Why aren't there more games with heavy Lovecraft themes?

[D-Class 198482]

Bloodborne was second place on my game of the year list, right under Undertale. I loved the world, the combat, the mechanics, even the initial lore caught my eye. I would have been heartily satisfied with the whole game (although it wouldn't be as high-ranked for me) if it was just a game about some shmuck fighting werewolves.
Except it's not. It's a breakneck descent into the realms of the eldritch abomination, even going so far as to taking the Lovecraft idea of dreams and nightmares being physical planes and making them the late-game areas. Between the horrible, ancient bosses with designs so intricately hard to understand (if you asked me to describe Ebrietas you'd get nowhere with me), I love the Lovecraftian elements in Bloodborne more than anything else.
So I'm pretty curious why there aren't too many serious games that delve into it -- you have They Bleed Pixels in a slight scale, Eldritch, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, but what other games are there with heavy, serious Lovecraft themes?

 

[Spacewolf]

That Which Sleeps is an upcoming Strategy game coming out that has a Lovecraft theme. Hard to say if it will fit the feel though since it's not out yet and you actually play as an Old one.

 

[Here Comes Tomorrow]

Because it doesn't lend itself well to the common heroes/themes western devs like to put in their games.

Can you imagine Nathan Drake quipping at a shoggoth or [Assassins Creed character] scowling at a Yithian as it explains that they're going to put his vital organs and brain in a jar and take him beyond time and space.

The themes are too bleak for most western devs, they like their games to be good guys vs bad guys.

The japanese try bless 'em, but they have a habit of turning elder gods into moe blobs.

 

[Lufia Erim]

I feel like it's a little niche to be honest. Which is why we get a few but not a lot.

Plus Western RPGS are still stuck up Tolkiens ass.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

There aren't even many BOOKS with Lovecraftian themes. For such an iconic name in horror literature, he has precious little in the way of imitators or homages. After reading "14" I went looking for Lovecraftian Horror and was endlessly redirected to the works of Lovecraft himself.

By comparison, there seems to be an almost wealth of it in gaming, from the direct Lovecraft/Cthulu mythos games, to stuff like Sunless Sea, or MMOs that clearly draw inspiration from it (Secret World, the Old Ones in World of Warcraft).

Plus Western RPGS are still stuck up Tolkiens ass.

Classic western fantasy in general has struggled to get out from under Tolkien's shadow.

 

[Silvanus]

I would suggest it's because Lovecraftian horror (as great as it can be) is relatively obscure, and relatively niche. Not to us, perhaps, but to your average cinema-goer, and even gamer.

Now, with the recent critical acclaim for both Bloodborne and Undertale (though I have little experience of the latter), I wouldn't be surprised if developers and publishers took notice.

 

[Ravinoff]

Because it doesn't lend itself well to the common heroes/themes western devs like to put in their games.

Can you imagine Nathan Drake quipping at a shoggoth or [Assassins Creed character] scowling at a Yithian as it explains that they're going to put his vital organs and brain in a jar and take him beyond time and space.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want to make a good Lovecraft-themed game by a Western dev, base it on Delta Green [http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/7644266/images/1263791532744.jpg]. You can have your generic grizzled white male protagonist...who's all of a sudden dealing with sanity-melting horrors from beyond instead of brown guys with AKs. Start him off doing whatever (cop, soldier, explorer), then drop him straight into the weird shit. None of the Men In Black "you've been chosen because you're the best" crap, just dump him right into the world of shoggoths and Outer Gods.

 

[Here Comes Tomorrow]

Because it doesn't lend itself well to the common heroes/themes western devs like to put in their games.

Can you imagine Nathan Drake quipping at a shoggoth or [Assassins Creed character] scowling at a Yithian as it explains that they're going to put his vital organs and brain in a jar and take him beyond time and space.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you want to make a good Lovecraft-themed game by a Western dev, base it on Delta Green [http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/7644266/images/1263791532744.jpg]. You can have your generic grizzled white male protagonist...who's all of a sudden dealing with sanity-melting horrors from beyond instead of brown guys with AKs. Start him off doing whatever (cop, soldier, explorer), then drop him straight into the weird shit. None of the Men In Black "you've been chosen because you're the best" crap, just dump him right into the world of shoggoths and Outer Gods.

Thats what I mean though. Western devs make games that are a power fantasy. You can't really give that to players when they're up against unimaginable horror. Even Dark Corners of the Earth eventually caved and gave the player a chance to kill fish monsters and an electric death gun.

Devs just aren't willing to take the chance on proper Lovecraftian stories because the protaganist really shouldn't be able to fight back and will either die or go insane or probably both by the end. Though I will give DCotE credit that despite the main character murdering giant eldritch beings, they did drive him mad eventually.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

No one is mentioning Amnesia?! The whole thing is Lovecraft inspired. Cosmic horrors, monsters that drain sanity, dark and spooky castles, racism.
Even A Machine for Pigs was just Monopoly meets the Reanimator, and you basically play as Garro/Herbert West.

But my guess is that Lovecraft games are very specific. They almost universally have to be horror, and horror games are so very easy to get wrong, even with great ideas. See SOMA and Dead Space for that.
And even when you do get it right, its rarely financially successful.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

What's the most common fate of a Lovecraftian protagonist? Dead, completely insane, or dead and completely insane. Lovecraft's entire schtick was everyday people faced up against incomprehensible things that don't even understand that we're people, that destroy us physically or mentally not even through maliciousness but via the very nature of their existence.

It's very hard to build a game around that. I've never played Bloodborne or any of the Dark Souls games myself, but I'm not sure how they really fit in to that genre beyond aesthetics (bizarre, misshappen horrors from beyond).

 

[Albino Boo]

The enemy is the Cthulhu Mythos isn't beatable and in games you need to have a something you can win. It stops being Lovecraftian when you have killed your 100th Deep one or sniped the 67th Fungi from Yuggoth. The other issue is that Lovecraftian horror stories aren't about jump scares but the slow realisation than humanity is a powerless in the face of the true nature of the universe. Games can do jump scares but slow builds require exposition which loses immersion in games rather than adding to it.

 

[M0rp43vs]

Try giving Sunless Sea a try. It's a steam punk Victorian, semi rogue-like sail-around-the-world-em up where you're trying to keep your sanity that's very heavy on the "Old ones of the depths" and "Things mortal men's minds were not meant to comprehend" themes.

It's a lot lighter than usual lovecraftian affairs, with a bit more comedy and farce, but if hides a really dark and dreary interior. A bit like an old school british comedy.

The gameplay is not much to write about, but the writing is fairly superb and the atmosphere is thus that it's strangely relaxing going through the dark and forboding Zee of the Neath.

I haven't played it but I'm guessing the predecessor game it spun off from, Fallen London, also follows it's Lovecraft bent. I hear it has less gameplay though.

 

[D-Class 198482]

What's the most common fate of a Lovecraftian protagonist? Dead, completely insane, or dead and completely insane.

Well, you can hardly say that Bloodborne lacks that, considering the three endings consist of the player

Spoiler

'dying' in the Dream and returning to the surface having forgotten the Great Ones even existed, meeting a true, powerful Great One (not like the lesser/newborn Great Ones you meet throughout the game) and going insane, or becoming a Great One themselves.

 

[Evonisia]

Because Lovecraft's themes almost always have to be found in horror or some really intense drama, both of which are fairly niche compared to other genres which are ill suited to Lovecraft.

Horror games often rely on simpler tactics to invoke fear in the player and take influence from other popular media to create an effective experience (Until Dawn from 90s horror films, Silent Hill from Jacob's Ladder, Alan Wake from the works of Stephen King, The Last of Us from Zombie media, Dead Space from Alien and Event Horizon).

Of course, indie titles are more likely to have a crack at Lovecraft (Amnesia as has already been mentioned), but indie developers too would rather just rip off whatever was popular recently. Why bother putting in such depressing and difficult to implement themes when you can just make a clone of whatever was the latest YouTube breakthrough and print some money?

 

[Xeorm]

I'd say it's because video games are an inherently visual medium. Because Lovecraftian monsters are indescribable, they normally get around it in books by leaving the descriptions up to the reader. Can't do that with a video game, not as well at least.

You can try and show the monster and build something sufficiently crazy looking...but that doesn't tend to do so well. Cthulu as he's properly drawn isn't scary, nor is a lot of the monsters. They rely on that extra bit to make them good.

You can try and do something like what cheap movies (the SyFy channel comens to mind) do and hide the monster. Never show it, and leave it up to the player to fill in the pieces. Amnesia tries to do this, but it falls apart whenever the player decides to look at the damn things.

There's also Sunless Sea's solution, which is to return it to a written genre. Great...but still niche. I don't really want to read all the time in my video games.

 

[Dansen]

What's the most common fate of a Lovecraftian protagonist? Dead, completely insane, or dead and completely insane. Lovecraft's entire schtick was everyday people faced up against incomprehensible things that don't even understand that we're people, that destroy us physically or mentally not even through maliciousness but via the very nature of their existence.

It's very hard to build a game around that. I've never played Bloodborne or any of the Dark Souls games myself, but I'm not sure how they really fit in to that genre beyond aesthetics (bizarre, misshappen horrors from beyond).

That little synopsis you gave about lovecraft is more or less what Bloodborne is all about. The story is basically about how a civilization ruined itself in its mad quest for ascension to a higher plane of existence.

 

[vallorn]

Well, this website's very own Yahtzee made a somewhat Lovecraftian game set in a variation of his Chzo Mythos (a lovecraftian setting from his earlier works)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/403830/

Spoiler: Nerd3 playing it

Spoiler: Yahtzee and his friend playing it

It's not bad at all.

Back on topic. As most people have said, the key to Cosmic Horror is powerlessness and fear of the unknown. It's hard to make a game where you have no hope of winning. However, it's harder to manage the fear of the unknown, it's the unsaid word, the unseen flicker, the shadow around the next corner. It's a difficult thing to manage when everything has to be comprehensible on the screen to the player. Text manages better because you can describe things that are impossible to show easily, some games cheat by making it bad to look at the monster (Amnesia), and some do their best but still lack the horrific spark that truly ascends a horrifying star-abomination into the territory of mind blasting terror.

How do you render in pixels, that which must be incomprehensible?

EDIT: Now that I think about it, the plot of Shadowrun: Hong Kong has a somewhat Lovecraftian theme mixed with elements of eastern myth and the general magic cyberpunk of the setting. Especially the last few missions, and it manages to do a lot with just text descriptions of things.

 

[Vanilla ISIS]

Eternal Darkness on the GameCube has some Lovercraftian themes.
It definitely has the "going insane" aspect down.