Staff – October 23, 2018 at 10:04 AM
The work of 20th-century horror fiction author H.P. Lovecraft has been causing people to re-read disturbing sentences and slowly shake their head in disbelief for nearly a century. His characters tend to succumb to insanity when they behold the abject horror of each monstrosity they uncover (and the reader, rest assured, is inclined to do the same).
This is the feeling the folks at Cyanide hope to inspire in players of their upcoming RPG, Call of Cthulhu, which is an adaptation of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu pen-and-paper RPG. Both games draw from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, a body of literary work that concerns an abominable, octopus-headed, cosmic entity whose appearance is enough to drive anyone mad.
Call of Cthulhu follows a detective, Edward Pierce, as he travels to an island near Boston, Massachusetts to investigate the mysterious death of a family. The island, aptly named Darkwater, is incredibly gloomy, rendered with the devastating, dark hues characteristic of Romantic-era landscape paintings.
“When you build a Lovecraftian environment you have to convey mystery,” Cyanide’s team explained. They drew visual inspiration from a range of references, including the surrealist paintings of Zdzisław Beksiński, the portraiture of Rembrandt, and film noir, from which they borrowed a stark contrast between light and dark. “Light and dark are a very important part of the game design, and to add even more mystery, we also use a lot of smoke and fog as film noir movies did,” Cyanide said.
The result is a game rich with tormented landscapes and scenery, providing Pierce with an environment that very much encourages him to go insane. In fact, Cyanide insists that Pierce’s insanity is inevitable, though just how insane Pierce becomes is up to the player. “Sometimes the player will have the opportunity to trade his sanity for knowledge of opportunities, or even to help him recover from a really bad choice or failed skill test,” Cyanide’s team explained. “Thus, some events will be influenced by the amount of sanity remaining to Pierce.”
Sanity is a staple of Chaosium’s original tabletop version of Call of Cthulhu, and Cyanide made sure to treat the mechanic with the same amount of care that Chaosium did. While designing the game, they aimed to keep the player in the dark about the quantifiable effects of Pierce’s insanity, opting instead to evoke something more experiential.
“The player feels incredibly good when he can anticipate the result of his actions,” Cyanide’s team explained. By obscuring the effects of Pierce’s insanity, Cyanide messes with the player’s expectations, threatening their feeling of control. They believe this is more effective than communicating Pierce’s insanity through cutscenes or dialogue. “We believe that's one of the most powerful ways to express something in games: through the gameplay,” they said.
Call of Cthulhu may be the closest game to capturing the soul-crushing, mind-bending horror of Lovecraft’s works. You can see for yourself when the game releases later this month, just in time for Halloween — though maybe at the cost of your own sanity.
Call of Cthulhu will be available on PC on October 30, 2018.
