodborne horrifying for you?
For me it was those naked fat frickers that sonichu roll at you. >Mfw it actually glitched through the level and fricking hit me later and killed me right when I engaged the boss.
Amygdala is one of the best fricking designs and encounters for a cosmic horror entity in all video games.
>When you first encounter it you can't even see it, you're just grabbed and driven insane while squeezed to death by an invisible entity >Can't see it until you have enough insight - ie seen enough crazy bullshit to finally comprehend it >When you fight it it becomes so desperate to defeat you it tears its own arms off without a thought to use as clubs against you >You basically learn nothing about it other than they're hostile higher beings from a different plane of existence
The Orz are a "species" you encounter in Star Control 2. If you go to the coordinates where you're told a cyborg breakaway race is hanging out, you only find these odd creatures that talk to you in an unsettlingly disjointed way. They appear goofy, and almost comical, but under their appearance, something doesn't feel right. They are uncanny at an existential level.
As it turns out, and as they are fairly honest about in their own way, they are the realspace extensions of a single massive creature that is totally alien to our reality, reaching through the underside of the complex mesh of the fabric of multidimensional spacial reality and coming through as what they appear as to you. The Androsynth are nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be found. And if you buddy up to the Orz, and you only later stumble across the archetypal "grey/green" ancient aliens of the game named the Arilou who give you express warnings not to do that and how important it is for you not to do that, you feel a biting sense of dread. Because, where as due to the Arilou's tampering humans were previously invisible to such creatures, you just gave a bigger fish humanity's address.
Take 2, because I words.
In Star Control II there was a race of artificial humans called Androsynth that rebelled and created their own civilization separate from humanity.
Humanity themselves had been historically visited by an alien race known as the Arilou (Which are just Greys) who seemingly made modifications to them to protect them from extra-dimensional beings. The Androsynth were "human" but had no protection, thus an entity from quasi-space replaced them in space-time with biological "extensions" of itself in the form of yellow parrot fish aliens.
correct.
You can't really make it work as a game. The game would have to be some slide of life shit where that sort of thing unfolds over time. Lovecraft gives you little hints and the whole stories are always and edging experience waiting for the MC to stop trying to be sane and deny whats in front of them.
The current games that they have, you show up and immediately your greated by a man who is clearly a fish.
You shouldn't even talk to anyone who isn't normal until act 2, and even then it should be something realy subtle, like a bizarre mannerism or body language or speech pattern.
You can make it work in a game, you basically just stated how. You don't show the eldritch abominations themselves. Instead you show the effect they have on humans. There are all kinds of disturbing fricked up body horror things you can do such as wriggling tendrils growing out of people's eyes, distorted faces, etc. Avoid the tired boring stuff like big teeth and red eyes, and focus on body horror themes of infestation, injury, and disease instead. Event Horizon style flashes of obscene horror images can also work.
this is kind of why I find Bloodborne to be the best game on the market that does it right
Insight is a very genius mechanic and lends itself well to the concept
Thats the reason why all endgame bosses in PoE are just agents of some big cosmic horror, never the cosmic horror itself. You're fighting a whole bunch of Dagons and Hydras but never Cthulhu itself.
The fact that we can discern it's shape, size and ability makes it a fathomable existence. This is the reason why the Souls formula stumbles with cosmic horror, the mere thought of being able to fight these beings (and fricking kill them) is moronic.
Sometimes showing the monster completely absolutely destroys the terror it generates. Alien is the biggest example of this.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Nah, Alien is considered a horror classic for a reason.
The original was a fantastic horror film and Aliens was a fantastic action horror.
Anything else is absolute trash, but you can't say the xenomorph design isn't absolute iconic
9 months ago
Anonymous
The FIRST ONE is a horror classic, because for most of the movie, you can't see most of the fricking thing.
The later ones when they're running through open air and the humans are blasting them with lasers? Nobody fricking cares.
9 months ago
Anonymous
only because xenomorphs make me horny
fricking h r giger you bastard
this and denying information to the player about the horror, it's there and it's dangerous and there's no convenient cult with a PDA somewhere that just explains it and ruins the suspense
aren't the Combine fighting a war against a type 3 civilization ? for them earth its like a playground and that's why they don't give a frick about earth in that game after they conquer it
Earth is to the Combine as some backwater island tribe was to the British Empire. The synths you fight in the games aren't even something the Combine bother to create; they self-reproduce. >"vast, meteorological intelligences"
The frick did Breen see? >G-man, a time-travelling teleporter is forced to play guerilla warfare against them and can be contained with half a dozen vortigaunts
In my experience, its usually because of the perspective of scale. They put the human viewpoint the same as the creatures, or tone down the creatures size, so the human looks at things from a view of dominance, whereas it'd work better if the cosmic horror were fricking massive and all you could really see from your perspective were like a mass of moving tentacles all over the horizon you can barely even see the origin of, and at most like 1 massive eye the size of a city looking down at you from the sky, just noticing you, which would have some massive negative effect.
homie they can't even do it properly in any other visual medium. Cosmic horror relies on ambiguity and subtlety faaar too much for it to ever be truly effective in a visual medium.
Because every homosexual in existence who does adaptations of this genre only know how to inspiration from Lovecrafts' shit. Granted he's the grandaddy of the genre for the most part but there are soooo many other authors who did their own thing that you could pick from.
Lovecraft was a cheap pulp magazine author, read any of his contemporaries and the writing will be almost identical. He's only remembered now because of chance. Glad to see the actual visionaries get some credit
Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson for one. I'll add Laird Barron but you probably wouldn't like his stuff at all just going off the reactions from everyone else I've suggested him to here.
Mah homieh! I wish he would write another cosmic horror novel instead of this hardboiled crime shit he's been doing for the last few years now.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Some of his short stories were among the most unsettling literature I have ever read too
9 months ago
Anonymous
I don't know what it is, the children of old leech just.. DO IT for me.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Which ones did it for you?
9 months ago
Anonymous
Anything that ties into the Old Leech mythos. I love the recurring mentions of it in his other stories, when a character mentions the Great Dark, or stumbles upon the Black Guide. Mysterious Tremendum and The Men From Porlock are great short stories from that universe if you haven't read them, but there are many others.
It's a bit silly considering there were other creatures in Lovecraft's work, iirc the ones from The Mountains of Madness were plant/fungi in nature, and one of the stories is basically about the birth and life of the Antichrist who I think eventually becomes a sort of goatheaded minotaur beast and is killed unceremoniously by a guard dog
There's also a story where some generic guy bodies and places with a giant alien centipede and basically usurps their entire power structure to become their ruler while the alien in his body goes insane and gets killed by a hunter
It's like trying to write medieval fantasy without making it Tolkienish. You have to first purge your mind of all that and then come up with something brand new and unique. It's not easy.
Because morons have only surface level understanding of lovecraft's work.
His best horror story is the Color out of Space anyways, and it doesn't feature any tentacles.
The Color Out of Space is absolutely his best, the movie was total dog shit though. AHHHH IT'S PURPLE HELP!
did you know magenta doesn't actuzlly exist
there's no wavelength associated with the color magenta
it is purely a creation of our brains to fill avoid for somethig that doesnt exist in our reality
sometimes i think that without the capacity to perceive colors that dont exist like magenta, our brains might just crash instead
the good ones imo strike an extremely delicate balance. you have to make the player's actions and struggles meaningless in the grand scheme of things, yet the game has to be satisfying to play. games i have seen nail it the hardest are fear & hunger, and/or anything by yames. you basically don't win in any of them, only struggle against infinitely stronger cosmic forces, you are always swallowed by them in the end.
The Color Out of Space is absolutely his best, the movie was total dog shit though. AHHHH IT'S PURPLE HELP!
>His best horror story is the Color out of Space
supreme taste anons
never have them directly appear but still have very apparent effects on gameplay and story. if the player is to combat them in any way it will be narratively indirect so that even if you succeed the encounter, the player never truly defeats the cosmic horror.
fear and hunger does this right. every single fight with an older god isn't an actual fight with the old god but a tiny figment of it
i was looking for this. the game keeps constantly subtly hinting at just how ridiculously powerful the old gods are
never have them directly appear but still have very apparent effects on gameplay and story. if the player is to combat them in any way it will be narratively indirect so that even if you succeed the encounter, the player never truly defeats the cosmic horror.
fear and hunger does this right. every single fight with an older god isn't an actual fight with the old god but a tiny figment of it
lovecraft was ahead of his time because seeing something from the 4th dimension would look like one big tentacle with one end being its birth and the other end where it dies
the game also shows how a new god gets completely btfo by just the echo of an older god. for context, imagine zeus trying to fight nyarlathotep and getting deleted
>Why does cosmic horror= Space tentacles? Why not something that is made of the void?
Wanna know the biggest problem with cosmic horror? Biggest problem is knowing that it's coming. The best are the subversive ones, like the film Akira. You have biker gangs, poverty, zealot followers, civil unrest, military coup, back stabbing politics, egoism, bitter friendships. All of it strikes a cord in the human spirit, but is all utterly fricking meaningless when you ascend. I always thought the very end was there just to trip you out, but the lucid journey is you having a first person perspective taste of leaving your humanity.
As I said, the film Akira has themes that are meaningful to the human condition, but when you get to the very end you peep behind the curtain. Then on a repeat viewing you start to notice the signs were there all along with the espers.
>the film Akira has themes that are meaningful to the human condition
yeah, just like every single other thing produced by humans. this doesn't mean anything. a category that encompasses everything encompasses nothing.
I've already explained my argument, you just haven't grasped the point of the very end.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>I've already explained my argument
Yeah so? Then you started quoting Game of Thrones which hurt your argument. The other guy did nothing but call you moronic and is still more convincing than you.
9 months ago
Anonymous
He talked shit at me so I talked shit back because that's the language he understands, understand?
9 months ago
Anonymous
You suck at talking shit if you think Game of Thrones lines are good comebacks.
The film is a different story to the comics. I shouldn't have to explain that to you.
9 months ago
Anonymous
Sure it's different.
Still doesn't go into cosmic horror. It's body horror at best.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>Still doesn't go into cosmic horror. It's body horror at best.
The film is literally about ascension and at the very end you get the first person momentary experience of Tetsuo leaving his humanity as if you're doing it. That's the subversive cosmic horror moment, you experiencing being above humanity. There's no reason for that section to exist if it was just a dumb story.
Also for the record, you would also know that the film was completed before the ending for the manga was completed. I think the manga sucks compared to the anime.
9 months ago
Anonymous
The manga has some cool pages that if you read on a screen and scroll up and down real fast the images look 3D.
>Why does cosmic horror= Space tentacles?
Lovecraft made a running metaphor of the cosmos and void of space comparing it to the deep abyss of the ocean.
Everyone afterwards took the metaphor at face value and now considers the deep void of the cosmos ocean life and fish.
No, tentacles are based. Its a great trope that should be expanded upon. A ton of things in the ocean look entirely alien to all other forms of life that we're familiar with on land, in the ground, and in the air. They're strange with physical morphology and reproductive methods unlike anything else.
Where people go wrong is just showing spoogy tentacle space monster. What if space was an entire ocean teeming with strange life? What if there are giant space whales, amorphous blobs reaching out and probing celestial bodies like an amoeba, worms undulating through every inch of space just outside our atmosphere? That'd be spoopy.
i want more geometric elder gods. all of evangelion angels are perfect examples of cosmic horror
Is there a name for media that has the themes of cosmic horror despite not actually being "horror" because Evangelion is it with the way the characters are fighting totally alien and unknowable threats then they all melt into a goo.
For me its Leliel.
Its true body is a thin black mass that in itself is a pocket dimension. The 3D orb seen floating about the true body is actually its shadow. Fall inside it and it makes you hallucinate and fricks with your memories.
With extreme difficulty
It would probably not be a very good game, since it implicitly has a bad ending and makes the player feel completely powerless.
I think the way to properly do it would be to have a complete contrast in visual tone and style to the rest of the game. Make it the only 3D thing in a 2D game or something
Also make it undefeatable or approachable. Maybe you see it way in the background or forever just out of reach. Never able to truly see the entire entity all at once
>The story behind Siren is peak horror
Are you talking about Forbidden Siren? I vaguely remember those games. Sneaking around zombies looking through their eyes, right?
I dont remember Siren 2, but the first one was about a huge bug god which fell to Earth and was eaten, causing his rage. And yes, thats the gameplay pattern, I never played Forbidden Siren, just 1 and 2 though.
That's a bullshit meme though. It's not actually something Lovecraft did much at all. Usually he was very descriptive. This is why, for example, everyone knows what Cthulhu is supposed to look like. Lovecraft actually described him in detail same as he described most things in detail.
That only goes for what the people that also get estranged by a Black person think while also somewhat describing whatever thing they are facing. >Oh good how can that be, what an unspeakable indescribable horror this creature is, looking like a fish crossed with a man.
Of course some things are left vague but that really only goes for the real big fish in the cosmic pond, like pic related.
It wouldn't be cosmic horror if it could be easily described. Beside if you read more of lovecraft stuff you would know that some of his stories do describe various beings very well.
I liked how Colour out of Space was described as hard to describe because supposedly the creature existed in another dimension. Same way how if we would fall through a 2D plane with a 2D man in it, he could never see our true form, only parts of us as weird floating blobs in the 2D air, he wouldn't even recognize a human figure unless we would be in a very specific position when passing through the 2D-world in our 3D form and even then he would only see a human silhouette for a split second.
The idea that our eyes are simply not developed to properly see some monster who is partially made of time itself and other light spectrums is creepy, because the creature could still easily see us, the way we could easily see the 2D man with our eyes, while he can't really look at us properly with his 2D eyes. The tentacles sucking off your juices and turning you into a grey melted zombie are there but your eyes can't see them. They're like nuclear radiation.
lovecraft was ahead of his time because seeing something from the 4th dimension would look like one big tentacle with one end being its birth and the other end where it dies
9 months ago
Anonymous
lmao get a load of this 3rd dimension ningen trying to imagine a dimension he is entirely lacking
9 months ago
Anonymous
yeah, the big tentacle is how a 4 dimensional creature would appear to US in the 3rd dimension. its real form is whats incomprehensible. kinda like the flatlander seeing vivisections of an apple passing through the 2nd dimension
You fricking homosexual, that's not what he did at all. He described almost all of his horrors in great detail. Frick, he even provided a drawing of Cthulhu in a letter to some butthole. Frick people like you who have never read him, yet have the gall to tell anyone anything about his works. Go back to school, you teenage c**t.
I like how he wrote a story called The Unnamable and the titular creature which is so horrifying that it cannot be named is thoroughly described when encountered.
9 months ago
Anonymous
He was a cheeky c**t like that. In all seriousness, I think he just liked all the weird stuff far too much and was too autistic in his love for detail not to describe whatever he conjured up in his mind.
9 months ago
Anonymous
I can describe this image to you in great detail, but I can never do it justice versus looking at it. Certain things are hard for our visual cortex to process.
Like Arkham Knight, with the way Joker appears on a billboard but then doesn't when you look back.
Non-Euclidean spaces like most of those first-person horror puzzle games, but for people.
why are people so scared of fictional tentacle monster cosmic horror stuff when something like the sun is 10000x bigger and more destructive than this, and something like a black hole is so powerful it destroys the fabric of reality? those are things that actually exist, the existential dread is real, you don't need to make up stuff
I think will and purpose of intent are fundamentally necessary to any sort of horror. Besides the sun being something you live with every day and black holes being something everyone is exposed to in 3rd grade science, they don't have a will of their own, they're just a force of nature. An eldritch being has motivations, even if it's just survival, and often their motivations are beyond our own understanding.
A lack of understanding I think is also important, which is why so much horror relies on the supernatural and mystery. If you know everything about the monster that's killing everyone off, it's not quite as horrifying. It'd be like being hunted by a tiger VS some ridiculous alien abomination.
i think i have to disagree
i feel cosmic horror is at it's strongest when the horror is almost more like a natural fisaster than a sentient being
i think the closest one can get to the feel of cosmic horror in the real world would be to climb the everest and then stand at the edge
the "immensity of the universe" is just too immeasurably big to even get a reaction out of most people, but the everest and other such massive mountains are tangible and high enough that it can evoke a similar feeling that's close enough
Wouldnt an easy way to replicate that in a game be that if you come into contact with the creature, that it deletes your save (aka drives you insane)? Would build a natural dread of wanting to avoid it at all costs
Horror that relies too much on loss of progress to punish the player for failure typically devolve into frustration and lose their sense of horror as the game drags on. If you're just dying repeatedly or getting your save deleted and being forced to replay the same parts over and over it'll become repetitive and annoying.
You can't really, because it's hard to base gameplay around the concept of something being so otherworldly it shatters one's sanity.
It's extremely difficult to convincingly portray someone losing their own perception of reality through a video game, so it's best alluded to but never made the main focus.
Cosmic horror can't be done in any medium anymore.
It was based around the fear of unknown.
Modern human is overloaded with information and its ease of access to the point that average person can't even fathom a theoretical paranormal experience of dealing with something unexplainable.
Back then something as trivial as encountering people of different ethnicity was already an uncanny experience to most.
The best horror these days is the relatable horror of controlled information. A false reality controlled by powers above you, you only ever know what you are allowed to know and your knowledge is carefully curated by others.
And then there is the horror of the mob. That the majority overrules all else. An individual's perceptions are nothing in the ocean of powerful ignorance, of the masses who decided what truth is.
Times have changed and you can't really talk about races and mixing bloodlines anymore. Even if you do have something like a half-lovecraftian monstrosity, you're not allowed to draw any parallels to race mixing and the disgust it elicits. Radiation, mutations, parasites etc. sorta work, but it's not quite the same.
That said I'd kill for a At the Mountains of Madness game.
You best start believing in cosmic horrors, you're living in one.
https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/the-gig-economy
I think there's untapped potential in AI to render mindfricking scenery
You can go the body horror route. Imagine trans-animal people physically altering themselves or a trans-attack helicopter metal man ala Tetsuo. There's a lot you can do to play on the horrors of modern day
Lovecraft actually tackles this as well, in a way. Consider this opening paragraph from The Call of Cthulhu:
>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
>flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age
He wasn't that far off in predicting the current age. Masses lost sense of wonder, discovery and adventure with mundane fears reigning supreme by and large.
Man, Astral chain could have been so good if it stopped trying to choke you to death with shitty minigames and stealth sections to keep you from the good parts.
That's my point. He's pretty much the codifier and yet I find that so many of his contemporaries or those that followed in his footsteps did FAAAR better with the genre then he ever did.
>the founder of a genre doesn't include all of the advances that later successors found and build upon
that's crazy
Next you'll tell me that many of the early 3D games had poor camera controls, that's unhinged man, real cosmic horror right here
Just stop sucking him off so much. His stuff always comes off like a high school freshmen wrote it and its cringe.
9 months ago
Anonymous
what you said applies to most creators of most things in existence
The first tries are rarely the best, but that does not mean that you cannot learn from them either
9 months ago
Anonymous
And yet even though the original bits aren't actually the best, Black folk continue to suck it off as the best. That's the issue. I'd struggle to call any of HPs stories "great" by any means.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>I have shit taste
We know, go read Lumley or smth
9 months ago
Anonymous
Nah. Machen's Pan story shits all over the vast majority of HPs shit. Sorry you're the one with the unrefined, milquetoast taste.
9 months ago
Anonymous
>irrelevant literal who
Yea ok buddy
9 months ago
Anonymous
there's far worse writers (who are also considered founding members) of early gothic litterature to blame rather than HP lol
9 months ago
Anonymous
Arthur Machen did cosmic horror better than Lovecraft ever did.
That's my point. He's pretty much the codifier and yet I find that so many of his contemporaries or those that followed in his footsteps did FAAAR better with the genre then he ever did.
Didn't he literally invent cosmic horror?
Lovecraft did not invent cosmic horror, people were writing stories that you would consider "lovecraftian" decades before he was born.
>Build expectation of REAL lovecraft being the kind of shit that is not actually possible in video games >Actually read Lovecraft >CoC has Cthulu get it's head blown up after being rammed with a steam boat >The dunwich horror is straight up destroyed by the protagonists
Not all protags go insane, either.
And at times the genuine intended 'horror' is shit like, "And it turns out my great grandpappy was a Black person"
And things that are even slightly out of the ordinary being presented as something terrifying.
Literally "Ahhhh a tentacle help me Black personman I'm going insane"
Interesting reads, but more for the window into how Lovecraft viewed the world moreso than being actual good horror.
Dude clearly had an anxiety disorder or some shit.
This is one my favorite ones, just that sudden realization of helplessness in front of impending doom at the end I think is what defines the genre.
I was the same. I read all of his works and the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was a wild ride, but holy shit it needed some chapters. It just WENT AND WENT AND WENT and never slowed down.
Certainly not like Control, what a piece of shit game
I know, I know, it's not that bad, but average titles are much worse than stuff that's outright shit for me. Control was every bit safe and bland, where it had the potential to be every bit as schizo and convoluted as the lore implied. Imagine looking at the SCP and thinking to yourself "that was great, I loved the human characters!"
That's leaning towards that SCP homosexualry more than anything else really. SCP is a homosexual reddit tier modern offshoot of cosmic horror and its thoroughly awful.
Well, yeah. The game leaned toward the modern approach to the foundation with its multiple canons and focus on poor interpersonal drama, instead of just stealing the good concept behind the original SCP idea and expanding it their own way
Saya's Song
Squirrel Stapler
That one fishing game whose name I forgot that just came out, Dredge or Drudge or something (sorry I got really high and cant do shit right tonight)
Eat a dick, you know what I meant, sorry I don't weeb the frick out every time I need to talk about a Japanese game. By the way I fricking like the game so much I bought it, do you own it? Then shut the frick up.
Ara ara boku no nihongo no geimu tbh, kore wa meccha no taisetsuna koto uwu
The only thing it really did well was the ending.
The only game that really comes close was Yahtzee's mythos series where all 3 games wrap into the same story and the ending is basically makes everything you did pointless because your comprehension of events is on the immediate, not on what those events rotated around.
You need to go into full on schizo game territory for anything applicable honestly. >Stars Die >Zelle >Siphonopolis >Cube Gothic >Signalis
Shit like that.
Is Signalis even Lovecraftian? I only played it once, on launch but it was (to me) way more of some 2001 type of shit than a cosmic horror story. It took on a LC-ian art style towards the end but I dont remember anything too crazy about it.
More so in the secret ending, and not so much Lovecraftian specifically (given that The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers factors heavily into the plot).
I'll also throw out the entire Saturn Quest trilogy, made by the same guy who did Cube Gothic. Those games have some of the singular best cosmic horror I've come across once you figure out the general gist of the plot.
that's just a typical horror story from the monster's POV, there's nothing eldritch or even supernatural about a creature that can be kiled with conventional weapons
>there's nothing eldritch or even supernatural about a creature that can be kiled with conventional weapons
Dude, Cthulhu got defeated by a dude sailing a ship into his giant ass.
Plenty of Lovecraftian creatures can be killed by conventional weaponry, Gods are far from the only thing in his settings.
>there's nothing eldritch or even supernatural about a creature that can be kiled with conventional weapons
Dude, Cthulhu got defeated by a dude sailing a ship into his giant ass.
Not really defeated, Cthulhu basically just woke super early from a nap, got bonked on the head and decided to frick off back to sleep because he's not a dictator or conqueror, he's a fricking priest.
Would any of the katamari damacy titles count? One way or another you have an entity regularly breaking and repairing the sky, using all sorts of things, living creatures and people included, to do the job. Often times the balls start the size of a thimble and grows and grows with no apparent limit as it collects more stuff to add to its mass. All to be used to recreate whatever celestial body or bodies that were lost in the king's last drunken bender.
And every living creature that gets rolled up screams. Initially. Yet all those who have experienced being rolled up into a katamari have described it as joyful or rapturous.
I honestly don't get what people find so scaaawy about this scenario if a planet eater showed up I'd of course be sad that I and everyone I love were about to die but the wtf am I supposed to do about it?
The government is way scarier because they can actually cause tangible long term suffering and ostracize you from your family and friends plus there's also the stress of thinking there *might* be something you can do about it
Encased does it pretty nicely, it's presented as a straight sci-fi RPG but you start getting the cosmic horror around quarter way through. Giant bottomless holes opening up in the ground that drive science teams insane, stuff like that.
It's great if you're not a shitter who only plays gay pride parade RPG's like Pathfinder and expects RPG's to have romance and all that lame crap
invested moron, it is missed opportunity the game. They had an amazing premise that goes straight into the gutter when you finish prologue in favor of making bootleg fallout out of it.
To me, the best cosmic/existential horror game I played was space engine. The sheer scale of the cosmos that simulation can depict is terrifying to me. Cosmic horror doesn't need muh supernatural or some weird unknowable eldrich aliens, all it needs is the sheer scale of the cosmos itself and our insignificance in the face of it.
We are so fricking tiny and I fear it.
https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
You are moronic if you think some liminal horror bs is even comparable to the sheer terror of how fricking huge the universe is and how tiny we are in it. Most zoomers haven't even fricking seen a starlit sky in their entire lives, whereas I've lived large chunks of my life on the countryside and vividly remember staring at the night sky with awe, and later with forboding fear as my understanding of our place in the universe grew.
Some of my earliest terrors relate to fearing asteroids impacting earth, or sun swallowing our planet as it expanded, because I watched way too many science documentaries as a wee lad. One of the most terrifying nightmares I've ever had was one where I saw two moons on the night sky, but one of them was rapidly growing in size as it was falling towards earth.
Depends on how you look at it. I find it comforting because it means we're a tiny part of a greater whole, and everything we do only matters an infinitely tiny amount. It means we're truly free to find our own meaning and purpose without worrying about some higher plan, and then we die and return to the stardust we came from. The universe doesn't care if I'm handsome and super successful or make 300K a year. It's OK if I'm overweight and hairy if I make enough to live on and develop a skill I enjoy like making miniature occult relics or training my dog to sniff out buried patchouli sacks.
>or sun swallowing our planet as it expanded,
Thats like 8 billion years away. Bit too early to be scared of that. Sun will grow and scorch Earth into an uninhabitable desert wasteland a billion years from now, way earlier than it swallows us.
I know this feel I had a book on ancient Egypt as a kid and I was like 7 when I read about how they stuck hooks up the noses of the dead to pull out their brains and I was inconsolable for like 4 days
You sound like a moron? You read how big the universe is but don't understand how big it actually is, nothing will happen in your life time that in any way has anything to do with the universe beyond Jupiter.
this
i am terrified of black holes tbh
but if they looked like this
why are people so scared of fictional tentacle monster cosmic horror stuff when something like the sun is 10000x bigger and more destructive than this, and something like a black hole is so powerful it destroys the fabric of reality? those are things that actually exist, the existential dread is real, you don't need to make up stuff
Where the FRICK do you think the concept of C O S M I C horror even comes from? Dipshit. You just described the very basic tenets of cosmic horror you fricking mongoloid.
>that one video detailing the future of the universe >pass the ages of stars and galactic systems where only black holes exist >due to the strength of their immense gravitational pulls they will eventually engage in a cosmic dance while producing their own forms of music to set the tone
I thought that part was nice until you realize that it comes along at the halfway point. Everything after that is total energy death.
I don't find this shit spooky at all, I find it comforting
no matter how fricked up this moron ball is, the universe is so incomprehensibly huge that, by the laws of mathematics, nice places must also exist
why are people so scared of fictional tentacle monster cosmic horror stuff when something like the sun is 10000x bigger and more destructive than this, and something like a black hole is so powerful it destroys the fabric of reality? those are things that actually exist, the existential dread is real, you don't need to make up stuff
Cosmic horror is precisely that existential dread presented as a pulp detective story.
Image spam dumps with no context or any thoughts to write in a comment with the pics are easy ways to spot a bad game. Him spoiling it just cements that the game is for morons and not worth checking out.
>Y-you can't show it
Call of Cthulhu >Y-you can't ram the motherfricker with a steam-powered yacht so hard it goes back into its stupid non-Euclidean city
Call of Cthulhu
I love horror but I read the first book in the series and it freaked me out so much. Same with that "I am a search and rescue officer" series on Reddit, you can talk as much shit about that site as you want but thats some good creepypasta.
>interdimensional teleporting bigfoot
Damn.. I knew he was a bigfoot gay, but I was just getting slightly intrigued with the Missing 411 stuff. Thanks for the info.
He is at the very least somewhat tactful in that he doesn't say it outright when talking to the families of victims. He admits it in a couple interviews though, and the entire end section of one of his movies is about bigfoot sightings lmao
That's only because the AI model was trained with a dataset containing too many ducks. Imagine the same webm except instead of ducks and fish it's locusts and human faces
Sadly not. What you see on acid is pretty wild but not like how you imagined it before the trip. What you think is the really crazy shit you couldn't really comprehend to be possible before the trip. All the lsd art you see is about the brain, not your vision.
>Webm
Salvia gave me this effect for about 15 minutes, though it was in the house rather than outside. Shit was melting into everything. I really started to question reality.
>I really started to question reality.
really highlights how dumb normies are. you should get the same realization just discovering the blind spot in elementary or whenever your teacher blows your mind with it.
>Webm
Salvia gave me this effect for about 15 minutes, though it was in the house rather than outside. Shit was melting into everything. I really started to question reality.
First time I smoked that shit was the highest grade XXX shit you could find, with the butane torch lighter to get it heated enough.
By the time I finished blowing out the bong rip, the whole goddamn world melted away and I was on the set of the Big Comfy Couch for what seemed like days, which eventually melted away back to reality where for the next 2 hours I saw little demons from Diablo (the Fallen that scream "RAKANISU") in the shadows everywhere yelling "he's seen us, flee!!" anytime I looked at them.
Same with the US. Could walk into any head shop in Florida and pick up that absolute insanity, and it would leave you high as a kite for the next like 6 hours after the trip ended. It was nuts.
>I needed to smoke salvia to realize my brain constructs my perception of reality
wait. was this NOT the realization you made? was the realization actually something much stupider? like that your brain ISN'T constructing reality, and that the drug "opened your mind"? then I underestimated how dumb you are
Bloodborne was missed potential. matthewmattosis was right. what's the point of such great setting when the game is poor action rpg with very little actual adventure.
>Build expectation of REAL lovecraft being the kind of shit that is not actually possible in video games >Actually read Lovecraft >CoC has Cthulu get it's head blown up after being rammed with a steam boat >The dunwich horror is straight up destroyed by the protagonists
Not all protags go insane, either.
And at times the genuine intended 'horror' is shit like, "And it turns out my great grandpappy was a Black person"
And things that are even slightly out of the ordinary being presented as something terrifying.
Literally "Ahhhh a tentacle help me Black personman I'm going insane"
Interesting reads, but more for the window into how Lovecraft viewed the world moreso than being actual good horror.
Dude clearly had an anxiety disorder or some shit.
never have them directly appear but still have very apparent effects on gameplay and story. if the player is to combat them in any way it will be narratively indirect so that even if you succeed the encounter, the player never truly defeats the cosmic horror.
fear and hunger does this right. every single fight with an older god isn't an actual fight with the old god but a tiny figment of it
>play engineer girl >fight the moon >it fricks off after you hit it enough >she becomes a rocket engineer so she can go back to the moon for round 2
kino
No, tentacles are based. Its a great trope that should be expanded upon. A ton of things in the ocean look entirely alien to all other forms of life that we're familiar with on land, in the ground, and in the air. They're strange with physical morphology and reproductive methods unlike anything else.
Where people go wrong is just showing spoogy tentacle space monster. What if space was an entire ocean teeming with strange life? What if there are giant space whales, amorphous blobs reaching out and probing celestial bodies like an amoeba, worms undulating through every inch of space just outside our atmosphere? That'd be spoopy.
Bloodborne atmosphere + good writing+ dredd and hopeless
You need to start slow and steady, main character investigate a city/town where people disappear without a trace , while some get their wishes overnight . The atmosphere its not bad at the start of the game, even a nice one, but further you advance, the worse it get. You don't show the God/cosmic horror, only in the end or only glimpses
you have to reconstruct the reality around the protagonist and his helpers, from being a good man with a strong mind and spirit to a shell
Its hard to make a game like that, especially made by modern developers who are a bunch of gays. While the budget need to be over 100 million to make it look good.
A completely normal game that has no horror elements with some optional path in side content that leads you to witness some crazy shit that is never elaborated upon again
there is absolutely nothing i could possibly see or be told that would drive me even slightly crazy, unless there was some kind of stupid magic or "eldritch influences" involved. i have literally jerk offd to things that lovecraft would put into his books to spook his characters.
I think the difference between seeing something in a form of media, such as a video game or book, vs actually encountering it IRL are completely lost upon you, anon.
Seeing a picture of a lion and sitting right next to one in the same room IRL is literally 1:1 exactly the same experience and nothing could ever convince me otherwise.
I think the difference between seeing something in a form of media, such as a video game or book, vs actually encountering it IRL are completely lost upon you, anon.
True, it's like "I can drive at 110MPH in game why can't I do it in real life!?".
let's talk Bloodborne bros what are some Easter eggs, whats the story about and how can i erase my memories of playing it so i can experience anew again
Threadly reminder that Lovecraft basically always described the horrors in great detail and the "OH MY GOD IT'S INDESCRIBABLE I'M GOING INSAAAAANE" is complete horseshit. The only true part of this is that he sometimes described the pure sight of these monstrosities as enough to send many men into delirium, but the protagonists often withstood this as well.
Read some of his stuff if you get the chance. It's pretty good, though his style can be a bit tedious. He also wrote about much more than just muh cosmic horror. One of my favorite short stories of his that has nothing to do with the Old Ones etc. is Polaris. It's a quick read if you fancy having a go now.
California being in charge of the internet and so pushing their personal values on literally the rest of the world, even though it's proven to not work.
action horror for this case,
1 (NOT demake) is perfect as an experience, 2 is better at action espect along with 'le cinematic cutscenes' but those are cool in that specific case so it's fine
Concluse 2 unrionically does it very well for a recent indie game. Some of the enemies are literally damn near indescribable (certain ones are so impossible that they have actual "censor blur" on them to represent the fact that they're too horrible to actually comprehend). And the lore helps a bunch too, form what little I've gathered.
Other picks are stuff like Golden Light, Where The Dead Cremate The Roadkill, and especially Torutaru. Games where the cosmic horrors are genuinely not just all encompassing, but hard to define without making you come across as an actual schizo.
More likes it hides it in expansion entirely. Base game story doesn't really have that much existentialism, it is much more about man made horrors and hubris.
You can't do it properly, the core of the concept is something vastly beyond your comprehension and videogames love showing you the monster, explaining it and having you fight it
Dwell, which is what that's from. An even-ish mix of great maps and some mediocre.
Arcane Dimensions, obviously. The Quake gold standard.
After that it varies. Imhoptep's legacy, The Warden, there's loads of great maps. The xmasjams are good go-to's. The recent Dimension of the Machine was really fun. Just go looking, you're bound to find something cool.
There are so many details that make this comic amazing to me.
>fingerless gloves >lunchables with capri sun >rat tail hair >bomber jacket covered in old 80s cartoon patches >etc
A super autist being the main character is perfect given the context of the whole thing.
[...]
I don't understand the premise of this. Badly drawn cartoons of people torturing an ostensibly fluffy sapient creature, for what purpose? Is it a fetish?
If you've ever heard of Happy Tree Friends, it's sort of like that. Typically the 'fluffies' are arrogant, stupid, and obnoxious, or otherwise asking for it. They're usually an invasive species and pests, or sometimes they're pets that are impossible to truly domesticate and just piss and shit everywhere. I remember there being a decent number of comcis where one or two of them were well behaved and treated well, while the rest were shitty brats that would inevitably get tortured to death or somehow get themselves killed.
>Badly drawn cartoons
Comes with being niche, we don't get to pick who contributes. >people torturing
Not necessarily, might as well be the indifference of nature or prospect of profit. >an ostensibly fluffy sapient creature
Merely sentient. >for what purpose?
Why does a forest burn?
can you stop shitting the thread
im trying to immerse myself into the feeling of the sublime
i'm not shitposting, i actually consider this a cosmic horror setting, just not for the humans
I don't understand the premise of this. Badly drawn cartoons of people torturing an ostensibly fluffy sapient creature, for what purpose? Is it a fetish?
>Badly drawn cartoons
Comes with being niche, we don't get to pick who contributes. >people torturing
Not necessarily, might as well be the indifference of nature or prospect of profit. >an ostensibly fluffy sapient creature
Merely sentient. >for what purpose?
Why does a forest burn?
It just clicks some weird low key sadistic part of my brain for some reason. I have never actually hurt animals nor do I desire to do so, but something about these fricking moronic comics is endlessly fascinating to me.
le scary monster is the worst way to do it
focus on the insignificance of all of humanity's works and all of earth's history when compared to the endless abyss that is space, who was been there for uncountable millenia and will continue to be long after every single part of humanity is reduced to stardust
a good cosmic "horror" inspires both horror and awe
it's something beyond calculation, beyond reason, immeasurably vast and worth veneration in it's boundless greatness, a bottomless abyss
first of all, one of the core precepts of cosmic horror is "fear of the unknown"
but people often forget the rest and just focus on that part
i think a big part of it is also "awe" like and
You are moronic if you think some liminal horror bs is even comparable to the sheer terror of how fricking huge the universe is and how tiny we are in it. Most zoomers haven't even fricking seen a starlit sky in their entire lives, whereas I've lived large chunks of my life on the countryside and vividly remember staring at the night sky with awe, and later with forboding fear as my understanding of our place in the universe grew.
Some of my earliest terrors relate to fearing asteroids impacting earth, or sun swallowing our planet as it expanded, because I watched way too many science documentaries as a wee lad. One of the most terrifying nightmares I've ever had was one where I saw two moons on the night sky, but one of them was rapidly growing in size as it was falling towards earth.
say
it's the destruction of the human's antropocentric pespective when confronted with the rest of the cosmos, forcing contemplation on one's own place in this universe without inherent meaning
it's the horrible truth of our reality and the feeling of powerlessness, or helplessness, that it evokes, a truth that we strive to deny and bury under our insignificant achievements and scientific "progress"
Cosmic horror is writing tripe about tentacles and then b***hing about the Rhode Island racist whose shoulders you're standing on, without ever reading anything the man wrote.
a good cosmic horror is conceptual
it's not scary because of it's appearance but because of it's existence itself, or rather, because it's a part of existence that we refuse to accept
it has to inflict the feeling of "despair" like the immensity of the universe
hopelessness
existential crisis
loss of meaning
these are the important factors
The perfect cosmic horror game would be you, stranded on a deserted planet, and you have an In real time timer for when you're set to be rescued off of it. The problem being, you have to survive on it until then. The setting alone would provide tons of cosmic horror scenarios. From the planet being alive, to you being purposely stranded there as some sorta of tribute to their an eldtrich creature, to body horror/visions from being stuck on that planet for so long. etc etc
this just makes me remember how bad No Man Sky dropped the ball on lovecraftian horror, all those planets you visit and no real lovecraftian horror to deal against
One of Black Souls 2 endings leads to that, but it's a non-canon bad ending. Black Souls 3 leads up to something similar, but the protagonist is unlikely to be a full-on Black personman, and you'll likely need to maintain some stealth - excessive Black personman warfare is said to lead to Azathoth's awakening in the in-game lore.
this reminds me a bit of Ar Nosurge where you, the player, are the 7th dimensional entity that possesses the player character Delta and pilots the robot Earthes. (You) provide the characters with supernatural knowledge and combat skills, and Casty (Delta's gf) begs you to keep Delta safe when they realize what is happening, and Delta resolves to allow you to keep possessing him.
Perspective, I guess?
A cultist that worships a cosmic entity would be enraptured while they go crazy looking at it while a regular person would shit their pants metaphorically and literally as the true scope of things breaks their mind, that's my guess at least.
i loathe the "it's just punishment" cope
All it is is getting to do whatever you want to a valueless thing. "Good" behavior does not factor in and it can't save itself from painful doom.
bloodborne
This and pic related.
>rare instance of a smart tumblrite
this is the real eldritch horror
Psychedelic experience with a 'eldritch/horror' paint coat.
eldritch horror is a psychedelia experience with a tentacle paint coat
Related.
reminds me of this
very cool
The madness in a lot of Lovecraft's stories also could be chalked up, at least in part, to some severe PTSD from being in a life or death encounter with extremely bizarre and alien entities. Extreme trauma and fear leading to a mental breadown. "Madness" wa defined a little more loosely back in Lovecraft's day and a lot of mental disturbances could be classified as madness. The characters in Lovecraft's books end up mentally shaken and damage by their experiences but they don't ALWAYS end up as gibbering madmen slaming their head into a wall repeatedly while chanting alien phrases.
Or: imagine if you uncovered incontrovertible proof of something that shakes the foundation of everything you know.
Imagine coming across previously-censored research, documentation, and religious materials which all confirmed that every single person goes to hell when they die, no matter what, to be tortured forever.
You'd spend the rest of your life in silent doom, or trying to find some strange code by which to live so you can escape judgement, or trying to uncover information that disproves what you've seen, or making millions and spending every dollar trying to become immortal. You would seem to be mad, especially if you tried to explain why.
>bloodborne
unironically fpbp
What made bloodborne horrifying for you?
For me it was those naked fat frickers that sonichu roll at you.
>Mfw it actually glitched through the level and fricking hit me later and killed me right when I engaged the boss.
fpwp
fpbp
Amygdala is one of the best fricking designs and encounters for a cosmic horror entity in all video games.
>When you first encounter it you can't even see it, you're just grabbed and driven insane while squeezed to death by an invisible entity
>Can't see it until you have enough insight - ie seen enough crazy bullshit to finally comprehend it
>When you fight it it becomes so desperate to defeat you it tears its own arms off without a thought to use as clubs against you
>You basically learn nothing about it other than they're hostile higher beings from a different plane of existence
really stellar stuff
Actionshit, hard pass
Basic b***h awnser
PS5 performance update fricking when?
probably never, gameplay is supposedly tied to the performance but that's bullshit since modders have hacked ps4 pro's to run at 60fps no problem
This was actually a deep concept, funny looking lime green things are something unimaginably dangerous and terrifying.
And it's all hinted.
Hey buddy, have you seen the Androsynth?
gimme a qrd
The Orz are a "species" you encounter in Star Control 2. If you go to the coordinates where you're told a cyborg breakaway race is hanging out, you only find these odd creatures that talk to you in an unsettlingly disjointed way. They appear goofy, and almost comical, but under their appearance, something doesn't feel right. They are uncanny at an existential level.
As it turns out, and as they are fairly honest about in their own way, they are the realspace extensions of a single massive creature that is totally alien to our reality, reaching through the underside of the complex mesh of the fabric of multidimensional spacial reality and coming through as what they appear as to you. The Androsynth are nowhere to be seen. Nowhere to be found. And if you buddy up to the Orz, and you only later stumble across the archetypal "grey/green" ancient aliens of the game named the Arilou who give you express warnings not to do that and how important it is for you not to do that, you feel a biting sense of dread. Because, where as due to the Arilou's tampering humans were previously invisible to such creatures, you just gave a bigger fish humanity's address.
Take 2, because I words.
In Star Control II there was a race of artificial humans called Androsynth that rebelled and created their own civilization separate from humanity.
Humanity themselves had been historically visited by an alien race known as the Arilou (Which are just Greys) who seemingly made modifications to them to protect them from extra-dimensional beings. The Androsynth were "human" but had no protection, thus an entity from quasi-space replaced them in space-time with biological "extensions" of itself in the form of yellow parrot fish aliens.
Lust from Beyond
Don´t show the cosmic horror
>oh my god, it´s le eldritch tentacle blob from outer space!
Yawn
correct.
You can't really make it work as a game. The game would have to be some slide of life shit where that sort of thing unfolds over time. Lovecraft gives you little hints and the whole stories are always and edging experience waiting for the MC to stop trying to be sane and deny whats in front of them.
The current games that they have, you show up and immediately your greated by a man who is clearly a fish.
You shouldn't even talk to anyone who isn't normal until act 2, and even then it should be something realy subtle, like a bizarre mannerism or body language or speech pattern.
You can make it work in a game, you basically just stated how. You don't show the eldritch abominations themselves. Instead you show the effect they have on humans. There are all kinds of disturbing fricked up body horror things you can do such as wriggling tendrils growing out of people's eyes, distorted faces, etc. Avoid the tired boring stuff like big teeth and red eyes, and focus on body horror themes of infestation, injury, and disease instead. Event Horizon style flashes of obscene horror images can also work.
this is kind of why I find Bloodborne to be the best game on the market that does it right
Insight is a very genius mechanic and lends itself well to the concept
Say it is indescriptible and that sawing it drove you insane.
Thats the reason why all endgame bosses in PoE are just agents of some big cosmic horror, never the cosmic horror itself. You're fighting a whole bunch of Dagons and Hydras but never Cthulhu itself.
I thought Moon Presence looked cool for being a load of tentacles
The fact that we can discern it's shape, size and ability makes it a fathomable existence. This is the reason why the Souls formula stumbles with cosmic horror, the mere thought of being able to fight these beings (and fricking kill them) is moronic.
>nooooo you can't heckin show them!! If you visualize them then it will invalidate and expose writers as artlets who can't draw!!!
>t. imaginationlet
>needing to read first just to imagine
Sometimes showing the monster completely absolutely destroys the terror it generates. Alien is the biggest example of this.
Nah, Alien is considered a horror classic for a reason.
The original was a fantastic horror film and Aliens was a fantastic action horror.
Anything else is absolute trash, but you can't say the xenomorph design isn't absolute iconic
The FIRST ONE is a horror classic, because for most of the movie, you can't see most of the fricking thing.
The later ones when they're running through open air and the humans are blasting them with lasers? Nobody fricking cares.
only because xenomorphs make me horny
fricking h r giger you bastard
That man must have had wild dreams
is it safe to stick your dick in that?
Cthulhu is also an agent. He's just a priest.
they hit him with a boat and he sank into the sea
Blessed Kunka saved us all
this and denying information to the player about the horror, it's there and it's dangerous and there's no convenient cult with a PDA somewhere that just explains it and ruins the suspense
Half Life 2
The Combine are just one thread away from having near limitless power over everything that ever was or will be
This. Tentacle monsters aren't cosmic horror
>Tentacle monsters aren't cosmic horror
You could do a giant penis and call it cosmic horror if it's done right.
Oh boy do I have something to tell you about Shin Megami Tensei
That's what I was referring to.
we could say this is a wienersmic horror
im still laughing to the bad joke
aren't the Combine fighting a war against a type 3 civilization ? for them earth its like a playground and that's why they don't give a frick about earth in that game after they conquer it
Earth is to the Combine as some backwater island tribe was to the British Empire. The synths you fight in the games aren't even something the Combine bother to create; they self-reproduce.
>"vast, meteorological intelligences"
The frick did Breen see?
>G-man, a time-travelling teleporter is forced to play guerilla warfare against them and can be contained with half a dozen vortigaunts
The Combine are ridiculously powerful.
I mean isn't the point of video games to make the impossible possible?
No you're thinking of spiral power.
>My God.... is that.. a tentacle?
>AAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Black personMAN SAVEEE ME
In my experience, its usually because of the perspective of scale. They put the human viewpoint the same as the creatures, or tone down the creatures size, so the human looks at things from a view of dominance, whereas it'd work better if the cosmic horror were fricking massive and all you could really see from your perspective were like a mass of moving tentacles all over the horizon you can barely even see the origin of, and at most like 1 massive eye the size of a city looking down at you from the sky, just noticing you, which would have some massive negative effect.
I like games where you can kill them
Remember, shotgun>
horror/demons/evil buttholes
any horror game that has to rely on spooks by making things practically invincible or disarming you is a shit horror game
Game has to be almost completely incomprehensible and your character should be insane. Something like The Suffering 1 and 2
Make them cute girls you can bang.
homie they can't even do it properly in any other visual medium. Cosmic horror relies on ambiguity and subtlety faaar too much for it to ever be truly effective in a visual medium.
Why does cosmic horror= Space tentacles? Why not something that is made of the void?
because literally every cosmic horror game ever is inspired by Lovecraft stuff
Because every homosexual in existence who does adaptations of this genre only know how to inspiration from Lovecrafts' shit. Granted he's the grandaddy of the genre for the most part but there are soooo many other authors who did their own thing that you could pick from.
W.H. Hodgson is the true founder of cosmic horror as we know it. Lovecraft even credits him as a primary inspiration.
House on the Borderland is kino and faaar better than anything HP penned.
Lovecraft was a cheap pulp magazine author, read any of his contemporaries and the writing will be almost identical. He's only remembered now because of chance. Glad to see the actual visionaries get some credit
By Lovecraft.
Yes, but there is still no true Night Land game.
name a few. i'm genuinely curious, i want to check them out
Arthur Machen and William Hope Hodgson for one. I'll add Laird Barron but you probably wouldn't like his stuff at all just going off the reactions from everyone else I've suggested him to here.
I thought The Croning was excellent
Mah homieh! I wish he would write another cosmic horror novel instead of this hardboiled crime shit he's been doing for the last few years now.
Some of his short stories were among the most unsettling literature I have ever read too
I don't know what it is, the children of old leech just.. DO IT for me.
Which ones did it for you?
Anything that ties into the Old Leech mythos. I love the recurring mentions of it in his other stories, when a character mentions the Great Dark, or stumbles upon the Black Guide. Mysterious Tremendum and The Men From Porlock are great short stories from that universe if you haven't read them, but there are many others.
Oh, I've read all of his stuff.
any more?
It's a bit silly considering there were other creatures in Lovecraft's work, iirc the ones from The Mountains of Madness were plant/fungi in nature, and one of the stories is basically about the birth and life of the Antichrist who I think eventually becomes a sort of goatheaded minotaur beast and is killed unceremoniously by a guard dog
There's also a story where some generic guy bodies and places with a giant alien centipede and basically usurps their entire power structure to become their ruler while the alien in his body goes insane and gets killed by a hunter
It's like trying to write medieval fantasy without making it Tolkienish. You have to first purge your mind of all that and then come up with something brand new and unique. It's not easy.
I don't know, hentai's ruined my brain too and that makes it even worse
Because morons have only surface level understanding of lovecraft's work.
His best horror story is the Color out of Space anyways, and it doesn't feature any tentacles.
The Color Out of Space is absolutely his best, the movie was total dog shit though. AHHHH IT'S PURPLE HELP!
Its not purple its MAGENTA
did you know magenta doesn't actuzlly exist
there's no wavelength associated with the color magenta
it is purely a creation of our brains to fill avoid for somethig that doesnt exist in our reality
sometimes i think that without the capacity to perceive colors that dont exist like magenta, our brains might just crash instead
the good ones imo strike an extremely delicate balance. you have to make the player's actions and struggles meaningless in the grand scheme of things, yet the game has to be satisfying to play. games i have seen nail it the hardest are fear & hunger, and/or anything by yames. you basically don't win in any of them, only struggle against infinitely stronger cosmic forces, you are always swallowed by them in the end.
>His best horror story is the Color out of Space
supreme taste anons
i was looking for this. the game keeps constantly subtly hinting at just how ridiculously powerful the old gods are
the game also shows how a new god gets completely btfo by just the echo of an older god. for context, imagine zeus trying to fight nyarlathotep and getting deleted
Game?
I think "The Rats in the Walls" is his best.
>when they realize the stairs weren't carved downward by someone digging into the cavern
>they were carved upward by someone digging out
>Why does cosmic horror= Space tentacles? Why not something that is made of the void?
Wanna know the biggest problem with cosmic horror? Biggest problem is knowing that it's coming. The best are the subversive ones, like the film Akira. You have biker gangs, poverty, zealot followers, civil unrest, military coup, back stabbing politics, egoism, bitter friendships. All of it strikes a cord in the human spirit, but is all utterly fricking meaningless when you ascend. I always thought the very end was there just to trip you out, but the lucid journey is you having a first person perspective taste of leaving your humanity.
akira is just more moronic whining about muh bombs
As I said, the film Akira has themes that are meaningful to the human condition, but when you get to the very end you peep behind the curtain. Then on a repeat viewing you start to notice the signs were there all along with the espers.
>the film Akira has themes that are meaningful to the human condition
yeah, just like every single other thing produced by humans. this doesn't mean anything. a category that encompasses everything encompasses nothing.
>Akira
>cosmic horror
you're moronic. at best it's body horror.
Oh sweet summer child.
Quoting Game of Thrones doesn't help your argument.
I've already explained my argument, you just haven't grasped the point of the very end.
>I've already explained my argument
Yeah so? Then you started quoting Game of Thrones which hurt your argument. The other guy did nothing but call you moronic and is still more convincing than you.
He talked shit at me so I talked shit back because that's the language he understands, understand?
You suck at talking shit if you think Game of Thrones lines are good comebacks.
>he's talking about the anime adaption
>calls others a sweet summer child
Sweet summer these nuts, b***h.
How much of it is the anime?
The anime is approximately the first 2 volumes with some stuff from volumes 3-6 thrown in there.
Thanks. Maybe will start it after im finished with dorohedoro. Need something short after that.
Mr "Akira is cosmic horror" sure is quite all the sudden
The film is a different story to the comics. I shouldn't have to explain that to you.
Sure it's different.
Still doesn't go into cosmic horror. It's body horror at best.
>Still doesn't go into cosmic horror. It's body horror at best.
The film is literally about ascension and at the very end you get the first person momentary experience of Tetsuo leaving his humanity as if you're doing it. That's the subversive cosmic horror moment, you experiencing being above humanity. There's no reason for that section to exist if it was just a dumb story.
Also for the record, you would also know that the film was completed before the ending for the manga was completed. I think the manga sucks compared to the anime.
The manga has some cool pages that if you read on a screen and scroll up and down real fast the images look 3D.
>Why does cosmic horror= Space tentacles?
Lovecraft made a running metaphor of the cosmos and void of space comparing it to the deep abyss of the ocean.
Everyone afterwards took the metaphor at face value and now considers the deep void of the cosmos ocean life and fish.
i want more geometric elder gods. all of evangelion angels are perfect examples of cosmic horror
>evangelion angels are perfect examples of cosmic horror
The series wasn't about them though. They're literally there to look cool.
yea and they did their job cuz they were fricking cool. perfect examples of horrors from space
all flash and no substance like all japanese shit
Is there a name for media that has the themes of cosmic horror despite not actually being "horror" because Evangelion is it with the way the characters are fighting totally alien and unknowable threats then they all melt into a goo.
Ramiel is too cool for its own good. Frick its awesome
For me its Leliel.
Its true body is a thin black mass that in itself is a pocket dimension. The 3D orb seen floating about the true body is actually its shadow. Fall inside it and it makes you hallucinate and fricks with your memories.
You try selling people on a malevolent shade of purple.
With extreme difficulty
It would probably not be a very good game, since it implicitly has a bad ending and makes the player feel completely powerless.
That sounds like a great game.
I think the way to properly do it would be to have a complete contrast in visual tone and style to the rest of the game. Make it the only 3D thing in a 2D game or something
Also make it undefeatable or approachable. Maybe you see it way in the background or forever just out of reach. Never able to truly see the entire entity all at once
Games like Siren and Signalis have done Cosmic horror pretty well. The story behind Siren is peak horror.
>The story behind Siren is peak horror
Are you talking about Forbidden Siren? I vaguely remember those games. Sneaking around zombies looking through their eyes, right?
I dont remember Siren 2, but the first one was about a huge bug god which fell to Earth and was eaten, causing his rage. And yes, thats the gameplay pattern, I never played Forbidden Siren, just 1 and 2 though.
I liked this one a lot when I played it like ten or fifteen years ago
same. but it was too revealing towards the end.
>but it was too revealing towards the end
But that's Lovecraft. Contrary to popular opinion Lovecraft was actually rarely vague.
Lovecraft's main problem is his whole "IT WAS JUST TOO INCOMPREHENSIBLE, TOO UTTERLY TERRIFYING TO DESCRIBE!!!" bullshit.
That's a bullshit meme though. It's not actually something Lovecraft did much at all. Usually he was very descriptive. This is why, for example, everyone knows what Cthulhu is supposed to look like. Lovecraft actually described him in detail same as he described most things in detail.
That only goes for what the people that also get estranged by a Black person think while also somewhat describing whatever thing they are facing.
>Oh good how can that be, what an unspeakable indescribable horror this creature is, looking like a fish crossed with a man.
Of course some things are left vague but that really only goes for the real big fish in the cosmic pond, like pic related.
>Flying spaghetti monster
>*tips colander*
It wouldn't be cosmic horror if it could be easily described. Beside if you read more of lovecraft stuff you would know that some of his stories do describe various beings very well.
I liked how Colour out of Space was described as hard to describe because supposedly the creature existed in another dimension. Same way how if we would fall through a 2D plane with a 2D man in it, he could never see our true form, only parts of us as weird floating blobs in the 2D air, he wouldn't even recognize a human figure unless we would be in a very specific position when passing through the 2D-world in our 3D form and even then he would only see a human silhouette for a split second.
The idea that our eyes are simply not developed to properly see some monster who is partially made of time itself and other light spectrums is creepy, because the creature could still easily see us, the way we could easily see the 2D man with our eyes, while he can't really look at us properly with his 2D eyes. The tentacles sucking off your juices and turning you into a grey melted zombie are there but your eyes can't see them. They're like nuclear radiation.
It also touches on the idea of radiation poisoning before it was a known thing.
Damn, the Nicolas Cage adaptation of this was fricking disappointing.
I liked it.
It had a great soundtrack
I liked it.
It had a great soundtrack
Cage finally had a role that was perfect for him and you're like "disappointing".
Cage was born to go nuts, and he did - you just have shit taste.
Cage going nuts doesn't make a bad film good. Cage went nuts in Wicker Man, that movie is dogshit. Cage went nuts in Mandy, that movie is godtier.
>Cage went nuts in Mandy
It wasnt Cage, it was Mandy. She possessed him after her death. Watch it on LSD and especially look at the eyes.
I loved it
Grant us eyes.
That sounds pretty rad
lovecraft was ahead of his time because seeing something from the 4th dimension would look like one big tentacle with one end being its birth and the other end where it dies
lmao get a load of this 3rd dimension ningen trying to imagine a dimension he is entirely lacking
yeah, the big tentacle is how a 4 dimensional creature would appear to US in the 3rd dimension. its real form is whats incomprehensible. kinda like the flatlander seeing vivisections of an apple passing through the 2nd dimension
i wonder if was inspired by soul eater
Congrats on outing yourself on not reading his works dumbass.
You fricking homosexual, that's not what he did at all. He described almost all of his horrors in great detail. Frick, he even provided a drawing of Cthulhu in a letter to some butthole. Frick people like you who have never read him, yet have the gall to tell anyone anything about his works. Go back to school, you teenage c**t.
I like how he wrote a story called The Unnamable and the titular creature which is so horrifying that it cannot be named is thoroughly described when encountered.
He was a cheeky c**t like that. In all seriousness, I think he just liked all the weird stuff far too much and was too autistic in his love for detail not to describe whatever he conjured up in his mind.
I can describe this image to you in great detail, but I can never do it justice versus looking at it. Certain things are hard for our visual cortex to process.
He was too verbose.
Exhausting to read sometimes.
Used a lot of words and sayings that weren't even common back in the early 20th century too.
How do you render the incomprehensible effectively?
Like Arkham Knight, with the way Joker appears on a billboard but then doesn't when you look back.
Non-Euclidean spaces like most of those first-person horror puzzle games, but for people.
If its comprehensible then it's not incomprehensible.
doom
AN OPEN WOUND
That's just body horror, b***h.
>OoOoooOHhh Nooooo I'm STUCK IN A GIANT SPHINCTER!!! BUT IT HAS A GIANT HEART ALSO THOUGH!!!!
Gimme a fricking break.
very much incorrect
City having guts is pretty lovecraftian
What game you fricking dick lickers
It's clearly Doom Eternal
Clear Mind 2
Ai Suru Tsuma, Mariko ga Rinshitsu de Dakareru Made ~Anata ga Shiranai Koto, Kare ga Takusan Oshiete Kuremashita~
Pathologic for sure, pretty sure it's the second one/remake
Sorry I asked
what game?
Make them cute girls that you can frick
amogus bottle
why are people so scared of fictional tentacle monster cosmic horror stuff when something like the sun is 10000x bigger and more destructive than this, and something like a black hole is so powerful it destroys the fabric of reality? those are things that actually exist, the existential dread is real, you don't need to make up stuff
Dis homieh scared of the mothafrickin' SUN! Must be why you don't get out very often, eh, pasty?
Are you an arab?
DIS homie THINK A BALL OF PLASMA IN DAH SKY BE POSTIN' ON FACEBOOK!!
WOW MAN..now picturing those relativistic jets from her event horizon
>Accretion Disc
W-what's it like there? Asking for science.
Extremely hot.
And by hot, I mean up to 10 million Kelvins.
Creatures are scarier than forces of nature.
Would you rather jump into a volcano
Or jump in a hole of roided up man eating pitbulls?
>roided up man eating pitbulls
>man eating
>pitbulls
anon, listing synonyms is redundant
>roided up man eating pitbulls
>roided up man
>eating pitbulls
horrific
>black hole chan
>is white
I think will and purpose of intent are fundamentally necessary to any sort of horror. Besides the sun being something you live with every day and black holes being something everyone is exposed to in 3rd grade science, they don't have a will of their own, they're just a force of nature. An eldritch being has motivations, even if it's just survival, and often their motivations are beyond our own understanding.
A lack of understanding I think is also important, which is why so much horror relies on the supernatural and mystery. If you know everything about the monster that's killing everyone off, it's not quite as horrifying. It'd be like being hunted by a tiger VS some ridiculous alien abomination.
i think i have to disagree
i feel cosmic horror is at it's strongest when the horror is almost more like a natural fisaster than a sentient being
i think the closest one can get to the feel of cosmic horror in the real world would be to climb the everest and then stand at the edge
the "immensity of the universe" is just too immeasurably big to even get a reaction out of most people, but the everest and other such massive mountains are tangible and high enough that it can evoke a similar feeling that's close enough
Wouldnt an easy way to replicate that in a game be that if you come into contact with the creature, that it deletes your save (aka drives you insane)? Would build a natural dread of wanting to avoid it at all costs
part of the horror is it's inevitability
so that would make for a really shitty game
Horror that relies too much on loss of progress to punish the player for failure typically devolve into frustration and lose their sense of horror as the game drags on. If you're just dying repeatedly or getting your save deleted and being forced to replay the same parts over and over it'll become repetitive and annoying.
The original Alone in the Dark which basically jsut copies a lovecraft story
>Noooo you can't show it
>Nooo you can't kill it
>Ahhhh im going MAAAAD
When will it end?
You can't really, because it's hard to base gameplay around the concept of something being so otherworldly it shatters one's sanity.
It's extremely difficult to convincingly portray someone losing their own perception of reality through a video game, so it's best alluded to but never made the main focus.
Cosmic horror can't be done in any medium anymore.
It was based around the fear of unknown.
Modern human is overloaded with information and its ease of access to the point that average person can't even fathom a theoretical paranormal experience of dealing with something unexplainable.
Back then something as trivial as encountering people of different ethnicity was already an uncanny experience to most.
The best horror these days is the relatable horror of controlled information. A false reality controlled by powers above you, you only ever know what you are allowed to know and your knowledge is carefully curated by others.
And then there is the horror of the mob. That the majority overrules all else. An individual's perceptions are nothing in the ocean of powerful ignorance, of the masses who decided what truth is.
Ligotti is pretty good.
Wouldn’t not being able to comprehend having a fear of the unknown count as a fear of the unknown in it of itself.
Times have changed and you can't really talk about races and mixing bloodlines anymore. Even if you do have something like a half-lovecraftian monstrosity, you're not allowed to draw any parallels to race mixing and the disgust it elicits. Radiation, mutations, parasites etc. sorta work, but it's not quite the same.
That said I'd kill for a At the Mountains of Madness game.
You best start believing in cosmic horrors, you're living in one.
https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/the-gig-economy
You can go the body horror route. Imagine trans-animal people physically altering themselves or a trans-attack helicopter metal man ala Tetsuo. There's a lot you can do to play on the horrors of modern day
>zerohplovecraft
Lovecraft actually tackles this as well, in a way. Consider this opening paragraph from The Call of Cthulhu:
>The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
>flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age
He wasn't that far off in predicting the current age. Masses lost sense of wonder, discovery and adventure with mundane fears reigning supreme by and large.
I want more games where you get to go into bizarre alternate dimensions with impossible geometries and stuff that go on for eternity.
Man, Astral chain could have been so good if it stopped trying to choke you to death with shitty minigames and stealth sections to keep you from the good parts.
i think you would really like the final episode of Amid Evil
?t=377
>Lovecraft
>Come for horror
>Stay for Dream Cycle lore n world building
Lovecraft did cosmic horror the worst in my opinion.
Didn't he literally invent cosmic horror?
That's my point. He's pretty much the codifier and yet I find that so many of his contemporaries or those that followed in his footsteps did FAAAR better with the genre then he ever did.
>the founder of a genre doesn't include all of the advances that later successors found and build upon
that's crazy
Next you'll tell me that many of the early 3D games had poor camera controls, that's unhinged man, real cosmic horror right here
Just stop sucking him off so much. His stuff always comes off like a high school freshmen wrote it and its cringe.
what you said applies to most creators of most things in existence
The first tries are rarely the best, but that does not mean that you cannot learn from them either
And yet even though the original bits aren't actually the best, Black folk continue to suck it off as the best. That's the issue. I'd struggle to call any of HPs stories "great" by any means.
>I have shit taste
We know, go read Lumley or smth
Nah. Machen's Pan story shits all over the vast majority of HPs shit. Sorry you're the one with the unrefined, milquetoast taste.
>irrelevant literal who
Yea ok buddy
there's far worse writers (who are also considered founding members) of early gothic litterature to blame rather than HP lol
Arthur Machen did cosmic horror better than Lovecraft ever did.
The Shining book and movie?
Lovecraft did not invent cosmic horror, people were writing stories that you would consider "lovecraftian" decades before he was born.
You are a certified moron my man.
No, you fricking moron. He didn't even believe that.
Keep your dumbshit opinions to yourself homosexual
After you, wienerslurper.
This is one my favorite ones, just that sudden realization of helplessness in front of impending doom at the end I think is what defines the genre.
This
the culmination of cosmic horror is "the feeling of impending doom" in my oppinion
Worst how? Worse than who? How?
you can't just make a fricking moronic pronouncement like that and not defend any of it, jackass
>Deepest lore is knowing some jive ass cat would absolutely bust Cthulhu's balls
Black personman-sama...
>Comparing moon beasts to Cthulhu
lol
The cats are only a couple of steps below Nyalarhotep if I recall correctly
I was the same. I read all of his works and the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was a wild ride, but holy shit it needed some chapters. It just WENT AND WENT AND WENT and never slowed down.
>Whats the proper way to do cosmic horror in a videogame?
lmfao
Certainly not like Control, what a piece of shit game
I know, I know, it's not that bad, but average titles are much worse than stuff that's outright shit for me. Control was every bit safe and bland, where it had the potential to be every bit as schizo and convoluted as the lore implied. Imagine looking at the SCP and thinking to yourself "that was great, I loved the human characters!"
That's leaning towards that SCP homosexualry more than anything else really. SCP is a homosexual reddit tier modern offshoot of cosmic horror and its thoroughly awful.
Well, yeah. The game leaned toward the modern approach to the foundation with its multiple canons and focus on poor interpersonal drama, instead of just stealing the good concept behind the original SCP idea and expanding it their own way
This was basically the cancerverse but less moronic.
Simple, it's all about muh POWER LEVELS
>Outer Gadz
You're fricked
>Old Farts
You can do smth
>Ayy lmaos
Fair game most of the time
>A fricking RPG maker chicken scratch porn game made by 1 guy is the best rendition of cosmic horror
>posting yt video
disgrace
For all of it's many, many flaws everywhere else in the game, I think dead space 3's ending did it well.
It doesn't matter if it's planetary or on a cosmic scale, If the threat is being eaten, then it's just regular horror.
Saya's Song
Squirrel Stapler
That one fishing game whose name I forgot that just came out, Dredge or Drudge or something (sorry I got really high and cant do shit right tonight)
>saya's song
namedrop it properly next time you fricking druggie
Eat a dick, you know what I meant, sorry I don't weeb the frick out every time I need to talk about a Japanese game. By the way I fricking like the game so much I bought it, do you own it? Then shut the frick up.
Ara ara boku no nihongo no geimu tbh, kore wa meccha no taisetsuna koto uwu
Dredge starts out very strong, until it just devolves into "lol go find the 7 dragon balls"
Make more use of dissociation
dunno how they'd do that in a video game though
Eternal Darkness was pretty good. You did end up seeing the monsters but I think it handled everything better than most other games.
The only thing it really did well was the ending.
The only game that really comes close was Yahtzee's mythos series where all 3 games wrap into the same story and the ending is basically makes everything you did pointless because your comprehension of events is on the immediate, not on what those events rotated around.
Point and click, probably. If it has any amount of violent action from your character, you're doing it wrong
You need to go into full on schizo game territory for anything applicable honestly.
>Stars Die
>Zelle
>Siphonopolis
>Cube Gothic
>Signalis
Shit like that.
Is Signalis even Lovecraftian? I only played it once, on launch but it was (to me) way more of some 2001 type of shit than a cosmic horror story. It took on a LC-ian art style towards the end but I dont remember anything too crazy about it.
It is not lovecraftian per se, but it is definitely fits as cosmic/existential horror.
lovecraft books are literally in the game
More so in the secret ending, and not so much Lovecraftian specifically (given that The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers factors heavily into the plot).
>Zelle
My homie.
I'll also throw out the entire Saturn Quest trilogy, made by the same guy who did Cube Gothic. Those games have some of the singular best cosmic horror I've come across once you figure out the general gist of the plot.
I want a game where you play AS a cosmic horror.
Oh my brother you won't believe this its a Metroidvania, which some people hate but its great
>puzzle game
It's shit.
that's just a typical horror story from the monster's POV, there's nothing eldritch or even supernatural about a creature that can be kiled with conventional weapons
Shit, try Populous or any god game then. That basically fits the mold.
>here's nothing eldritch or even supernatural about a creature that can be kiled with conventional weapons
lol
>there's nothing eldritch or even supernatural about a creature that can be kiled with conventional weapons
Dude, Cthulhu got defeated by a dude sailing a ship into his giant ass.
Plenty of Lovecraftian creatures can be killed by conventional weaponry, Gods are far from the only thing in his settings.
Not really defeated, Cthulhu basically just woke super early from a nap, got bonked on the head and decided to frick off back to sleep because he's not a dictator or conqueror, he's a fricking priest.
>he's not a dictator or conqueror
>Violated the NAP and started shit with Elder Things
Not your planet, frick off
Carrion, yah dingus.
kirby
>kirby is Eldritch Horror!!!!
>A walking black hole with the mind of a toddler isn't fricking horrifying
I bet you need spikes on the armor to know who a bad guy is.
Yes. Obviously.
I figured that shit out when I was a kid. Play games homosexual.
Would any of the katamari damacy titles count? One way or another you have an entity regularly breaking and repairing the sky, using all sorts of things, living creatures and people included, to do the job. Often times the balls start the size of a thimble and grows and grows with no apparent limit as it collects more stuff to add to its mass. All to be used to recreate whatever celestial body or bodies that were lost in the king's last drunken bender.
And every living creature that gets rolled up screams. Initially. Yet all those who have experienced being rolled up into a katamari have described it as joyful or rapturous.
Shadows of Forbiddon Gods.
*Forbidden
hurr durr
>Tolkien type fantasy setting with orcs n' goblins n' shit
Ffffffuuuuucking GAAAAAAAAY
Black & White
Katamari damacy.
Wakey wakey Azathoth! *BANG BANG BANG*
as its been said already, don't show the cosmic horror show its effects on the world, it's people and it's environment.
I honestly don't get what people find so scaaawy about this scenario if a planet eater showed up I'd of course be sad that I and everyone I love were about to die but the wtf am I supposed to do about it?
The government is way scarier because they can actually cause tangible long term suffering and ostracize you from your family and friends plus there's also the stress of thinking there *might* be something you can do about it
Oh, Jesus Christ.. Please just frick off leave. Stop making EVERY video game thread about fricking politics wienersucker.
Homeworld Cataclysm
>Lovecraft game
>Based on Call of Cthulhu or Innsmouth or both mixed together for whatever reason
AAAAAAAHHHH FRICK OFF WITH THIS SHIT
>copypaste eyes + tentacles everywhere on lump of flesh
>call it le heckin lovecraftian
In the Mouth of Madness game when?
THIS IS NOT REALITY
NOT REALITY
NOT REALITY
>Event Horizon
>Mouth of Madness
>Sleeping Dogs
Quintessential Sam Neill
I’M NOT INSANE!!
Relax buddy, you're awake now
Game?
Underrail
Why does this machine have a bunch of giant sex toys attached to it? Just what kind of flesh are we talking about here?
>walls of text, describing unspeakable horrors
>continue
Encased does it pretty nicely, it's presented as a straight sci-fi RPG but you start getting the cosmic horror around quarter way through. Giant bottomless holes opening up in the ground that drive science teams insane, stuff like that.
I heard that game was not very good
It's great if you're not a shitter who only plays gay pride parade RPG's like Pathfinder and expects RPG's to have romance and all that lame crap
>Turn-based combat
Into the SHITTER it goes!
Oh sorry I didn't realize I was talking to a moron
>doesn't realize he's talking to morons
>on Ganker
First day newbie?
Don't listen to this
invested moron, it is missed opportunity the game. They had an amazing premise that goes straight into the gutter when you finish prologue in favor of making bootleg fallout out of it.
To me, the best cosmic/existential horror game I played was space engine. The sheer scale of the cosmos that simulation can depict is terrifying to me. Cosmic horror doesn't need muh supernatural or some weird unknowable eldrich aliens, all it needs is the sheer scale of the cosmos itself and our insignificance in the face of it.
We are so fricking tiny and I fear it.
https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
You're the type of Black person who's spooked by wide open, empty rooms. Zoomer detected.
have a nice day moron you have a brainrot, which zoomer fricked your mom/wife?
You are moronic if you think some liminal horror bs is even comparable to the sheer terror of how fricking huge the universe is and how tiny we are in it. Most zoomers haven't even fricking seen a starlit sky in their entire lives, whereas I've lived large chunks of my life on the countryside and vividly remember staring at the night sky with awe, and later with forboding fear as my understanding of our place in the universe grew.
Some of my earliest terrors relate to fearing asteroids impacting earth, or sun swallowing our planet as it expanded, because I watched way too many science documentaries as a wee lad. One of the most terrifying nightmares I've ever had was one where I saw two moons on the night sky, but one of them was rapidly growing in size as it was falling towards earth.
>Universe is big
>This scares a lil homie stuck on earth for all of his days
Nah, you're just a fricking b***h.
moronic boomer or stupid zoomer?
Millennial. Being terrified of outer space is such a b***h trait lmao.
>Millennial
you sound like one of those people that will immediately shit themselves when something big would happen.
I know that you talk big, but you probably WOULD shit your pants, homosexual.
weak samegay stupid zoomer
I'm 32, dipshit.
I watched the towers get hit and come down with bemused indifference.
well rogue planets and moons are very much real
rogue black holes too
Depends on how you look at it. I find it comforting because it means we're a tiny part of a greater whole, and everything we do only matters an infinitely tiny amount. It means we're truly free to find our own meaning and purpose without worrying about some higher plan, and then we die and return to the stardust we came from. The universe doesn't care if I'm handsome and super successful or make 300K a year. It's OK if I'm overweight and hairy if I make enough to live on and develop a skill I enjoy like making miniature occult relics or training my dog to sniff out buried patchouli sacks.
>or sun swallowing our planet as it expanded,
Thats like 8 billion years away. Bit too early to be scared of that. Sun will grow and scorch Earth into an uninhabitable desert wasteland a billion years from now, way earlier than it swallows us.
>Thats like 8 billion years away.
I know. But 6 years old me didn't quite grasp the scale of that time when it first terrified me.
I know this feel I had a book on ancient Egypt as a kid and I was like 7 when I read about how they stuck hooks up the noses of the dead to pull out their brains and I was inconsolable for like 4 days
You sound like a moron? You read how big the universe is but don't understand how big it actually is, nothing will happen in your life time that in any way has anything to do with the universe beyond Jupiter.
this
i am terrified of black holes tbh
but if they looked like this
then maybe i wouldn't be so afraid..
Where the FRICK do you think the concept of C O S M I C horror even comes from? Dipshit. You just described the very basic tenets of cosmic horror you fricking mongoloid.
>that one video detailing the future of the universe
>pass the ages of stars and galactic systems where only black holes exist
>due to the strength of their immense gravitational pulls they will eventually engage in a cosmic dance while producing their own forms of music to set the tone
I thought that part was nice until you realize that it comes along at the halfway point. Everything after that is total energy death.
I don't find this shit spooky at all, I find it comforting
no matter how fricked up this moron ball is, the universe is so incomprehensibly huge that, by the laws of mathematics, nice places must also exist
Anon, I have bad news for you, Earth is one of those nice places so now imagine with the messed up ones are like.
Cosmic horror is precisely that existential dread presented as a pulp detective story.
>moron just spoil most of the shit
Brain rot
Image spam dumps with no context or any thoughts to write in a comment with the pics are easy ways to spot a bad game. Him spoiling it just cements that the game is for morons and not worth checking out.
>caring about spoilers
underage spotted
>can't read a two sentence post
I had written off the game before spoilers even entered the equation, low-iq kun
you really are a midwit, huh
No you
>You can't show it
Dunwich Horror
>Y-You can't kill/banish it
Dunwich Horror
>Y-You can't kill/banish it
They literally kill it in the end
I'm pointing out that such things CAN happen
s-sorry ;_; I misunderstood
>Y-you can't show it
Call of Cthulhu
>Y-you can't ram the motherfricker with a steam-powered yacht so hard it goes back into its stupid non-Euclidean city
Call of Cthulhu
It didn't count, the stars weren't right
Not quite right, but right enough for old R'lyeh to rise and the doors to open. And for Steamboat Willie to dunk on him.
More like fight or flight response
>Yea im not gonna fight this mass of flesh/whatever
Horrible murderous monster that only likes (You) for some reason.
Talk about it, hint about it, but never show it.
Here’s your cosmic horror bro.
>OH NOOOOO!!!! DIPSHITS DISAPPEAR INTO THE WILDS NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAINNNN I'M GOING INSAAAAANE!!!!
I love horror but I read the first book in the series and it freaked me out so much. Same with that "I am a search and rescue officer" series on Reddit, you can talk as much shit about that site as you want but thats some good creepypasta.
Reminder: Paulides unironically believes that unsolved disappearances in national parks are caused by interdimensional teleporting bigfoot
>interdimensional teleporting bigfoot
Damn.. I knew he was a bigfoot gay, but I was just getting slightly intrigued with the Missing 411 stuff. Thanks for the info.
He is at the very least somewhat tactful in that he doesn't say it outright when talking to the families of victims. He admits it in a couple interviews though, and the entire end section of one of his movies is about bigfoot sightings lmao
Can you prove it’s not an interdimensional teleporting Bigfoot?
Yes, because I'm not an interdimensional teleporting bigfoot.
I think there's untapped potential in AI to render mindfricking scenery
I dont like this video at all.
For the love of GOD never take psychedelics
It's like that film. What was that film? The one with the sharkgator and tree people?
Annihilation?
Pretty decent film if you disregard the duct tape golem
What was wrong with that? It was supposed to be a "prototype" which is why it took time to take form.
It just looked kinda cheap compared to the rest of the movie, is all.
>dude ducks lmao
That's only because the AI model was trained with a dataset containing too many ducks. Imagine the same webm except instead of ducks and fish it's locusts and human faces
I imagine that an acid trip probably looks something like that.
Sadly not. What you see on acid is pretty wild but not like how you imagined it before the trip. What you think is the really crazy shit you couldn't really comprehend to be possible before the trip. All the lsd art you see is about the brain, not your vision.
>Webm
Salvia gave me this effect for about 15 minutes, though it was in the house rather than outside. Shit was melting into everything. I really started to question reality.
>I really started to question reality.
really highlights how dumb normies are. you should get the same realization just discovering the blind spot in elementary or whenever your teacher blows your mind with it.
When you're mind is saturated with a mind bending drug your thoughts don't behave like they should.
You've never smoked salvia
First time I smoked that shit was the highest grade XXX shit you could find, with the butane torch lighter to get it heated enough.
By the time I finished blowing out the bong rip, the whole goddamn world melted away and I was on the set of the Big Comfy Couch for what seemed like days, which eventually melted away back to reality where for the next 2 hours I saw little demons from Diablo (the Fallen that scream "RAKANISU") in the shadows everywhere yelling "he's seen us, flee!!" anytime I looked at them.
That shit is absolutely wild.
I just remember shit like this coming from the TV with muffled voices. It didn't agree with me one bit, but I think I got too greedy for my first try.
Any time someone mentions salvia all I can think about is how the UK outlawed it after it being legal for ages.
Salvia sucks. Its just not a good time. Do lsd or shrooms. Mescaline if you want to chill and DMT if you are a weirdo.
Same with the US. Could walk into any head shop in Florida and pick up that absolute insanity, and it would leave you high as a kite for the next like 6 hours after the trip ended. It was nuts.
>I needed to smoke salvia to realize my brain constructs my perception of reality
wait. was this NOT the realization you made? was the realization actually something much stupider? like that your brain ISN'T constructing reality, and that the drug "opened your mind"? then I underestimated how dumb you are
Thats a proper mushroom trip right there.
Bloodborne was missed potential. matthewmattosis was right. what's the point of such great setting when the game is poor action rpg with very little actual adventure.
Guaranteed replies
come on b***h you know I'm right. it should have involved a little more. you know it's true.
Hey, I agree with you. I fricking hate Fromslop. I'm just saying you're guaranteed replies.
get the rope troony
YWNBAW
>NOOOOOOO YOU CAN'T NOT LIKE POPULAR THINGS!!!! YOU ARE A TRANNNYY
Yeah, I'd expect this from a Fromslop sucker.
no its because you use the terms that only xisters use on this board for raids so easy to out yourself as always.
>Build expectation of REAL lovecraft being the kind of shit that is not actually possible in video games
>Actually read Lovecraft
>CoC has Cthulu get it's head blown up after being rammed with a steam boat
>The dunwich horror is straight up destroyed by the protagonists
Not all protags go insane, either.
And at times the genuine intended 'horror' is shit like, "And it turns out my great grandpappy was a Black person"
And things that are even slightly out of the ordinary being presented as something terrifying.
Literally "Ahhhh a tentacle help me Black personman I'm going insane"
Interesting reads, but more for the window into how Lovecraft viewed the world moreso than being actual good horror.
Dude clearly had an anxiety disorder or some shit.
>"And it turns out my great grandpappy was a Black person"
but that is the greatest horror of all
never have them directly appear but still have very apparent effects on gameplay and story. if the player is to combat them in any way it will be narratively indirect so that even if you succeed the encounter, the player never truly defeats the cosmic horror.
fear and hunger does this right. every single fight with an older god isn't an actual fight with the old god but a tiny figment of it
>play engineer girl
>fight the moon
>it fricks off after you hit it enough
>she becomes a rocket engineer so she can go back to the moon for round 2
kino
you guys are homosexuals
TENTACLES ARE NOT SPOOKY!!! NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT! FRICK TENTACLES!! STOP WITH THE TENTACLE BULLSHIT!
No, tentacles are based. Its a great trope that should be expanded upon. A ton of things in the ocean look entirely alien to all other forms of life that we're familiar with on land, in the ground, and in the air. They're strange with physical morphology and reproductive methods unlike anything else.
Where people go wrong is just showing spoogy tentacle space monster. What if space was an entire ocean teeming with strange life? What if there are giant space whales, amorphous blobs reaching out and probing celestial bodies like an amoeba, worms undulating through every inch of space just outside our atmosphere? That'd be spoopy.
>Space is an ocean
I hate this homosexual trope. Everything you said sounds gay.
t. landlubber
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HELP ME Black personMAN
Bloodborne atmosphere + good writing+ dredd and hopeless
You need to start slow and steady, main character investigate a city/town where people disappear without a trace , while some get their wishes overnight . The atmosphere its not bad at the start of the game, even a nice one, but further you advance, the worse it get. You don't show the God/cosmic horror, only in the end or only glimpses
you have to reconstruct the reality around the protagonist and his helpers, from being a good man with a strong mind and spirit to a shell
Its hard to make a game like that, especially made by modern developers who are a bunch of gays. While the budget need to be over 100 million to make it look good.
I could enjoy a $20 budget game if the writing was good enough to set that atmosphere.
Try Stygian, it's unfinished tho
A completely normal game that has no horror elements with some optional path in side content that leads you to witness some crazy shit that is never elaborated upon again
work out how the horror or monster works, then dont explain it and also dont show it
is ecco the dolphin a cosmic horror game?
Nah just regular horror.
there is absolutely nothing i could possibly see or be told that would drive me even slightly crazy, unless there was some kind of stupid magic or "eldritch influences" involved. i have literally jerk offd to things that lovecraft would put into his books to spook his characters.
>possibly see
Well that's the point, what you end up seeing isn't possible.
It is amazing how detached from reality some anons are to spout this kind of shit.
I think the difference between seeing something in a form of media, such as a video game or book, vs actually encountering it IRL are completely lost upon you, anon.
Seeing a picture of a lion and sitting right next to one in the same room IRL is literally 1:1 exactly the same experience and nothing could ever convince me otherwise.
You are autistic.
True, it's like "I can drive at 110MPH in game why can't I do it in real life!?".
>Different dimensions so you can't see shit
But humans can make tech that let you see them ie; Tilinghast device or whatever it was called
I enjoyed Dominions take on it.
let's talk Bloodborne bros what are some Easter eggs, whats the story about and how can i erase my memories of playing it so i can experience anew again
ff7, the thing, kirby, bloodborne, warhammer 40k,
Threadly reminder that Lovecraft basically always described the horrors in great detail and the "OH MY GOD IT'S INDESCRIBABLE I'M GOING INSAAAAANE" is complete horseshit. The only true part of this is that he sometimes described the pure sight of these monstrosities as enough to send many men into delirium, but the protagonists often withstood this as well.
Read some of his stuff if you get the chance. It's pretty good, though his style can be a bit tedious. He also wrote about much more than just muh cosmic horror. One of my favorite short stories of his that has nothing to do with the Old Ones etc. is Polaris. It's a quick read if you fancy having a go now.
California being in charge of the internet and so pushing their personal values on literally the rest of the world, even though it's proven to not work.
Pic related
forbidden onahole
To convince /v probably just add a bunch of D&D rules or let Nintendo do it.
action horror for this case,
1 (NOT demake) is perfect as an experience, 2 is better at action espect along with 'le cinematic cutscenes' but those are cool in that specific case so it's fine
Concluse 2 unrionically does it very well for a recent indie game. Some of the enemies are literally damn near indescribable (certain ones are so impossible that they have actual "censor blur" on them to represent the fact that they're too horrible to actually comprehend). And the lore helps a bunch too, form what little I've gathered.
Other picks are stuff like Golden Light, Where The Dead Cremate The Roadkill, and especially Torutaru. Games where the cosmic horrors are genuinely not just all encompassing, but hard to define without making you come across as an actual schizo.
Eternal darkness but with more focus on fricking with the player and oppressive atmosphere instead of basic b***h broken combat
I've never actually played the game, but I thought Control did it right.
Why don’t you guys do sex magic rituals to summon lovecraftian gods like Grant had did? Frick a girl during her period
>frick girl
If fricking a girl on her period is enough to summon Old Ones, I must be famous in R'lyeh.
More likes it hides it in expansion entirely. Base game story doesn't really have that much existentialism, it is much more about man made horrors and hubris.
Meant for
>Base game story
Yo hold up, which game has a base story about fricking girls on their period to hold off old gods?
Ah nevermind. I thought I was about to learn some crazy ass new game.
Someone needs to make a Kenneth grant inspired lovecraft game
He’s already referenced in the new(est) season of twin peaks
eh, it saves it to the end
>beat the game twice
>never unlock this building
I guess you gotta be a bastard to join them or something
>he's never unlocked Oculus
holy frick
you're missing 80% of the context of the fricking plot
I try to murder six every time I meet him but he's too strong
you can only make him seethe
Hes afraid of 7
>Frick a girl
I was up for cutting a goat in a cemetery or something but I think you're asking a bit too much here.
Males have limited options
>Shub Niggurath
And I guess that's it from BIG names
Yeah, it hides the existential shit for most of the game.
I, for one, would like a game based on charles stross the laundry
You can't do it properly, the core of the concept is something vastly beyond your comprehension and videogames love showing you the monster, explaining it and having you fight it
turn it into an absurdly cute young girl with long silky black hair and daddy issues chasing the player
Elder Things did nothing wrong
>Comfy colony on Earth, idyllic life
>Create some new races
>Then Cthulhi Black folk come in and ruin everything
They made the Shoggoths.
test
Quake is the best Lovecraftian game.
Other realms await...
Maps for this feel?
Dwell, which is what that's from. An even-ish mix of great maps and some mediocre.
Arcane Dimensions, obviously. The Quake gold standard.
After that it varies. Imhoptep's legacy, The Warden, there's loads of great maps. The xmasjams are good go-to's. The recent Dimension of the Machine was really fun. Just go looking, you're bound to find something cool.
>humans are the REAL monsters...
>and that's a good thing!
i'm not shitposting, i actually consider this a cosmic horror setting, just not for the humans
kek these are good any more? reminds me of the pet stores at the mall never sat rat with me
There are so many details that make this comic amazing to me.
>fingerless gloves
>lunchables with capri sun
>rat tail hair
>bomber jacket covered in old 80s cartoon patches
>etc
A super autist being the main character is perfect given the context of the whole thing.
If you've ever heard of Happy Tree Friends, it's sort of like that. Typically the 'fluffies' are arrogant, stupid, and obnoxious, or otherwise asking for it. They're usually an invasive species and pests, or sometimes they're pets that are impossible to truly domesticate and just piss and shit everywhere. I remember there being a decent number of comcis where one or two of them were well behaved and treated well, while the rest were shitty brats that would inevitably get tortured to death or somehow get themselves killed.
can you stop shitting the thread
im trying to immerse myself into the feeling of the sublime
No, no, this IS a cosmic horror setting for any sane human.
cringe and ineffective, not like the blind girl, where he first makes you empathize with the mc before hurting her
God I love fluffy pony abuse.
I forgot all about these. I frickin loved them back in the day, they were basically the American version of jissouseki and yukkuri.
I don't understand the premise of this. Badly drawn cartoons of people torturing an ostensibly fluffy sapient creature, for what purpose? Is it a fetish?
>Badly drawn cartoons
Comes with being niche, we don't get to pick who contributes.
>people torturing
Not necessarily, might as well be the indifference of nature or prospect of profit.
>an ostensibly fluffy sapient creature
Merely sentient.
>for what purpose?
Why does a forest burn?
It was originally created to offend moronic bronies.
>moronic bronies.
Pleonasm.
honestly the ones where they die horribly because they can't take care of themselves properly are the best
It just clicks some weird low key sadistic part of my brain for some reason. I have never actually hurt animals nor do I desire to do so, but something about these fricking moronic comics is endlessly fascinating to me.
>I have never actually hurt animals nor do I desire to do so
Do you eat meat?
I can't wait for the degeneracy of "animal rights" to be eradicated.
Beloved (1987)
le scary monster is the worst way to do it
focus on the insignificance of all of humanity's works and all of earth's history when compared to the endless abyss that is space, who was been there for uncountable millenia and will continue to be long after every single part of humanity is reduced to stardust
a good cosmic "horror" inspires both horror and awe
it's something beyond calculation, beyond reason, immeasurably vast and worth veneration in it's boundless greatness, a bottomless abyss
first of all, one of the core precepts of cosmic horror is "fear of the unknown"
but people often forget the rest and just focus on that part
i think a big part of it is also "awe" like and
say
it's the destruction of the human's antropocentric pespective when confronted with the rest of the cosmos, forcing contemplation on one's own place in this universe without inherent meaning
it's the horrible truth of our reality and the feeling of powerlessness, or helplessness, that it evokes, a truth that we strive to deny and bury under our insignificant achievements and scientific "progress"
Cosmic horror is writing tripe about tentacles and then b***hing about the Rhode Island racist whose shoulders you're standing on, without ever reading anything the man wrote.
a good cosmic horror is conceptual
it's not scary because of it's appearance but because of it's existence itself, or rather, because it's a part of existence that we refuse to accept
it has to inflict the feeling of "despair" like the immensity of the universe
hopelessness
existential crisis
loss of meaning
these are the important factors
a good cosmic horror should make you want to have a nice day
cosmic horror is the victory of nihilism
The perfect cosmic horror game would be you, stranded on a deserted planet, and you have an In real time timer for when you're set to be rescued off of it. The problem being, you have to survive on it until then. The setting alone would provide tons of cosmic horror scenarios. From the planet being alive, to you being purposely stranded there as some sorta of tribute to their an eldtrich creature, to body horror/visions from being stuck on that planet for so long. etc etc
Elden Ring, Demon Souls, Chrono Trigger
Can Clive Barkers Undying count as 'Lovecraftian'?
Why can't Saya be real bros?
this just makes me remember how bad No Man Sky dropped the ball on lovecraftian horror, all those planets you visit and no real lovecraftian horror to deal against
>No game where I can be [insert eldritch horror here] and fight with other eldritch horrors over influence
Sad
One of Black Souls 2 endings leads to that, but it's a non-canon bad ending. Black Souls 3 leads up to something similar, but the protagonist is unlikely to be a full-on Black personman, and you'll likely need to maintain some stealth - excessive Black personman warfare is said to lead to Azathoth's awakening in the in-game lore.
this reminds me a bit of Ar Nosurge where you, the player, are the 7th dimensional entity that possesses the player character Delta and pilots the robot Earthes. (You) provide the characters with supernatural knowledge and combat skills, and Casty (Delta's gf) begs you to keep Delta safe when they realize what is happening, and Delta resolves to allow you to keep possessing him.
>fear of the unknown
Eventually that fear will disappear and after that only curiosity and wanderlust shall remain
What other fears could you make games about?
>death -> pain -> paintings
???
>Death -> Pain -> Purple Squares
!!!
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself
Reading about 'true love' in fiction and knowing that I will never experience that is already the greatest horror there is
Read Saya no Uta.
honest question
is there a difference between cosmic horror and the sublime
Perspective, I guess?
A cultist that worships a cosmic entity would be enraptured while they go crazy looking at it while a regular person would shit their pants metaphorically and literally as the true scope of things breaks their mind, that's my guess at least.
more conventional horror
The real horror is that someone drew those pictures and decided to post them on the internet.
existence is suffering
we suffer because we exist
that's the real horror
Can I impregnate ShubNiggurath? and hold her tentacles?
can we do this thread again but without the guro porn
completely killed the mood
i loathe the "it's just punishment" cope
All it is is getting to do whatever you want to a valueless thing. "Good" behavior does not factor in and it can't save itself from painful doom.
cosmic horror is the call of the void