The scariest thing about Cthulhu is that he's not the scariest thing in the Cthulhu Mythos. Nyarlathotep, the Colour Out of Space, and Azathoth are all arguably much scarier.
Yes, but Azathoth is a threat too far out of mankind's grasp to even consider. For mankind to expend worry and concern on the matter of Azathoth would be for a colony of ants to do the same on the matter of the Galaxy.
StarryStarryNocturne I suppose that's true, but I just feel like the concept that we could be destroyed at any second by an uncaring god is far scarier than a squidfaced monster that eats a few people.
YpsiFang Yes, but if such a threat were true and mankind were to lend worry and concern to it our psyches would implode. Just like if a colony of ants were to do the same in my comparison. The point I'm getting at mainly is that Azathoth wouldn't make a good tool of fear as a driving force behind the actions of human beings in a video game or film. There's nothing mankind could do about Azathoth but psychologically collapse as soon as his existence and his threat is intellectually realized. There's at least a little wiggle room with Cthulhu.
YpsiFang I see, so, you were just stating the obvious? I mean who has ever argued that Cthulhu is the scariest thing in the mythos? Who has ever agued that Azathoth isn't a scarier concept than Cthulhu for that matter? I thought your original comment was following the general theme of the video. If it were even on just the portion of the video that focused on the explanation of what Cthulhu represents for mankind, how could you suggest a move from the more immediate incomprehensible threat to something with much more cosmic implications? Ah, well. My mistake.
What bugs me in anything outside of Lovecraftian mythos is that everything from games, fan fiction, and tv/films make Cthulhu out to be the biggest bad guy, the end all be all of the mythos. Which is far from the truth, He's not even the main villain in his book. Hell he's basically a human when you compare him to the outer Gods.
i'd say there's an even larger difference between him and some others than the difference between humans and cthulhu (and that difference is already unimaginable huge)
Taken quite literally from the stories, Cthulhu is actually an alien cult leader: high priest of the cult of the Old Ones. And Cthulhu and humans have more than just a metaphor in common, depending on how literally you read the account of the People of K'n-yan in "The Mound" (written mostly by Lovecraft, with input from Zelia Bishop), a rather human-looking race of people who sealed themselves underground before R'lyeh, Mu, Atlantis, and the other ocean civilizations fell beneath the waves, and who claimed to have followed Cthulhu to Earth, and to have been the ancestors of modern man. Lovecraft gives us some small reason to question the origin story given for the People of K'n-yan by revealing some background details that tie their mythos in with that revealed in the polar city of "At the Mountains of Madness" and a tendency of the People to bury revelations they can't quite handle, but that, too, is amusingly suggestive of the human race having more than just a little in common with Lovecraftian monsters.
I can see one of the "good" endings now. You take a boat and find R'lyeh, waking Cthulhu and as He rises from the ocean your screen blots and glitches and then He looks at you causing your character to begin screaming, then the screen blinks in and out as your character bashes his skull onto the rail of the boat, then black for a few seconds and you open your eyes once more to see a giant eye a few feet away, staring at you, then black and cut straight to the main menu, no "the end," no credits, not even music.
That's exactly what I want in a game! So like, when you are near the end of the horror game, you awaken Cthulhu (As you said) But! to creep the players out even more, have a giant eyeball open in front of them, as they see a giant rise up, and then the rest that you said.
or there can be a quote on quote true ending where if you go perfect, the boat leaves without you, you get left behind, the boat vanishes in the distance the reason why you will never know, you get left with what happened you sit down and nothing is left, you’re all alone, alive, but at what cost?
Fun physics fact: most of the universe is made up of vast reserves of unknowable substances and strange energies we creatures of baryonic matter can’t see or interact with in any meaningful way. Now imagine if that wasn’t necessarily true in reverse, and that things living on the other side of the matter gap might start taking notice of that tiny 5% of the universe that encompasses human understanding. You’d essentially have yourself a situation where modern physics has proven Lovecraft to be totally right, and we’d never know until it was too late. Sweet dreams~
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth did this pretty well. In that game you never even SEE Cthulhu! The only Old Ones you see are Dagon and Mother Hydra, and most Lovecraft stories seem to imply that those two are really just particularly old and massive Deep Ones than actual Old Ones. The only time you encounter Cthulhu's power is in a room where a Cthulhu statue stands, and the longer you stay in the room with the statue, the quicker your sanity meter depletes. You never get to see him, but being in the presence of a mere image of him is enough to drive the character insane.
Yes Dark Corners has definitely the best job above and beyond of really instilling a sense of fear in the player. (My god, who doesn't remember their first run from the damned fishmen?) No slaying hundreds of enemies like the new shitty pretenders. While Eternal Darkness suffered from having a lot of combat, that wasn't integral to the puzzle-solving, storyline, and heavy lovecraft influence. The sanity system was also ingenious, and hasn't been successfully replicated since.
What made Amnesia ( and others like SOMA, or Outlast ) so good horror games is the feeling of powerlessness you experiment by not being able to defend yourself or, wore in Amnesia, to even barricade doors; AND being "fantastic" - except for SOMA - settings ( like every Lovecraftian novels ), where you have to fight concepts like sanity, or indicible horrors... ( Wallrider for exemple in Outlast, a invisible force otherwordly in appearance ). This is what Lovecraftian settings horror games need to be based on. Because THIS ( the irruption of the unreal in the real, and the fact you are but a regular human being put against forces that goes way beyond your understanding ) is what Lovecraft is all about... ( Except for some wasp view points with the deep ones and all this but... Hey, no one is perfect ! xD )
I loved "CoC: Dark Corners..." but that take on Dagon and Hydra came more from Chaosium's pen-and-paper RPG than from Lovecraft's stories: the story "Dagon" can be thought of as a sort of first draft for the climax of "The Call of Cthulhu", while the references to Dagon and Hydra in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" come off more like baloney that Obed Marsh cooked up to make more palatable to his victims the deal he'd made with the Deep Ones selling his family, friends, and neighbors out as sacrificial husbands and wives to monsters, in exchange for gold. The "Father Dagon and Mother Hydra" thing was basically a fake religion to try to make the whole being-dragged-into-the-ocean-abysses-to-serve-as-unwilling-breeding-stock-for-aliens thing sound like a fun family reunion in an underwater heaven with long-lost members of humanity's family tree....
Would be a fun joke to make a Cthulhu in some game so that pissing it off crashes the game and gives you an error message along the lines of "Cthulhu melted down reality"
Perhaps. Although I personally would make it the daemon sultan Azathoth, the blind idiot god at the center of creation. The error message could be like "Azathoth has Awakened. His Dream - Your Reality - has Ended."
Bluecho4 I prefer having Cthulhu being devoured by some even greater power and then leaves. Finally the main character puts a gun to his own head to end his insanity
So basically, Cthullhu is just a bad trip on Acid. You have no control, everything is fucked and you philosophically shit your pants as all reality draws to a close and you face infinite nothingness. Actually, I think that sounds more like a hit of Salvia! "...am I back?"
Actually Lovecraft would say “it’s a literal being.” There are tons of other creatures within the mythos that more closely resemble the metaphysical/Physical relationship you describe. Cthulhu is just the “casual” name that most people would have at least heard of.
they literally ram a boat into Cthulhu 's face and it tore its head apart. it did have an effect. Thats how they were able to escape to be able to tell the tale in the first place. What happened is that Cthulhu regenerated from the damage.
Sadly I think it may be too late for Cthulhu, his image has already been taken down like many well known horror icons. But I'm sure there's room for a new original creature, or even an old one that has flew passed the radar. :)
Jasae Bushae Or maybe even taking on the Colour from The Colour Out of Space. If someone could properly tackle that in a film or videogame format, heck, in any visual medium, I would be extremely happy, since that is probably one of Lovecraft's best stories and most unnerving horrors.
A creature ... as a sentient galaxy would be a creature ... or a sentient super black hole. The point is that "it" transcends "creature" or even "god" or "demon" ... it is something beyond those human constructs. It is supposed to be outside and beyond and actually, permanently ... unknowable.
+THELORDOFEXCESS wasn't Cthulhu supposed to be some kind of invader in "at the mountains of madness"? It was supposed to be made of an alien matter and follow physical laws that are different than us but Cthulhu is nowhere near the strangest things HP Lovecraft wrote about.
+Robert Gallasch ...sort of, they kind of took over the majority of the oceans from the race of yeth, while what are essentially yeti's took over the mountains, and some fucked up dragon things capable of ending all of the above civilizations were subdued below by yeth and the development of energy weapons. yeth were confined to the polar regions and then soon after whiped out by the slave race of sheoggaths (basically near mindless drones capable of limitless evolution...origionally just drones but the yith couldn't subdue all of the ones that gradually grew intelligent). The way cthulhu was apparently defeated (haven't read it) was by temporarily injuring him thus delaying him long enough for the planets to unaligned and the city to sink beneath him, sealing him back to the deep. His form is physical...just that it's not only what's immediately in front of you that you have to worry about, injuring him has no real meaning as it simply delays. In a way call of cthulhu does capture this in regards to presenting the information that despite everything you did, it's just stalling the inevitable.
+Alex Cooper um.... you got a little bit mixed up there... 4.5 billion years before present: Cthugha (No, it isn't Cthulhu) and its fire vampire servitors arrive. 1 billion years BP: The elder things arrive on earth, landing in what is now the atlantic ocean. Using organic material, they invoke or generate a primal shogoth mass called Ubbo-Sathla, the father of all life. All life on earth is born from this creature. From this, the elder things create the shogoths, and build their first great undersea city. 750 million years BP: The flying polyps arrive on earth from outer space. Settling on what later becomes Australia, they create great windowless cities of basalt and feed upon the indigenous cone shaped beings they find there. 400 million years BP: The minds of the great race of Yith travel across time and space into the cone shaped beings the flying polyps feasted upon. The Yith, utilising their knowledge and technology, fight and win a war against the polyps, imprisoning them in vast caverns underneath their cities. 350 million years BP: Cthulhu and his star-spawn arrive on earth and claim the continent of Mu for their own. They begin a war with the elder things for dominance of the planet, but eventually a truce is declared between the two races. 300 million years BP: Mu is sunk beneath the waters of the pacific ocean, and Cthugha and the fire vampires are banished from the earth. 275 million years BP: The serpent folk civilisation in Valusia begins. 250 million years BP: The shogoths revolt against the elder things. In a war of survival, the elder things eventually gain victory. Their slave beasts, the shogoths, are nearly extinct. This event signals the decline of elder thing civilisation. 160 million years BP: The mi-go, the fungi from yuggoth, arrive and establish a colony in the Appalachian mountains. They begin a war with the elder things, who are forced to retreat southwards. Soon the earth is divided, with mi-go in the north, elder things in the south and the great race of Yith in the lands surrounding Australia. 70 million years BP: the dinosaurs are wiped out by a meteor impact. 50 million years BP: A cataclysm shakes the earth and destroys the prison of the flying polyps, freeing them. The Yith then transmit their minds into the bodies of the New great race, a hive mind of bugs that inhabit the earth far after the fall of man. Without the intelligence of the Yith, the cone shaped beings are overwhelmed and killed. The polyps then appear to disappear from the world, however some remain in the ancient cities of the Yith and their cavernous prisons. And that's pretty much it up until present day. The rest of the history is that the elder things retreat further into the antarctic and the mi-go kind of go away to the point where they are rare to find on earth.
There's only one way to accomplish "fighting Cthulhu" in a game and that is when the "self empowerment" aspects carries you completely outside the realm of humanity. Your character would need to progress to a point where they are no longer human and that the rest of humanity is beneath your notice as much as it is for Big C himself. You may have had companions along your journey, but they are a distant memory and whether they are alive or dead and, if dead, by your hand or something else's, is something about which you absolutely could not care less. If you want to have a slobber-knocker with an eldritch horror, you must become one yourself.
Yeah but all of those games have characters with "vaguely human" levels of strength. A cthulean horror would need to be so powerful it can destroy earth, not through some small intentional act, but as an unintended consequence of merely being in the area. So powerful that all logic or reason fails to comprehend what has happened.
Well, Bloodborne handled being able to kill Cthulhoid beings fairly well. Probably because the point is that you can kill individual Great Ones, but you're still always playing by the rules of other, greater powers, never fully in control of where your character goes. So the powerlessness and sense of smallness in the universe that Cthulhu represents is still present, despite being able to kill Great Ones. Also, the majority of people in Yharnam are fully aware of the Great Ones and worship them, which is very unusual for Lovecraftian horror, but it ends up working rather well in Bloodborne.
aresdotexe Well, in Bloodborne, most of the people are already mad, they're in the process of turning into beasts, but they refuse to believe that the old blood is the source of the scourge, they refuse to believe that it was the church (that got them to worship the old ones) all along, they refuse to believe that they themselves are beasts, and honestly, to me, my favourite old one is Oedon, I'd love to see what From Software is about to bring us about him in the expansion
Even the ending where you yourself become a great one has some strange implications, considering that the hunter's dream exist before you came along so you can't be the host, Gehrman is dead so he can't be the host, and the moon presence is dead so he also couldn't be the host. But if you go to the abandoned workshop you can see the dolls finger twitching if you look closely, the hunter's dream may have been the dolls all along and now you, as a great one, are sort of her surrogate child, and as we know from the description of the umbilical cord "every great one loses its child, and yearns for a surrogate."
***** In my opinion, the doll isn't a great one but is going to acquire powers to defend the infant great one, like Mergo's Wet Nurse, which still has an unknown origin
as far as lore goes, I think it's pretty stablished that the wet nurse is a great one.Much like the pressence and amygdala, it only exists and "can be defeated" in the dreamlands with I think suits well with hunters being more that what meets the eye
Diego Carnero Ortega Great Ones can exist outside dreams, Ebrietas for example was a Great One who was left behind after the other Great Ones have ascended to the cosmos or such, in which case they can only manifest themselves to humans through dreams, Mergo was the child of Yharnam, the queen of the Pthumarian's, she was pregnant with a physical child of a Great One, and unlike other children of Great Ones, Mergo survived, and was taken to the nightmare by some way or another, not sure how, but it was for him to ascend I think, and it was probably the School of Mensis who beckoned for the Wet Nurse to take him, or it can be that the Wet Nurse was real and she was a Pthumarian, and gained powers from the either the beckoner/host of the nightmare or the beckoned Great One, like the doll who gained sentience when Gehrman beckoned the Moon Presence, it is most likely that Mergo is the real Great One behind the scourge of the beast and not the Wet Nurse whether she herself is an Old One or not, welp, not sure about it
In my opinion, explanations ruin horror in general. For example: You have a horror movie with a scary creature. Is it a demon? An alien examining human anatomy? Welp, I see you are very curious, so here's the solution to the mystery - It's ghost avenging his own death after being executed for a crime he didn't commit! Now, almost anyone familiar with horror movies - can agree that this is the part where the film becomes much less scary.
Unraveler in my opinion, knowing only to realize the insurmountable gap between you and the monster gives more horror. Cthulhu and eldritch abominations wouldn't be so scary if we didn't know what they were. They would be just normal monsters instead of being monster of all monsters. The trick however is to do the 'backstory' right, which Hollywood likes to dumb down for the average viewer thus making them less scary. An example I could give is the Aliens. Before Prometheus and Covenant, we knew that the xenomorphs are engineered by aliens far more ancient and powerful than us. Thus if they couldn't contain the alien, what hope do we have? But now we know that it is actually a human android that created the iconic alien and it spoiled everything.
It's why I hate when we have horror prequels, or whatever to explain the origins of the creature/villain. I don't want to know that Michael Myers was bullied and mistreated as a child, stop making me feel sympathy for him, you're making him less scary by doing that.
Last time someone tried to steamboat Cthulu... _"farewell Thunderchild"_ " _Lashing ropes and smashing timbers_ _Flashing Heat Rays pierced the deck_ _Dashing hopes for our deliverance_ _As we watched the sinking wreck_ _With the smoke of battle clearing_ _Over graves in waves defiled_ _Slowly disappearing_ _Farewell Thunder Child!_ " Ooooooolaaaaaaaaaaahhhh !!! As they say on Mars ; )
He did reform after that incident, and just went back to sleep with a minor bruise, like a bruise you'd get by punching a wall, it didn't kill him, he just went back under the waves to reform, then the stars unaligned cause Cthulu has the worst luck so he is forced to go back to sleep
Last summer I played an amazing D&D campaign revolving around a cult trying to summon an ancient being. We were set inside a train going through a long period in its journey where we were to far from any towns to bring aid. The way the DM went through the story truly captured that the ancient being wasn’t a really supposed to be a being, but something that was happening to us, unpreventable. The only thing we had control over was trying to stop the cult from summoning the being, and that sense on desolation felt like we as the players, the force behind D&D, were utterly powerless. I completely agree with everything said in this video.
Yeah, though that game is more Harlan Ellison (mostly because it's based off one of his stories), and in the end, the protagonists DO have a chance of beating AM. But it does show the feebleness of human existance, and is pretty disturbing at times. It's just not Cthulhu because, well, you CAN win.
According to the official wiki and an FAQ with the game creator, the moon lord just is Cthulhu. Also his brain and eye are pretty much fodder, and the real deal isn't even really the hardest fight, that honor goes to the empress of light daymode.
No, you have a point. Toby Fox did something with the files that would change the title depending on where you were or crash the game, and assuming people don't see the Meta resurgence, that could be the way to go. crashing and relaunching with the title changed to eldritch runes at random intervals, changing it's icon on your desktop. Onviously, don't make it a gimmick - small things for the observant player
"Now, at my end, I can fully see. My last case opened in me a fear, a real fear. A fear of myself; of what I am, and what I've always been. All that I was is now lost. Hope? Purpose? Pleasure? All meaningless. I now walk in the shadows between worlds, and it is there that I have finally glimpsed what lives in the dark corners of the earth..." No one seems to remember the amazing game "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth" a survival horror game, the first to use the sanity loss concept before "Amnesia: The dark descent" and most times makes you genuinely feel not in control of the situation. I love how loyal to the mythos logic has, I mean, in the game you never get to fight nor even see Cthulhu, only Dagon, Hydra and its cultists, but even being influenced by Cthulhu's dreams is enough to turn the main character mad and make him kill himself eventually...
This game is amazing; I play it about once a year. Not only is it exactly the perfect game described in this video, but it was WAY ahead of it's time. It was the first game I ever played with iron-sight aiming for guns, it had you running helpless from enemies years before games like outlast existed, a sanity loss system similar to but better than Amnesia; the game is just great.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is also overlooked, maybe because it was the only M-rated game to be a Gamecube exclusive. Sanity meters 3 years before CoC: Dark Corners, excellent use of historical research and locations, and the only way to kill an Elder God is to summon another Elder God and hope that it doesn't turn its attention to you before killing the first Elder God. Also, one "good" Elder God is manipulating events to kill all its competition, and you have no way of knowing if it will still find humanity's continued existence useful in the future.
like i've said to someone else. give the illusion of control. and part way through, do something like rapid regeneration, or make the health bar completely disappear while damaging the other player's or change up the controls or even remove the controls part way through the fight. so that once you get them to half health, you can't move or do anything. your forced to watch as cthulhu slowly devours your mind and body while your character just stands there in fear
ye, cthulu could have (in an UT esq thing) the fight and mercy buttons switched at the last secont, so you flee from him out of your control and someone else kills him while you're on the overworld...
Yes you can do the thing, it achieves its true form when it finds itself at 0 health, and the health bar just goes the other way, and even attacks you.
The real horror is that humanity has not even a hope of holding out against things like this. Cthulhu might not be the biggest threat out there, but no matter what we have no hope of ever withstanding him or the other elder things if they ever decide to squash us out. We're as consequential to them as a gnat is to us, something they wouldn't even think of for more than a few seconds after crushing into nothingness. All of humanity, all of life, all of the earth itself could be eradicated in an instant by the errant swipe of a terror from beyond the stars, and no amount of foresight or intervention could prevent it. The scary thing is, the real universe is like this. Life on earth has only managed to last so long in the universe because ultimately we are VERY lucky. The earth could have been bombarded with radiation and reduced to a lifeless husk eons ago, or destroyed in the planetary impact that created the moon. If we were too close or too far from the sun, we'd be a burnt out rock or a frozen ball of ice. We've faced several mass extinctions from huge meteors in the past, and even within the earth itself are things that could easily destroy us. Supervolcanoes, earthquakes, rare diseases (Ebola has NOTHING on naegleria fowleri), hell even the higgs boson could wipe us all out with little resistance. At the same time, the cosmic horror of cthulhu is a little dated because these days we don't think of our insignificance as a thing of horror, but rather something of wonder. It's amazing that the universe is so vast and exists on a scale we can't even fathom. It's fascinating that the earth has survived long enough for us to exist. That's perhaps the real reason why Cthulhu is becoming a killable enemy instead of the implacable horror he once was. In Lovecraft's time, going to the moon was inconceivable. Now it's practically a day trip for astronauts. We're preparing for commercial space flights, and readying for life among the stars. How can we fear that which we've come to know so much about? The answer is: we reveal that which we do not. Cthulhu and co. belongs there, lurking behind what scientists call "the black wall", the upper limit of our knowledge and comprehension as a whole. He is beyond space, beyond time, beyond any ability to quantify or define. To him, the universe is a plaything, and perhaps the time when we venture forth as a whole race to walk among the stars will be the time when he finally notices us, the little gnat buzzing in his ear. *swat*
tbh i'd prefer a lifebar starting like midscreen going into one direction and when reaching the "0 hp" it starts building up in the opposite direction, so the player still has some hope but has to realize that there's no way of doing anything at all also there would need to be something happening if somebody manages to defeat him which would be impossible by default, but might become possible by cheating (or adding a incredibly hard to find easteregg, that might only have a low% chance of even working) to make the players still wonder if there might be a possible intended way of beating him and feeling insecure about their own mind and possibility to judge whether there is a way or no way at all a healthbar that doesn't go down at all would tell us it's not possible to do any damage. it's something we can comprehend without any problems. there needs to be mystery, giving players the idea there might be a way, giving them hope, playing with their minds and expectations i'd personally let the healthbar be filled and decreased again by filling it up on the original side again. if you do it often enough you'll expect this to happen so it will still be like this for a while, letting people think that's all. if you tryhard it bc u still think something might happen if you do it often enough theres always the option of adding something different when nearly everybody lost their expectations of something to happen imo if you're trying so hard to defeat cthulhu, the possible ultimate horror (for a gamer) should be unleashed and the game should wipe itself, leading to a player not knowing whether to like the game because there actually was something happening if you kept trying and you got "rewarded" for it or to hate it because it did this you can't use cthulhu in a game without playing with the player's mind, without playing with his sanity
A good idea from my side: never let the player find out that the world is based on the Cthulhu mythos, only by some small chance would they stumble upon someone mentioning them. For example, what Bloodborne did with the Moon Presence. it had been there the entire time, giving the player directions, controlling them. It had been there even before the player, ever since it created the hunt, the Dream and trapped Gehrman within. Probably, not even Gehrman knows of it. I don't remember the game ever hinting at simple peasants - like Gehrman used to be - knowing at all of the Great Ones. For example, when the prostitute whose name I'm too lazy to google gives birth to a Great One, she sees it for what it is - a monstrosity - and does not react like would, for example, members of the Church. Gehrman doesn't know how many hundreds of years have passed outside and that Ludwig is dead and gone to the Nightmare and Willem - close to dying. he knows there is something, because he knows to channel energy from the Moon. But he doesn't know what it is and what are its intentions
+Ernests Stroinovs Bloodborne is a very interesting example of cosmic horror done right, I think. Three endings: 1) You complete your task and wake up. You go up to some scholars and tell them that dreams are actually real and exist on different dimensional plains, and that they are the domain of things that normal man can't see, then you get called a fucking nut and shunned. All your eldritch knowledge only alienates you from your fellow man, and on top of that, you just spent who knows how long slaughtering people, and things worse than people, so any ethics and morals you may have had have likely been eroded away to the point where you might consider killing someone simply because they annoyed you- cause hey, killing something has solved a lot of your problems so far. Essentially, you're not really fit to inhabit human society anymore, because 2) You kill Gehrman, and take upon yourself the patronage of the Moon Presence. Which means, you get to guide hunters through their own dreams, all the while possibly being confined to the Hunter's Dream for however long you have before someone de-thrones you or the Moon Presence no longer needs you. You lose control of your life and become a mouthpiece for a terror that just so happens to help out humanity because humanity are pretty good tools for killing it's competition. 3) You trascend the hunt, kill the Moon Presence before it can take ownership of you, and due to your understanding of the cosmos and your expanded senses, you become so divorced from Humanity that you are forcibly evolved into the very kind of creatures you've been killing; a Great One. You the player lose control at this point, because you're no longer human and therefor no longer have a real human view of the world. The "you" that you knew died, and whats taken your place is a far different, far stranger "you".
***** You could've gone without explaining the endings because everyone and their grandma know about them XD I really love how the worst outcome looks exactly like a good ending - you wake up to see a beautiful new day. While the Presence awaits in the shadows, waiting for new pawns. I like how you mentioned the society shunning you and calling you crazed, despite you having so much damn insight. Also, same goes for Dark Souls, with its two endings - you becoming human firewood or leave the world in darkness so humans can now "rule the world" and the reign of gods is over. But it doesn't matter and the world will be taken by darkness no matter what and all humans will become hideous beasts because that is their nature and their fate - the Dark Soul. And the human desire to be the crown of all brings about their inevitable demise.
***** I mean, the "good" ending in Bloodborne is good because there is a chance that the protagonist will make tons of money starring in hyper-realistic tentacle porn.
+Corto Maltese i think in the "good " ending when you wake up you forget everything, though you would most likely have a hard explaining your new reflexes and instincts.
The loss of control makes me imagine a weird concept you enter the typical spooky maze dark hallways and a mysterious voice guiding you but without realizing it the game takes away things a bit at a time you start out with custom messages to the voice then preset then small uncontrollable noises like huh and what and then not talking at all,you start having less control over the game and getting more descriptions in the end you realize you were in a concrete cube and every texture every mystery was carefully drilled into your head not by complicated things like vr but just a simple voice hence showing how powerless the human mind is
Hearing this and as a game designer I immediately think off creating a character where schizophrenia is the main focus and showing the world around them and how they react to it, mental illness is something that not alot pf people grasp or understand remotely so having a player deal with it throughout would give all of the senses you are talking about, disempowerment, to gain the feeling of lose of control and to asert that to the player I think showing a character across their life as schizophrenia really is something that stays with you and offers no real cure, only that things might not get worse faster. Just a quick thought.
To a small degree this has been done in Vampire masquarade bloodlines. One of the races you can play as is basically insane and all the dialogue makes little to no sense. Unfortunately the effect is small by comparison to real madness as it only effects dialogue and it only really grips you if you play it first without know anything about the world prior. To really make what you said you would need to play on all the senses of the player.
Wish i saw your comment when i made mine, it is an interesting concept to just make your character insane or just the hint that there is something wrong.
There was an old text adventure game called "Bureaucracy" for the Apple II computers written by Douglas Addams. All you had to do is turn in your change of address form with out dying. Sounds simple? Not by a long shot. Rather than a life total you have "Blood pressure" that you have to manage. One point I died listening to the answering machine because some of the messages stress you out or piss you off. The whole game feels next to impossible with out a guide and I made out maps and everything trying to figure out what order I'm supposed to do which thing in which order until I gave up. I was thinking of something similar after this video but have two stats you have to manage: Reputation with others while your own stress/sanity. Stress/sanity gets too high and you start "seeing things". Problem is some of the things you see may actually be real. Reputation gets too low and you get locked up. Could base the whole thing like being a crewman on a small cruse ship at sea and you have to convince the captain to turn around before it's too late.
I think that games could execute Cthulhu properly, but instead of an FPS game it should be along the lines of an "Amnesia" Game, a Horror/Mystery/Detective game. Where you basically are just learning and surviving, only to go mad in the end.
How about a deconstruction? Have the player character set out to destroy an eldritch abomination- and fail? Of course, the game isn't that simple. Things never are. You're an eccentric. Deluded. Perhaps just a little mad. A world traveller. You stop one night outside of Resolute Bay, an arctic settlement in Nunavut. Your wealth affords you the option of ignoring practicality, so you decide that you'll sleep as an Eskimo in an igloo (ignoring that this practice has long since been abandoned). Your dreams are tormented. You toss and turn, talk in your sleep, and can't get the words out of your head. Ph'nglui. Mglw'nafh. Cthulhu. R'lyeh. Wgah'nagl. Fhtagn. You hear the chanting words (Chanting? Yes, they are chanting, but not in churchgoer's voices) approaching. You can't see anything. A light grows in the distance. It's getting closer. You can almost see the shape that brings the light. It's huge... A voice (YOUR voice) gasps. Run. You need to get away. You awake panting, grateful to have an anchor to reality again. You've been sweating all night, and a hole has melted through the igloo. You thank your God that there are no wolves or bears nearby, as you just barely manage to make it to town before the sweat that lines your parka freezes you into a sparkling trophy for your rescue team. You start telling people about your dreams. Initially, they blow you off as another rich kid who's had a bit too much to drink, but as you get more and more insistent, indifference is replaced by anger. Why anger? Why are they... angry? Afraid? You wisely decide to reamin quiet and return home to the Louisiana bayou. You talk about your dreams again. Back home, everyone knows you and they know better than to risk incurring the wrath of your lawyers. But they don't know what you saw. That almost-perceived shape takes up every moment of your time. It's getting closer. You keep having the dreams. You want to know, you need to know, you DESERVE to know! But every time you cross that threshold we call sleep, a voice holds you back. Conscience, maybe. Sanity? No matter. The voice is getting weaker. You decide to pursue that object. You comb through libraries, you sift through scrolls and books that could very well have once inhabited Alexandria. At last, you find the words: Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn. There is a warning with those words. They translate from an unknown and nigh-unspeakable tongue into "In his house of R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming", and whomever hears these words slowly descends into feverish madness. Mere pages further, you read that this house, R'lyeh, is lost beneath the shifting waters of the South Pacific. At last, a location. You have funnelled untold riches into this expedition, and have managed to turn a fortune that rivalled Mansa Musa's into a debt to rival countries. It will be worth it, you tell yourself, for I and I alone shall rid the world of this monstrosity. You've read up on the mythos. Most dismiss the writings of Howard Philip Lovecraft as fiction, but your years of research have found accounts of his characters in mad scrawlings contemporary to most of recorded human history. It appears that since the Epic Of Gilgamesh, whispers of the Great Old Ones have occupied the margins of human writing. They all foretell our doom. The 'Call of Cthulhu' ends with the monster intact, and you know that it's a folly to try to kill it. And yet, you rationalize, all that the protagonist did was try to ram the beast with a ship constructed of mere wood. Decades of military advances separate you and the protagonist. Where force has failed, nuclear fire will not. And if that fails? the voice wonders. Well then You'll have to engage it yourself. A mental domination of sorts. You brought along a psychic for a reason, after all. In retrospect, you should have seen the madness creeping in. Had you kept a journal, at the very least you would have seen your own hubris. Instead, you brought a crew of eight of the smartest, fastest, strongest, and all-around best specimens of humanity you could find. Heroes of this age, you call them. Your submarine has spent the better part of a year searching for the famed city, and the dreams have plagued you all the while. Your crew would have killed you had they not also succumbed to the dreams. They begin to worship the almost-visible image. WORSHIP! You'll need them, though. You are not the first to search for R'lyeh, and you suspect you shall run into more than a few of your precedents. You'll just have to face Cthulhu alone. Your predictions were correct. You found R'lyeh, and meet the crazed explorers there. Your crew is attacked, and they help you to fend off the cultists. You proceed through the tunnels. You see tentacles in the backgrounds. As you turn to inspect them, they vanish. This isn't good. You're going mad. Your crew begins to turn.The cultists are getting stronger. Your crewmates mutiny. You can't let them live. You strip down your party to just you and the psychic. You find the dormant form of Cthulhu. You call down your vessel to carry your trump card: A thermonuclear bomb. It never makes it that far. Cthulhu stirs and swats the ship. If not for the fact that Cthulhu ay between you and the bomb, you would surely have been atomized. And yet Cthulhu looks no worse for wear. You fire off six rounds from your sidearm. Futile, yes, but one can hope. You need to subjugate Cthulhu, to take control of him. This would drive any mortal mad, but you've already filled that criterion. You struggle to retain any sense of identity as the eldritch monstrosity begins to wake. Mercifully, the connection is cut off as your psychic is killed by an errant swipe from the hulking slumberer. You flee. Amid the wreckage of decades of submersibles and submarines, you manage to find one left intact. You make yourself scarce, praying that Cthulhu shall see no reason to pursue. The cultists will not let you leave, but their idol does not share their fervour. You spend years of your life in an asylum, in fear for your life and screaming at shadows. Your rehabilitation is achieved after ages upon ages of therapy, but you know the truth. There is something else out there, and only you know what it is. Cut to a shot of the phrase "When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky..." from Call of Cthulhu. The protagonist looks up to the skies, and sees that the cosmos have shifted greatly in his years of absence. Once-familiar constellations no longer form the desired patterns. Shadows cut across the sky, briefly blacking out stars or portions of the moon. You point this out to passers-by, but they take no notice. You and you alone can see the form of Lovecraft's celebrated Great Old Ones taking form, and you are powerless to do anything. You crouch, clutching your head, then release and weep at the now blotted-out moon. Fade to black. Roll credits.
Bloodborne breaks your three rules from 4:14 onwards, and yet it remains one of my favourite games and the most true Lovecraftian horror game I've played.
Bruh play the newest Call of Cthulhu. It’s really good. I thought I was in control of my character and how the story would turn out til I got to the ending
How about in a game, if you DO fight Cthulhu, nothing works. You try shooting it, the bullets just bounce off. You try hitting it, but you end up hurting yourself. In the fight, Cthulhu would be bigger, stronger, more powerful in every way, so in the end, you just can't win.
+Souper Potato exactly what was thinking. Not a single health bar. And after a few attacks, you realize that your target is an illusion, and turns into enormity, or darkness, much vaster than us.
I love this so much. I'm wanting to make a d&d one shot, and I want my players to lose. Lose horribly, but survive. And you bring up such good points that I'm going to try and use for said one shot.
I wonder about the possibilities of doing a truly powerful-beyond-imagining Cthulu in your standard power fantasy game. Obviously the fear is a difficult (and maybe impossible) thing to instill there, but just imagine Cthulu as boss monster... whose model extends beyond the players' view distance. Perhaps the very surface you stand on is an awakening Elder horror, the temple crumbling around you as you flee. Does he have to have a health bar? Okay fine, you do 1 damage to it at a time. If you stick around long enough to deplete it, it just replaces itself with a new one.
Maybe...It's already difficult to get right in a movie, where you don'tt even have to care about player agency and challenge...so I wonder, until it's done right in non-interactive visual media, if it's even possible to get it right in a game, especially as a boss monster. This said, games are evolving faster than movies, so we might get our real great visual transposition of lovecraft in a game rather than in a movie.
There's some possibility in the things you say, but there's still a small problem with the fact that - in a standard game - I as the player know that there must be some way to "beat" it. I played a game with a powerful boss that healed itself completely after every turn, making it impossible to beat. It wasn't Cthulu, but it had tentacles and was an immortal being of unimaginable power. However, another immortal being came in and used/sacrificed his immortality to seal away the immortality of your enemy, making him beatable. The fight is still absolutely crazy. At one point, the enemy begins to literally devour worlds just to be able to keep up the energy to fight you. Eventually, you find a way to stop him from doing that, and finish him off. Another (similar) way we can convey powerful-beyond-imagining enemies is to empower the player in powerful-beyond-imagining ways. It's not a horror thing, but it can convey concepts of amazing and overwhelming power. For example, in Bayonetta, I've heard that the final boss throws galaxies at you.
Lawlietftw30 The thing is though, you don't have to beat it. Killing the enemy isn't the only goal games have. You could very easily make it about running away. That's all you can do with eldritch horror after all. You can't beat it. Your best bet is to run away and hope it decides it has better things to do.
Gen Doukeshi Well, that's all you can do with an Eldritch horror in horror games. As you mentioned, this is other types of games, like a "standard power-fantasy games." In these games, you can be what the monsters and indescribable horrors are afraid of when they go to sleep. You can be the nightmare's nightmare. You can be...THE DOCTOR!!! (Heh, sorry about that last outburst. :) Got a little carried away. Easy to do with Doctor Who.)
If I had Cthulu as the big boss in a game, I would make the fight start with just a pitch black room that deals damage, but you can't see how. Every time you die, it gradually shows Cthulu as most people show it, but absolutely enormous. When it completely reveals itself, the controls completely randomize (would be pc only game) with all of the keys on the keyboard. Every time you die after that, it randomizes again and again. The only way to 'win' would be to quit and uninstall it. If you don't uninstall it after the fight, your computer will have faint traces of its presence in subtle sounds and by slowly darkening your screen or something. No idea how to do that, but it's the thought that counts :)
+Sans You know how they say that a creature existing purely in 2D would see the world through infinitesimally thin cross-sections? We would only see magic eye cross-sections, which, when some clever white hat put them together from the internal data, would sorta resemble our squid friend.
I'd have something seen, but unbeatable. You could deal damage to it, but the health bar is literally infinite and you only chip one pixel's with away from it at a time. That is in direct contrast to the rest of the game where you are just fighting demons and so on, but you are actually trying to fight an Outsider here. With all of your power, with all of your magical meteors, with all of the really damaging things that you can summon, that health bar will just infinitely go down with no apparent damage to the creature itself and no indication that the fight is actually progressing. And then you (finally) die, and the entire game just... evaporates and only leaves a text file and the game installer behind. Inside the text file reads: "I'll let you in on a secret, one who has seen the unseeable. Your life is and shall be... nothing. I will break through and show how your lives are insignificant. I shall take back what is mine, and i shall never exist as you think of me no longer. We will take your world, one step at a time no matter what you do. We are eternal. Your "god" may have sealed us, but we are eternal. All that will be left of this blight will be us, and we will shape it to our liking, and no one will be the wiser. We are eternal."
+The Exiled Nomad. I'd do something like having the health bar work normally at first, but then start acting weirdly like regenerating all of the sudden, getting bigger, or disappearing all together. It would do everything to completely confuse the player , in a way where the player can't figure out or understand.
TheRezro I feel like Cthulhu couldn't be anything but an end game "boss", so I don't know if you'd even need a cut scene, honestly. Since it'd be unbeatable, What would happen that you needed to see? I think it would be a great twist to have the player expect to win, but then reveal that it's impossible. Adds more to that confusion and misunderstanding. But I'm not a game designer, so I just speak from personal preference, I guess.
It's all semantics relayed to us as third-hand information from one unreliable narrator to another, anyway: there are no "gods" in Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories of that era in any traditional sense of the word, they were generally "sufficiently advanced aliens", to borrow from the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote ("...Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic....") Nyarlathotep doesn't seem to fulfill a role very much more advanced than Cthulhu in the variously (wildly different) appearances it makes in the stories as a sort of trickster who has to use deception, curiosity, and fear to control the "mild gods" here or convince humans to sign its book or attend its lectures there, while masquerading as a sort of herald angel for the likes of Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth.... One gets rather the impression from a careful reading of the stories that Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu both are very old and advanced alien ancestors of human beings who are basically just screwing with their naive and impressionable younger brothers by telling them elaborate lies and fairy tales about the nature of the universe and the amount of power that humanity's "Great Older Brothers" hold in it.... Which all rather makes sense when one realizes that Lovecraft was actually inverting Theosophical New Age mythology about wise and noble alien ascended masters of the universe who were telepathically leading humanity through New Age cults into a dawn of a new age of enlightenment and spiritual and material evolution....
Good video, but then there's the concern of breaking the immersion. Some monsters in games are just something to run from, and nothing else. What I would love to see is a monster than I can fight back against, but will quickly realize that all my actions against it is meaningless, and realize that I absolutely HAVE to run from coming to that "o sh**" realization.
I also kept getting the feeling that the lack of control could VERY easily result in a lack of agency. Meaning, that you'll loose interest because you have no role to play or are simply a fly on the wall
***** The hard part is that it still has to be threatening. The moment you realize that big threatening creature is actually incapable of killing you (or even worse, is basically just a set piece), then it loses all effect. It needs to be actually threatening, not just scary
On the subject of questioning the characters' sanity, there's a brilliant moment in Silent Hill 3, where Heather mentions the monsters she's been killing, and the man she's talking to says "Monsters? They look like _monsters_ to you?" Turns out he's yanking her chain, but it was a real OMFG moment.
I think Alan Wake did a pretty good job on Cthulhu, the game feels like you're going more mad the deeper you go, and your victories don't matter much long term
Alan Wake is a good example. I would argue that it lets you make some meaningful progress but inserts enough doubt about that progress the farther you go. It doesn't immediately turn around and say, "hah look, you were wrong" very often, which gives your character a sense of continuity and purpose even as everything is turning dark.
@Jared Lind Not really. The fact a mortal can find a way to face them wouldn't happen. The idea is No Matter What Humans Do we cannot even scratch it. If we found a way to become more than a human it's still from a human, therefor we are still nothing.
I want to make a game now, and have Cthulhu as a boss. But, when you beat him, someone goes up to you and tells you, "That wasn't him." Main character: "Wha- What do you mean?" "That wasn't the real Cthulhu. Did you honestly think that you would just be able to waltz up to the lord of madness, look him dead in the eyes, shoot him in the face, and be done with it? No, if so much as saw a glimpse of him, you would instantly either die or go insane, as your mind would rip itself in pieces, shatter." Then, if you try to disagree with him and claim Cthulhu is weak or something, all of a sudden, the roof starts getting torn off. When you look to see what's happening, all *you* can see (as in you the player, not the main character) is a mass of black tendrils coming from the heavens. Then, either the game freezes, or the picture starts getting shaken with some sort of color effect changing the colors at random, before the picture simply shatters and the game crashes. You sign back in, and when you get back to the title screen, it shows a special message saying, *".negnin hsiloof, em gnitbuod rof teg uoy tahw s'taht"* And then you find a body next to your spawn point that looks exactly like your character, except they look like they were driven insane right before death, where you find a journal. It'd all be pure madness, with a few distinguishable lines. Things like, "It's all meaningless. Life is a lie. Reality is insanity. Mortality is the ultimate weakness not even the mightiest or most righteous can push past. The universe is only a drop in terms of knowledge. *He is real. He is coming. Never doubt. Lest ye end up lost in your own asylum that becomes of your mind.*"
I always was kinda dissapointed with how they handles the cultists too: "if we can stop their ritual, we can stop cthulhu!" But cthulhu will come whether hes worshiped or not. Hes an unstoppable force. If they would have a scene ehere a cultist would explain how his own worship of the creature is inconsequential, I think that would help paint the right picture for the player to really see how hopeless it is. Because even though cthulhu can be pushed back, he will keep coming, like the tide. And eventualy, he will succeed. Its only a matter of 'when'.
Paranormal Encyclopedia again I said this to another person. the mythos states when the stars align then cthulhu will rise from the depths...obviously he was just getting a midnight snack and simply said "I'm too tired for this shit"
The story specifically says that the stars were right ("The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight'), and further says that if the stars are wrong, they can't awaken at all, not that they awaken weakened or anything ("but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.") This was supposed to be Cthulhu's big awakening... but one boat to the head and he went back to sleep again.
Well now you've made me want to play Darkest Dungeon. I've kept switching between wanting and not wanting to play it since its release, but noe I'm definitely going to
I'd throw Bloodborne into the mix here, especially because in Bloodborne (spoilers) as you move on your early choices to save person X or Y or not save person Z get stripped away. In 2/3rds of the endings the hunt continues, just your part in it is done. In the other one you become the monster.
This video reminds me of an old discussion I had, about "Why the Lady of Pain has no character sheet and why she should never have one" If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up Planescape and Planescape: Torment
To make it truly powerful would be to have a massive game to play, and that Cthulu could be encountered, but in a different way for every single copy of the game, or at least only one outcome from a wide pool available. That way, should a player encounter it and try to discuss what happened and what they did, no-one else would find it and call them insane. It wouldn't even be Cthulu as we know it, but maybe a force that, say, destroys a village, only for the village to return later, or something equally powerful, in a way that leaves no trace later. Or, to REALLY get in the player's head, it could detect if there's some kind of streaming device and, if it's at all possible, not show that to the people watching the video, only to that actual player, or to be invisible should the player try and print-screen what they see. Of course, I'm not entirely convinced that would work, but imagine watching someone online break down at a screen that, to the people watching, has nothing happening on it, or freak out at a cow that looks like it's doing nothing but the player sees it grow exponentially in size and have the game turn dark and the cow explodes as something quickly vanishes and the cow just looks like it was killed using the player's sword.
+DiscoClam Well Meeting Cthulu in game defies the Idea of Cthulu, you can not create a "Picture" of Cthulu, it is the entiere point that Cthulu himself defies the our understanding of Reality. In the entierty of Lovecrafts works, the reader encounters only once Cthulu and we get only vague descriptions of him, that are more "felt" then actually seen. And only a small glimps of him drove the protagonist into a raving lunatic. Or to ask differently, how do you show "Non Eucledean Geometry" in a Game? How do you show "Rectangel Shaped Triangles"? The true horror in Lovecraft is, that there are not only things out there that are powerfull beyond our imagination, but that these things proofs that the reality we think we can understand is in truth non existence. Ever seen something that let you stand still and say to your selfe "did that realy just happen?" now take that feeling and multiply it thousenfold.
+DiscoClam I like the way you think, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.... or do I? One of the greatest moments while playing Eternal Darkness was, we had a veteran playing through the game for me, as two of us watched on. It was amazing to see his skill at the game, and then, one time, the game crashed... but duh, the game messes with your sanity like that, so we sat there and waited for like a whole 1~5 minutes just going "so, when do we return to sanity?" OMG, have a path of the narrative that say, has cthulu spare a town because of some major choice you made in the game, and then CRASH! Oh no, none of the saves after that major choice "work", and now, you can't even figure out how to get the choice again, because the path has now been closed. You thought you were making meaningful decisions the whole branch, but it turns out THE DEVS WERE LEADING YOU DOWN A GARDEN PATH! "Hurray, you're a hero! ... sorry, we're taking that away now, and it turns out, there's no way to save the village canonically." Or an ever present danger that your insanity has separated you from reality and your save games stop working, or ... they randomly change every time you load them! "I didn't save you, I saved the other NPC..." NPC: "What are you talking about? Our love was so strong you could bear let me die, and so you painfully sacrificed your friend for your lover." "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, WE'VE NEVER HAD ANY ROMANCE TREES?!?!?!" My favorite Cthulhu tabletop game involved my character learning early on that he was destined to become the "Man in the Yellow Cloak" and that it is a tradition carried down through our family. So I confront one of the other players who appears to know what's going on, and he suggests that this is all just a play, and act. None of it matters. OMG, the freedom to do whatever you want with no consequence? To complete the ritual we had to kill my dad who was on an altar, and my character (a medical doctor) was all "sure thing", and just slashed his throat open with his hand-claw-thingie, whereas everyone else is all like "OMG! WTF ARE YOU DOING?!" while trying to stop me. But I'm all "just playing my part in the play!" So, we all get transported back to reality except for my younger brother, who ends up finding a yellow cloak, and meanwhile my character, having completed his part in the play, just walks to the nearest hospital and starts severing his hand off because he still sees it as a claw, and everyone else is all "OMG HE'S JUST CUTTING OFF HIS HAND!" Ah man... the stories...
+A Meier Antichamber is a proof of concept in non-euclidean gameplay. There are certain elements to the mechanics in games like Portal which can be applied to similar effect. Game's have to be somewhat intelligible, and working - at least mostly - on the basic fundamentals of physics is a good starting point, but it's possible to twist those rules in ways other game types can't. I think probably the best way to represent Cthulhu would be for the player to be facing down a cult rather than the entity itself. your goal is to investigate/defeat a group of people attempting to summon some kind of eldritch abomination. There would be some areas in the game where reality breaks down to varying degrees. Maybe there would be several places where it might happen, but no guarantee that the player will end up in those places, and no guarantee that any of them would actually generate the effects, only a possibility. The closer you get to the entity, the more the rules of the world would distort. If you keep going towards the source of the disturbance, there would be obstacles preventing you from getting too close, but persistence would get you close enough to the entity causing the disruption to gain their notice (poor thing). At this point, your control of your character's situation would begin to break down, potentially leading to a non-standard game over, or your character being led to do something that makes it look like you were the villain instead of the hero.
+Jerry Quiroga "Traumatized" sounds way too light of a description to those of us who have actually played Call of Cthulhu. "Reduced to a babbling creature bearing a vague resemblance to a human being" sounds more like it.
I only recently found this channel, and I've gotta say, it is everything a UA-cam channel should be. Amazing content, with some amazing presenters, all entertaining whilst also learning something about gaming. I appreciate the hell out of what you're doing. Thanks so much, I'm a huge advocate :)
Cthulhu doesn't resonate with people anymore because unlike in Lovecraft's time we aren't only now coming to realize how insignificant we are. We know full well how insignificant we are are. Our age is more defined by discovering how we ARE significant.
we are not significant, what little significance we might have is being thrown out of the window the moment we realise how large the universe is in comparison to us and how that there might even be infinite realities
It's not as simple as knowing how insgnificant when it comes to Lovecraft. What Lovecraftian themes are all about is the fear of the unknown which is something everyone is born with no matter the time. Like you just said, our agr is more defined by discovering, in general. But what drives our passion to discover is in itself thay fear of not knowing. Of not being able to explain something. If you think about it all horror relies in that. Weather it's paranormal or psychological.
It's not just that humanity is insignificant, it's the implication of how vulnerable and powerless that leaves us which makes Lovecraftian horror interesting. Everything that matters most to us, that builds the foundation of our lives and goals, means nothing in the scheme of things. There is no cosmic order to guide and protect us, no fate too horrible to befall us, we're at the mercy of a vast and indifferent universe, and our lives are small and fragile in comparison. That's always going to be at least a little unnerving to most people who aren't in denial about it. I think it's still as relevant in this self-obsessed, social media age as it ever was when Lovecraft first wrote his stories. Most people still seem quite delusional about their place in the world and take too much comfort in the pretense of power and control that we cling to in our day to day lives.
James Caldwell no cthulhu in that story simply said "fuck this its to early for this shit" you don't beat cthulhu you simply hope that it is early and that he is unwilling to put up with your feeble struggles
Yea. It's implied that Cthulhu is only going away for the time being, but the boat ram is probably the biggest "fuck it" moment in Cthulhu mythos. And for all we know, he really might have stopped Cthulhu from destroying the world by turning around and ramming him with a fucking boat. After all, like half the Eldritch beings in the Cthulhu mythos have some inevitable doomsday event tied to them. That moon could roll around and start screeching, or that human-faced spider could finish spinning its web before Cthulhu ever wakes up again.
This summed up what is wrong with horror games in general. The games will put you in a frightening situation, but then they'll give you some way to "beat" the horror, making you complacent. The fact of the matter is that I'm not scared of a zombie if I can shoot it in the head. Nor am I afraid of a monstrous boss if I can level up enough XP to kill it. Because that gives me a sense of empowerment, and empowerment isn't scary. *Disempowerment* is scary.
Mostly true. Though, horror can be based on the concept of power itself, like the consequences of using it poorly. Quite a bit of the horror in Spec Ops: The Line stemmed precisely from the power you held - and how tragically and hideously it was misused. 'course, I guess you could argue that's also a form of disempowerment, and it wasn't the sole focus of the game anyway.
Venatius I haven't played spec ops, but I suppose that you mostly feel disgust towards your character, rather than fear. I guess it's not the same kind of horror. Although I guess games ought to try different kinds of horror, rather than focusing solely on the suvival. And indeed, being forced by the game mechanics to do horrifying things is a twisting of the feeling of agency, and a disempowerment of the player in favor of a monstruous character he is supposed to play...kind of if the game was playing you...
Some games do that right. But they are rare. Like Amnesia the Dark Descent, Outlast, The Crooked Man, Paranoiac, Mad Father, The Witches House, Fear 1 (because the fact is no matter what you do, you cannot kill alma) those are great horror games, but that is a very limited list of monsters and creatures that you cannot kill. On Spec Ops: The Line you feel disgusted about yourself, not the character. The fact that you committed those acts. The game plays you, and it is fantastic to see.
StormWarriors2 Be the disgust directed to yourself or your character, you do not feel fear. I wonder if the distinction exists in english between the horror genre and the scary genre. IIn french we sometimes use "film d'épouvante" for movies that use suggestion and fear rather than gore and violence. Many games have horror without fear, and many times, the fear is more present wherever the gore is discreet.
There is literally a game coming out in like 28 days, it’s about Cthulhu and you literally can do nothing about it and even looking at it in the game causes insanity.
Cthulu is probably the wrong figure in Lovecraft's mythos to use in this video, since as the comments mention, you can totally knock him out with a yacht to the face. Now Azathoth, on the other hand...
You couldn't do a game with Azathoth though. Disturb him and all of reality goes away. I think Nyarlathotep would work. He/it likes meddling after all.
If the idea is to keep someone else from awakening Azathoth, it might work better. A setup where someone's delving too deeply into Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and it's not the player character, would make sense and be an interesting reversion of the usual RPG format.
I don't know. It seems like if Cthulhu is such an incomprehensible threat of an overwhelmingly powerful entity, Azathoth, it's safe to say, would be well beyond mankind's league to even consider. In the mythos there are greater beings making certain that Azathoth remains eternally asleep. For mankind to even think it could have any influence on that matter would be literally like mankind worrying about what it can do to preserve the entirety of the cosmos when it can hardly handle the preservation of it's own planet.
+Meidolaon to be fair Cthulhu is also used wrong because it is the incarnation of Lovecraft's fear of deep water. Azathoth was the fear of one day not existing. In both cases they are things we as humans cannot dare face because it would simply face us back and win without a single doubt, a outer god or old one that would work from Lovecraft's novels would be someone like Nyarlathotep because it would set up a protagonist in the "hero that fails" sense where we would be led to believe we won simply to realise we had lost long before we sat at the table.
*At the Mountains of Madness spoilers* In "At the Mountains of Madness", there are clearly Cthulhu spawn referenced, so Cthulhu is indeed a creature, if not a race.
Right. That’s what I thought. And the Old Ones brought the Cthulhu-spawn to a stalemate. So it seems to me that even though they are beyond human comprehension they still are susceptible to other star spawn.
It makes logical sense that things beyond human comprehension are susceptible to other things that are also beyond human comprehension. Yes, The Elder Things (Old Ones) despite being devolved by that point, still managed to push back Cthulhu's thugs and establish neat territorial boundaries for all.
The only Call of Cthulhu role playing game I've played where anyone "survived" it turned out in the end that we all died in the intro and the game went through the five stages of grief in purgatory. I've never been mad at the gamemaster that everyone died, because even though it wasn't plain from the beginning that victory conditions were minuscule, we all died in reasonable ways.
Sunless Sea and Fallen London do this really well as part of their extended lore. Despite not being part of Cthulhu mythos, it has a lot of cosmic horror built into the deeper story of the game that show how ultimately nothing you do matters. It's a reveal that's so deep in though that it would kind of be massive spoilers, even though it's freely explored in the newest game.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth did this well. How? By never actually having you encounter Cthulhu itself. Sure, you encounter lesser Old Ones like Dagon and Mother Hydra, but they are less Outer Gods and more just particularly massive monsters. However, there is a moment in the game when you are trapped in a room with an statue of Cthulhu, and the more you look at it, the more your sanity-meter dwindles until you go insane. That works pretty well since you get a firsthand experience of the mind-shattering power of Cthulhu, but you never actually get to see it for yourself. But you get the idea of how Cthulhu's true form is so horrifying and beyond human comprehension that even a pale-imitation of him like a statue or a picture of him can drive a person mad. Same goes for classic villains like Sauron, who does have a rather Lovecraftian feel to him sometimes. Yes, he had a specific motivation and character and all, but if you didn't know his backstory, you'd simply know that he's a being that was defeated and weakened, and all he needs to return to power is the One Ring. And again, the characters rarely actually encounter Sauron himself, and when they do they are left terrified and in shock. But the true terror of his character is the effect he has on other characters, not Sauron's character himself. What he turns his servants into and the lengths they are willing to go to resurrect him.
I'd have Cthulu as a cosmic entity. As the game progresses, you see Cthulu approaching from space, slowly getting larger and larger, and the game world and characters becoming ever more terrified of what it will do. Eventually, he gets close enough to affect the world itself, storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, have him devastate the world, just by being near it, Cromulon style. So the game has you building an army, or amassing weapons, preparing in some way to challenge this titanic creature, who's head alone can span the horizon, a feat seemingly impossible. You build up the challenge, develop the threat, have the player anticipating the end game battle, even have the player gear up, they're ready for this fight, and it will be epic! B..u..t.. then Cthulu just carries on, floats on past our tiny blue marble, not even throwing us a cursory glance, never even registering the attacks if the game even lets you go for the kill. Throw in a good vs. evil plot on the planets surface, disguised as a secondary plot, or side missions, and you've got a game. Better yet, you have a perfect excuse for your player character to become the most powerful entity on the planet, Ala most games, yet still powerless before Cthulu.
WackyModder84 :SPOILERS: Half of the game is an uninspired shooter, and in the end you blow Dagon away with a battleship. That's pretty much the opposite of a good Lovecraft game - which is a shame, because for the first half of the game, the player really is completely defenceless as he descends rapidly into madness.
Lee Coffill You're comparing Dagon to Cthulhu, dude. Dagon is just the Father of the Deep Ones. Cthulhu is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BALLGAME from Dagon. Dagon & Hydra actually can actually BLEED, because they're basically just Giant Deep Ones. Cthulhu cannot. He's some Next-Level Shit.
WackyModder84 Meh, of what I know about Lovecraftian Lore, Dagon and the Giant Deep Ones, despite being able to be bleed, be killed, so on, have the capacity to comprehend Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones. So, it makes me wonder how it can be depicted that humans can comprehend the Giant Deep Ones, and even in some cases harm them, but we cannot comprehend that which the Giant Deep Ones can, so the Great Old Ones, despite being very real to the Giant Deep Ones, are so incomprehensible that they are nothing more than a 'figment' of our imagination that has the capacity to do more harm to us than any 'figment' we could ever encounter.
Lee Coffill They still got Cthulhu right. You look at a statue of it for too long, your character goes insane and kills himself. No matter that the game was a bug riddled mess. Also they got the Shoggoth somewhat right. run away from it as it crushes the vent behind you.
The thing about cthulu is its sheer monstrosity. It's like "I have no mouth and must scream " you have no hope at all, it's existence is so other worldly, so uncomprehendingly powerful that everything you do means nothing and that the fact that you got this far is purely by eldritch design. You are there because they want you to be. And you will die because it is their design and you will fail. That is what cthulu is.
+Ryosuke The Lord Of Anemones Cthulhu is an actual being, but what it and all the others in the mythos represent is often looked over, and their relegated to just big monsters.
A Disappointed Horse Yeah but Fred's missing brother here said specificly that videogames were doing Lovecraft wrong because Cthulhu was an idea. An idea that can be rammed with a ship. The whole aspect of the "mythos" is just fanfiction. It wasn't even written by Lovecraft at all, it's just August Derleth's immagining of Lovecraft's work.
As far as I understand the Cthulhu that exists in the physical world is just the portion of the being that is knowable by humans. Cthulhu exists on a wider dimensional scale than us which is why he can lie dreaming whilst his physical body is dead, I think Lovecraft was trying to illustrate this with the unknowable dimensions of the door which contained him.
***** "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming" does appear as a quote a lot in the Call of Cthulhu, but it's not quite that literal. It's just another of those mad-sounding phrases that Lovecraft throws out a lot. Same as "that is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die".
It's a very good point, but I think Cthulhu isn't a great example from the mythos (aside from the fact his name is the most widely recognized). Cthulhu was a fairly "ordinary" entity. The Elder Things weren't much intimidated by him, and he got his head knocked in by a yacht, for pete's sake. He was basically Lovecraft's Godzilla, a warning that nature contains things that will mess mankind up, but not especially uncanny. Cthulhu NOTICED humans and antagonized them, quite unlike the way humans ignore eyelash mites. The time-travelling Great Race were much more of an existential threat, or Azatoth the primordial, relentless chaos. But always remember that Lovecraft's foremost terror was miscegenation. Race-mixing scared him more than anything, the old bigot.
+steveasat2 not necessarily, it scared the people who would read his stories, so he included it to creep them out. whether or not he personally agreed, I have no clue
+696190 Fair point, but from what I've read, Lovecraft was pretty bigoted against some groups. While occasionally positive about Hispanics and Jews, his wife was Jewish; his comments on African Americans an Irish Catholics were pretty viscous. Oddly, a lot of his views changed in regards to people he viewed as "well assimilated" individuals. Now, early on in the late 1800s/early 1900s, his views were not abnormal, but what sticks out is that his views remained constant even after much of public precept had begun to evolve.
+steveasat2 I'm so glad to have found someone in the comments who has *actually F-ing read Lovecraft*. Cthulhu was a real creature, and he was kind of a chump. (a madness inducing chump, to be sure, but he was killed by 1 dude in a boat)
+spenny Well, to be fair to the big guy, his head was reforming so he was likely going to shake it off like a lucky punch...but yeah, just the fact he could be inconvenienced by it puts him on a level that belies the video's premise. More to the point, he had a HOUSE. Pan didn't have a house. The gravitational constant doesn't have a house. Maybe a good argument could be made that what triggers horror in us is more like the "uncanny valley" - something that is right on the eerie border between a concept and an entity. If Chthlhu were also described as the cause of dreaming itself, that would be suitably humbling, I think.
+steveasat2 I want to preface this by saying that I agree wholeheartedly that Cthulhu isn't the best example of what they're talking about in this video. Cthulhu isn't the most 'pure' example of the unknowable horror of the mythos nor, as you said, the most powerful being within it (for me the Call of Cthulhu story sort of got ruined by all the build-up). But that's sort of why I think he works better than a lot of the other ones; The problem with a lot of the other Lovecraftian things is that they're entirely too unknowable to really put yourself in relation to in any meaningful way. It's kind of like trying to relate to the inevitable heat-death of the universe; It kinda sounds scary at first but worrying about it is just wasted energy and it's really far off anyway so who cares. I imagine eyelash mites would feel the same about people. ;) With Cthulhu the "horror" comes from the idea that we're trespassing mice trapped in a sleeping angry giant's larder, and mice are noticeable enough too have to be real careful not to draw attention to themselves.
Actually no, in this game not only you somehow understand, observe and fight the "Great Ones" on an equal level, you even become one your self Though the game is marvelous, its like the rest of Miyazaki's creations, a collection of stories he didint quite understand and left us to fill in the pieces calling it "lore" Which is wonderfull But calling it "spot on lovecraftian horror" is wrong
NuCLeaR 22 I think bloodborne is pretty close. The player can only fight "great ones" by receiving blood transfusion, by taking upon themselves the cursed old blood of the great ones themselves, and become something other than human in the process. And the three endings of bloodborne (spoilers) I think support this. You either run away, finding your worth in the waking world, are subjugated by the moon presence to be the next host of the dream, or give up your humanity to be reborn as a great one, which the player has no influence over. While not perfect, it shows that no matter how badass a person you are, no human can actively stand against the great ones. You can sacrifice your freedom, give up the fight or abandon your humanity, but not win. Because a human can never win. It's by no means a perfect "Cthulhu game" but it gets pretty darn close nonetheless.
seeing and fighting great one's makes you go insane in bloodborne and the only places where you can actually go toe to toe with any of them is within nightmares and dreams except for ebrietas and even in that case we just thought a left back remnant of a great one, never even being close to kill her completely since the augur of ebrietas, a spell within the game, supposedly summons tiny parts of ebrietas and is still usable after defeating her. so we only fight manifestations of great ones on different levels of reality to rid these planes of their nightmares. and even if you manage to become what is thought of as a great one in the end, i'm pretty sure you just replace the moon presence's manifestation within the hunter's dream, useless to really do anything yourself, picked up by a doll, a creature thought to be much less powerful than just a regular human.
What about Dark corners of the earth? You "defeat" the avatar of Dagon and Hydra in this dimension But You didn't even see Cthulhu you just know that HE is there And that HE is coming If we get pass the bugs and add some patchs Is the best adaptation of Cthulhu Mythos to videogames
They did it well, but they took inspiration from the oniric cycle, where the protagonists can achieve things, not the so called mythos. It also respects the ending rule (even though they scrapped a lot of late game things), so It's probably the only game that achieves killing eldrich gods without making them underpowered.
I don't think you can really achieve much in Bloodborne. Bloodborne is a power fantasy, but in the end the game turns it upside down, because it doesn't matter how strong you get, there is nothing you coul do, nothing really changes. By the end of the game Yharnam is no more, everyone there is either crazy, or dead, or became a beast. You may let Gherman sever your connection with the dream, you got the cure for your disease, and you can return to your home. Gherman promisses you that you will not remember anything, but that is not true. Djura and Eileen have been severed from the Hunter's Dream as well, and they still (albeit vaguely in Djura's case) remember dreaming. And still remember all the horror. So you are free to go, but can you really live with the memory of everything you did? Knowing of the eldritch horrors out there? And nothing changes. The second ending have you take the place of Gherman, becoming a mere puppet, the new surrogate child of the Moon Presence. That is the worse ending, you are now prisioner in the Hunter's Dream. And than there is the last ending, where you supposedly kill the Moon Presence and becomes a Great One. But what does it mean? You become something tha you (the player) can't even comprehend, completely devoid of eerything that made you human, and may very well, become the new Moon Presence. But is the Moon Presence really dead to begin with? The dream still exists, the Doll is still there and the Moon is still bright in the sky. There is a very interesting theory about that, that say that the Doll is a hypostasis of the Moon Presence, a face, just like the monster that came from the moon that you killed. If the Doll too is a manifestation of the Moon Presence, this ending may very well be the true victory for her: she finally have a true child, not a simple substitute like Gherman, but a true great one, just like her. You become something so fundamentally different that it may very well not beyourself anymore. Even if you really beat a Great One the implications is that overcaming eldricth horror means become eldritch horror. The Hunter, the city and humanity are doomed one way or another.
ThePsychomancer. Goddamn, I want to play Bloodborne so much... I've been keeping myself unspoiled in the hope that one day I might play it. The problem is that I don't have a PS4 and I don't have the money to buy one. Damn, Bloodborne sounds so good! Ah, Aiat.
Well... I think Cthulhu himself is ironically a bad example for this sort of discussion. In the original story the protagonist knocked Cthulhu out by hitting him in the head with the Alert. It wasn't "inconsequential" and it did damage. The Outer Gods like Nyarlathotep and Azathoth are more on the level you're talking about.
Hermaeus Mora seems pretty obviously inspired by Lovecraft’s aesthetic at least, and even though it’s very different, I think it works really well as a creepy eldritch monster. He is all knowing, not really an enemy or ally, and impossible to beat. Far far better than making such a thing the enemy.
I think Cthulhu doesn't and flat out can't work in a game in any form. I'm a heavy tabletop RPG gamer and I have a strong dislike for Cthulhu. Why? Because it goes against the very nature of RPGs, which is that no ending is written in stone. In virtually every game of Cthulhu I've ever heard of, by the end, every character is either dead or mad. So you can never win. Now it's not the lack of winnability that bothers me, it's the fact that the end is determined before you begin. I never want to play a tabletop RPG where that is true.
That's not true. The entire point is that there is an end. The "end" however, is so vast, that you yourself are too unimportant to actually be placed in the grand scheme of things. No end is set in stone. Everything influences what happens to characters around you, just as your actions do in the real world. A truly cosmic end, just as in our own universe, will never involve beings as inconsequential as us.
kaidar12 Alright, I can accept that. But it doesn't change my point that in EVERY tabletop RPG version of Cthulhu, the characters all enter the game with the players knowing that every one of them will die, go mad, or at best, run away. That doesn't sound very heroic to me. I don't mind trying and failing, but I dislike the notion that succeeding isn't even possible. I love role playing games, I play 2-3 times every week. But I can't enjoy CoC very much, because of this.
you're one of those people that wont see a movie when you know the ending arn't you? i can go into most movies (and games for that matter), FULLY aware of how its going to end, hell most movies spell it out from the get go, but i watch to see HOW they reach the end, to see the paths taken and obstacles overcome as opposed to whether they win or not
Khelvera A movie (or a book) is not an interactive experience? Do you feel that when you sit down to play an RPG that the plot and ending should be known in advance? I'd rather much of that emerged from the players decisions and choices. Even as a GM, I certainly prefer not knowing how the game will end before it starts.
Sooo tabletop RPG are about winning? Damn i always think it is about playing a role and geting the story, to experience it. Not to win something. Hell who win?! GM? PC? NPC?
You venture under the sea in your vessel you see a ginourmous green squid like humanoid "Fire torpedoes" rolls a d20 "Nat 20!" They exclaim. "Miss" the Dm said
Totally agree. But... In the book "montains of madness", there is a mention of a conflict between cthulu and the primordials. And they didn't win, but managed to spare some land and keep cthulu's forces at bay. Somehow...
It's not just "At the Mountains of Madness", but a number of Lovecraft's stories from the era that revealed other bits of that narrative told from different points of view: "The Shadow Out of Time", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Thing on the Doorstep", "The Mound" - Lovecraft had found his stride in what he called "Weird Fiction", and was using it as a vehicle for describing vast epochs of impersonal time in which many great and terrible alien civilizations rose up, one after the other, each in their time on earth, before decadence and decay and entropy and nature wore each in its turn down and left only ghost-haunted crumbling ruins. To Lovecraft, it was one level of bleakness to conceive of a universe where human beings are one of the less important beings to exist, and an entirely different level of bleakness to add on top of that the idea that the Star Spawn of Cthulhu, the Great Race of Yith, the Deep Ones, the Shoggoths, the Elder Things, the Mi-Go, and all the other hellish aliens - as powerful and ancient and wise and immortal as they were - were really no more significant than mankind, and no more immune to the ravages of time. And so, human beings have simply inherited an old an indifferent universe from far older and greater beings, and will rise and fall in their brief human time, before being replaced in their turn by much greater and more important races in their time. Notably, the human race goes extinct in a manner too horrible and too humiliating for Lovecraft's narrators to describe, only to be replaced by a far more successful "coleopterous" race that essentially descended from cockroaches possessed by the ghosts of a race of alien vegetables to rule earth far longer and far more wisely than man did, only to be replaced in their turn by a final race of giant spiders that ruled Earth's final, freezing days as the sun's death progresses to the point where earth's surface is at last uninhabitable, driving the spiders deeper and deeper into earth's "horror-filled core" before the Earth's end..... So yeah, various sorts of weird horrors ruled earth before humanity, and saw their civilizations rise to great heights before losing steam and seeing decay set in, until at last each race saw the ravages of time take its toll on them, and forced them to retreat and surrender from younger horrors that likewise could only claim to be rulers of earth for an all too short time before their times each came to an end. It's part of Lovecraft's philosophy: if Great Cthulhu and its immortal race of hellish titans could not live and rule forever, then what hope does mere man have of any significance in the universe?
Meh. In both of those games the hero ultimately CAN have an effect, though. That's so unlovecraftian that it's absurd. It's impossible to truly defeat the evil or save the world, but it is possible to fight back and win against the forces set against you. That's just not Lovecraft.
***** I agree with you there, I don't really like that you can kill great old ones in bloodborne, it's pretty stupid. On the other hand, the endings all reinforce that you never reeally win, the night continues regardless. There's even an easteregg where upon starting a new game, the waifu doll stands up from the grave your previous character was buried in, as if to say that you're just doing the same futile thing again
Anthony Bowman or the hero (or the player) MAY think that he or she had an effect on the world. Bloodborne's story is (like any other From Soft game) very open to interpretation. If you think there are good/bad endings in Bloodborne, I'll say that's just your interpretation. To me, the game lefts the player in oblivion about the ending. I've beaten it enough times to see each ending, and I can't point out a good/bad/neutral ending among them. I feel that just fits very well with the Lovecraftian theme.
Mr. Nobody Forever Bloodborne is actually a great example. You gain insight, which reveals more about the true nature of the world to you, but it's implied that insight drives you insane, it makes the game harder, and it literally fills the inside of your head with eyes. There are Great Ones, which resemble the Old Ones of Lovecraft lore, and you fight a few things that you think are Great Ones, but of the ones you kill, one is a defenseless infant, not even born properly, one is an artificial attempt to create a Great One, one is the stillborn child of a dead Great One, and one is simply a powerful creature that exists in the same realm as the Great Ones. You only fight one true Great One, and only after consuming three thirds of a Great One's umbilical cord, turning you yourself into an infant Great One, and thus fulfilling the Great One's plans to create more of their kind. And really, no matter what ending you get, the Great Ones still win.
The creators said that Bloodborne was specifically designed around to only the plague but of hopelessness. That no matter how hard you try, no matter how many things you kill no matter who you take, you can’t save them. They all go insane, turn into monsters, kill each other or wander off and die. In the end you can’t even save yourself and you are given three choices, move on and forget what you’ve seen living your life as if it was just a nightmare, die and struggle to stop the terror, or give into the plans of the Great Ones. You can fight or struggle all you want but you can’t win and everyone loses.
A game where all your choices didn't matter, no matter what you decided to do... So, the greatest Cthulhu game is Mass Effect 3? Why did none of us realize this before?!
The tabletop Call of Cthulhu does this very well. They give Cthulhu stats, but not so players can fight him, rather to show how insignificance they are.
A interesting game concept and something incredibly difficult to sucessfully pull off. I would say cuthulu is what a lot of horror games try to pull off but mostlu fail.
Companies want good selling games more than they want good games. People want affirmation more than they want a deep philosophical Lovecraft experience. They're not doing it wrong, they just have different priorities.
Just so. And while such games may not appeal to Lovecraft purists out there, Lovecraft purists are a very tiny portion of the market. In fact - and they ought to appreciate the coincidence here - they are an _insignificant_ part of the market. Lovecraft is already niche, and most Lovecraft fans are not purists. I'm a fan myself, but certainly no purist.
Gilmaris I personally play a lot of casual games, but i do enjoy a more sophisticated gaming experience from time to time. A shame that's not where the money is, because this whole existential horror thing sounds kind of intruiging. My only knowledge of lovecraft comes from Hellboy, i've never read any of his books or played any of the games.
Isaac Plumbo I'm just a casual Lovecraft fan myself, and I have a love/hate relationship to his writing. I love the mood he sets, I love the setting, but his writing is extremely heavy. The only one of his stories I managed to read in a single sitting is The White Ship, which is just over three pages long. Let's face it, his writing is boring, and yet there is something about it I like. And he is not remotely scary. Perhaps he was once, but times have changed - we have long come to terms with how insignificant we are in the universe as a whole, and the cosmic unknown is the least of our modern worries.
In my opinion, the most accurate portrayal of Cthulhu in a game is in Break a Leg. In this game, you have to feed a baby uranium until it grows into a giant, then you feed the giant baby to Cthulhu. You have to do this three times until the baby actually ends up eating Cthulhu.
All of this is said, and I agree that this would make a really cool idea, but I hear lack of control and choice, and that gets me thinking: Would people understand the subtlety of this fear? Or would they simply get mad and call the game "linear", accusing the game of not having any meaningful choices? Would people understand that the whole idea of Cthulu is being so insignificant that anything and everything that you do is meaningless to the point that you'd be better off not doing it? It would definitely make hardcore H.P. Lovecraft fans happy, but what about everyone else? It's not even a matter of people buying the game, it's people respecting your decision to do this to a game revolving around Cthulu, and understanding why you chose this path instead of having choice in this game.
Well, the answer to that is "It's really the matter of how well you execute it." Many great games with very unique mechanics could have been incredibly bad if the execution had been bad, and the problematic, broken mechanics of many bad games might have actually been strengths if they'd been done better. Many great games with unique mechanics probably sounded terrible on paper when first conceived, but people with vision made them work. And conversely, many games that sounded great on paper fell short because they just couldn't follow through with it. It would certainly require a good designer and people who had the talent to execute it well, but I think it absolutely could work.
Goblin Rat I agree. Design with enough talent behind it can make anything seem good. But, to me, at least, people would still get mad that the choices made have no real effect, whether or not it's central to the game. My best example of this is BioShock Infinite. You are given a few choices in the game, and the game never even mentioned having meaningful choices in the game, but people still got mad, as the choices made, such as the Bird or the Cage had no effect on the game whatsoever. In Wolfenstein The New Order, you are given a choice to save two characters, and even though the game never boasted having meaningful choices in the game, people were still mad that such a choice existed, even if the choice made had some sort of effect. Imagine a game in which you must make decisions, but the decision you make has no actual meaningful outcome, and you were frequently reminded of that. Most people do not understand the subtlety of Cthulu. Hell, I didn't before seeing this video. No one will understand why this decision was made, and simply write it off as bad game design.
ryallenquake Hmh. You might be right. If nothing else, Cthulhu's modern status as more or less OH LOOK A BIG ICKY MONSTER IT EATS CITIES (as well as Lovecraft's status as "Something nasty from beyond eats your face, and we mistakenly think that's the scary part") would probably make it even harder. You would probably have to use something that's not exactly Cthulhu. Something that's just a similar kind of a cosmic horror whose very existence means that all you know about this world is absolutely wrong and you cannot actually even understand the universe in any way. And even then, that might not be enough to differentiate. But then, I can think of one big control-robbing moment in a game that was actually lauded as a very brilliant sequence. Back in Modern Warfare, the first one, that Big Moment (which anyone who played it probably immidiately knows) absolutely took control away from you, and more or less forced a failure state on you. People really liked that, but it might be that it was the shock more than anything. Might just be that you still got to play afterwards and it didn't actually take away your ability to win. Eh, it's a difficult subject. You'd have to find a really strong way to do it, and a really strong place to begin.
Goblin Rat I do remember part of that scene, but I never made it out of the helicopter. To this day, I don't know what was outside of it. I crawled towards the opening, but backed away because I thought that I would die if I did. I died in the copter. It was boring.
They actually did a pretty good job fighting the power of Cthulhu in "The Call of Cthulhu"... I mean, the attack with the boat made Cthulhu decide to just go back to sleep again, and I'd say that constitutes a successful attempt at fighting him.
You can: it sounds like every "god sim sandbox game" ever, when played "wrong".... Not that any of us have designed Sim-City cities as toxic hell-holes with nightmare traffic tied up on non-Euclidean streets, or spent hours pulling ladders out of Sims swimming pools for the laughs....
The scariest thing about Cthulhu is that he's not the scariest thing in the Cthulhu Mythos. Nyarlathotep, the Colour Out of Space, and Azathoth are all arguably much scarier.
Yes, but Azathoth is a threat too far out of mankind's grasp to even consider. For mankind to expend worry and concern on the matter of Azathoth would be for a colony of ants to do the same on the matter of the Galaxy.
StarryStarryNocturne I suppose that's true, but I just feel like the concept that we could be destroyed at any second by an uncaring god is far scarier than a squidfaced monster that eats a few people.
YpsiFang Yes, but if such a threat were true and mankind were to lend worry and concern to it our psyches would implode. Just like if a colony of ants were to do the same in my comparison. The point I'm getting at mainly is that Azathoth wouldn't make a good tool of fear as a driving force behind the actions of human beings in a video game or film. There's nothing mankind could do about Azathoth but psychologically collapse as soon as his existence and his threat is intellectually realized. There's at least a little wiggle room with Cthulhu.
StarryStarryNocturne I'm not saying Azathoth is a good standalone antagonist, just that he's scarier than Cthulhu. You misinterpreted what I meant.
YpsiFang I see, so, you were just stating the obvious? I mean who has ever argued that Cthulhu is the scariest thing in the mythos? Who has ever agued that Azathoth isn't a scarier concept than Cthulhu for that matter? I thought your original comment was following the general theme of the video. If it were even on just the portion of the video that focused on the explanation of what Cthulhu represents for mankind, how could you suggest a move from the more immediate incomprehensible threat to something with much more cosmic implications? Ah, well. My mistake.
What bugs me in anything outside of Lovecraftian mythos is that everything from games, fan fiction, and tv/films make Cthulhu out to be the biggest bad guy, the end all be all of the mythos. Which is far from the truth, He's not even the main villain in his book. Hell he's basically a human when you compare him to the outer Gods.
i'd say there's an even larger difference between him and some others than the difference between humans and cthulhu (and that difference is already unimaginable huge)
Taken quite literally from the stories, Cthulhu is actually an alien cult leader: high priest of the cult of the Old Ones.
And Cthulhu and humans have more than just a metaphor in common, depending on how literally you read the account of the People of K'n-yan in "The Mound" (written mostly by Lovecraft, with input from Zelia Bishop), a rather human-looking race of people who sealed themselves underground before R'lyeh, Mu, Atlantis, and the other ocean civilizations fell beneath the waves, and who claimed to have followed Cthulhu to Earth, and to have been the ancestors of modern man.
Lovecraft gives us some small reason to question the origin story given for the People of K'n-yan by revealing some background details that tie their mythos in with that revealed in the polar city of "At the Mountains of Madness" and a tendency of the People to bury revelations they can't quite handle, but that, too, is amusingly suggestive of the human race having more than just a little in common with Lovecraftian monsters.
*cough* Thanos *cough*
Cthulhy is more of a maid than a human as he housed the gods
Except Kuuko
I can see one of the "good" endings now. You take a boat and find R'lyeh, waking Cthulhu and as He rises from the ocean your screen blots and glitches and then He looks at you causing your character to begin screaming, then the screen blinks in and out as your character bashes his skull onto the rail of the boat, then black for a few seconds and you open your eyes once more to see a giant eye a few feet away, staring at you, then black and cut straight to the main menu, no "the end," no credits, not even music.
I like how pronouns referring to Cthulhu are capitalized.
That's exactly what I want in a game! So like, when you are near the end of the horror game, you awaken Cthulhu (As you said) But! to creep the players out even more, have a giant eyeball open in front of them, as they see a giant rise up, and then the rest that you said.
or there can be a quote on quote true ending where if you go perfect, the boat leaves without you, you get left behind, the boat vanishes in the distance the reason why you will never know, you get left with what happened you sit down and nothing is left, you’re all alone, alive, but at what cost?
Fun physics fact: most of the universe is made up of vast reserves of unknowable substances and strange energies we creatures of baryonic matter can’t see or interact with in any meaningful way. Now imagine if that wasn’t necessarily true in reverse, and that things living on the other side of the matter gap might start taking notice of that tiny 5% of the universe that encompasses human understanding. You’d essentially have yourself a situation where modern physics has proven Lovecraft to be totally right, and we’d never know until it was too late. Sweet dreams~
You are very smart
0_0
I am so using this in my game. Thanks
you've got a big point, now i cant sleep
The main thing I take away from this is that we might be inscrutable horrors to the rest of the universe.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth did this pretty well. In that game you never even SEE Cthulhu! The only Old Ones you see are Dagon and Mother Hydra, and most Lovecraft stories seem to imply that those two are really just particularly old and massive Deep Ones than actual Old Ones. The only time you encounter Cthulhu's power is in a room where a Cthulhu statue stands, and the longer you stay in the room with the statue, the quicker your sanity meter depletes. You never get to see him, but being in the presence of a mere image of him is enough to drive the character insane.
Yes Dark Corners has definitely the best job above and beyond of really instilling a sense of fear in the player. (My god, who doesn't remember their first run from the damned fishmen?) No slaying hundreds of enemies like the new shitty pretenders. While Eternal Darkness suffered from having a lot of combat, that wasn't integral to the puzzle-solving, storyline, and heavy lovecraft influence. The sanity system was also ingenious, and hasn't been successfully replicated since.
Frictional Games (Amnesia, Penumbra and SOMA) are fans of the Cthulhu mythos...the engines used in their games are even called HPL ^^
What made Amnesia ( and others like SOMA, or Outlast ) so good horror games is the feeling of powerlessness you experiment by not being able to defend yourself or, wore in Amnesia, to even barricade doors; AND being "fantastic" - except for SOMA - settings ( like every Lovecraftian novels ), where you have to fight concepts like sanity, or indicible horrors... ( Wallrider for exemple in Outlast, a invisible force otherwordly in appearance ).
This is what Lovecraftian settings horror games need to be based on. Because THIS ( the irruption of the unreal in the real, and the fact you are but a regular human being put against forces that goes way beyond your understanding ) is what Lovecraft is all about... ( Except for some wasp view points with the deep ones and all this but... Hey, no one is perfect ! xD )
I loved "CoC: Dark Corners..." but that take on Dagon and Hydra came more from Chaosium's pen-and-paper RPG than from Lovecraft's stories: the story "Dagon" can be thought of as a sort of first draft for the climax of "The Call of Cthulhu", while the references to Dagon and Hydra in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" come off more like baloney that Obed Marsh cooked up to make more palatable to his victims the deal he'd made with the Deep Ones selling his family, friends, and neighbors out as sacrificial husbands and wives to monsters, in exchange for gold. The "Father Dagon and Mother Hydra" thing was basically a fake religion to try to make the whole being-dragged-into-the-ocean-abysses-to-serve-as-unwilling-breeding-stock-for-aliens thing sound like a fun family reunion in an underwater heaven with long-lost members of humanity's family tree....
Cyanide Call of Cthulhu is ok too,since only show glimpse of Cthulhu for 2 seconds,if you reach that ending
Would be a fun joke to make a Cthulhu in some game so that pissing it off crashes the game and gives you an error message along the lines of "Cthulhu melted down reality"
Perhaps. Although I personally would make it the daemon sultan Azathoth, the blind idiot god at the center of creation. The error message could be like "Azathoth has Awakened. His Dream - Your Reality - has Ended."
Bluecho4 I prefer having Cthulhu being devoured by some even greater power and then leaves. Finally the main character puts a gun to his own head to end his insanity
or yust make it invinebil and it oneshotes you yust by its mere presents
make it the true horror for a gamer. let him wipe the game's data.
That is basicly Undertale.
So basically, Cthullhu is just a bad trip on Acid. You have no control, everything is fucked and you philosophically shit your pants as all reality draws to a close and you face infinite nothingness. Actually, I think that sounds more like a hit of Salvia! "...am I back?"
well that's more of the cthulhu mytho's/ HP lovecraft's story's not cthulhu him self but yeah
the idea of insignificance and unknown.
You're about right.
+Cthulhu, no-one can here can comprehend you or what you say, the words "You're about right" are beyond me.
don't. blink
i lost sanity with bronie cthullu in 2:04
People: is Cthulhu a metaphysical concept or a literal being
Lovecraft: yes
Actually Lovecraft would say “it’s a literal being.”
There are tons of other creatures within the mythos that more closely resemble the metaphysical/Physical relationship you describe. Cthulhu is just the “casual” name that most people would have at least heard of.
they literally ram a boat into Cthulhu 's face and it tore its head apart. it did have an effect.
Thats how they were able to escape to be able to tell the tale in the first place.
What happened is that Cthulhu regenerated from the damage.
No_he_didn't_notice_since_he's_basically_a_god
That wasn't Cthulhu, though.
SarSaraneth yeah it was
***** No, it wasn't. A lesser thing, not Cthulhu. Cthulhu was one of the beings it was trying to wake up.
SarSaraneth is this referenced in another story or something? I didn't catch that reading the call
Sadly I think it may be too late for Cthulhu, his image has already been taken down like many well known horror icons. But I'm sure there's room for a new original creature, or even an old one that has flew passed the radar. :)
another one of H.P. Lovecraft's creatures would work
***** Like the spirit from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" ^^
Jasae Bushae Or maybe even taking on the Colour from The Colour Out of Space. If someone could properly tackle that in a film or videogame format, heck, in any visual medium, I would be extremely happy, since that is probably one of Lovecraft's best stories and most unnerving horrors.
Michael Welsh Would certainly be interesting at the very least
neigh. Good re-introduction of the concept can rock even with shady and faulty past. It just needs to be served right.
Actually Cthulu is supposed to be a physical creature, one that defies out understanding and sanity, but it is still a creature nonetheless.
A creature ... as a sentient galaxy would be a creature ... or a sentient super black hole. The point is that "it" transcends "creature" or even "god" or "demon" ... it is something beyond those human constructs. It is supposed to be outside and beyond and actually, permanently ... unknowable.
+THELORDOFEXCESS wasn't Cthulhu supposed to be some kind of invader in "at the mountains of madness"? It was supposed to be made of an alien matter and follow physical laws that are different than us but Cthulhu is nowhere near the strangest things HP Lovecraft wrote about.
+Robert Gallasch ...sort of, they kind of took over the majority of the oceans from the race of yeth, while what are essentially yeti's took over the mountains, and some fucked up dragon things capable of ending all of the above civilizations were subdued below by yeth and the development of energy weapons. yeth were confined to the polar regions and then soon after whiped out by the slave race of sheoggaths (basically near mindless drones capable of limitless evolution...origionally just drones but the yith couldn't subdue all of the ones that gradually grew intelligent).
The way cthulhu was apparently defeated (haven't read it) was by temporarily injuring him thus delaying him long enough for the planets to unaligned and the city to sink beneath him, sealing him back to the deep.
His form is physical...just that it's not only what's immediately in front of you that you have to worry about, injuring him has no real meaning as it simply delays.
In a way call of cthulhu does capture this in regards to presenting the information that despite everything you did, it's just stalling the inevitable.
+Alex Cooper um.... you got a little bit mixed up there...
4.5 billion years before present: Cthugha (No, it isn't Cthulhu) and its fire vampire servitors arrive.
1 billion years BP: The elder things arrive on earth, landing in what is now the atlantic ocean. Using organic material, they invoke or generate a primal shogoth mass called Ubbo-Sathla, the father of all life. All life on earth is born from this creature. From this, the elder things create the shogoths, and build their first great undersea city.
750 million years BP: The flying polyps arrive on earth from outer space. Settling on what later becomes Australia, they create great windowless cities of basalt and feed upon the indigenous cone shaped beings they find there.
400 million years BP: The minds of the great race of Yith travel across time and space into the cone shaped beings the flying polyps feasted upon. The Yith, utilising their knowledge and technology, fight and win a war against the polyps, imprisoning them in vast caverns underneath their cities.
350 million years BP: Cthulhu and his star-spawn arrive on earth and claim the continent of Mu for their own. They begin a war with the elder things for dominance of the planet, but eventually a truce is declared between the two races.
300 million years BP: Mu is sunk beneath the waters of the pacific ocean, and Cthugha and the fire vampires are banished from the earth.
275 million years BP: The serpent folk civilisation in Valusia begins.
250 million years BP: The shogoths revolt against the elder things. In a war of survival, the elder things eventually gain victory. Their slave beasts, the shogoths, are nearly extinct. This event signals the decline of elder thing civilisation.
160 million years BP: The mi-go, the fungi from yuggoth, arrive and establish a colony in the Appalachian mountains. They begin a war with the elder things, who are forced to retreat southwards. Soon the earth is divided, with mi-go in the north, elder things in the south and the great race of Yith in the lands surrounding Australia.
70 million years BP: the dinosaurs are wiped out by a meteor impact.
50 million years BP: A cataclysm shakes the earth and destroys the prison of the flying polyps, freeing them. The Yith then transmit their minds into the bodies of the New great race, a hive mind of bugs that inhabit the earth far after the fall of man. Without the intelligence of the Yith, the cone shaped beings are overwhelmed and killed. The polyps then appear to disappear from the world, however some remain in the ancient cities of the Yith and their cavernous prisons.
And that's pretty much it up until present day. The rest of the history is that the elder things retreat further into the antarctic and the mi-go kind of go away to the point where they are rare to find on earth.
+MadDemon64 No, he isn't a "creature", he's a God. An Old One. You obviously don't know what you're talking about.
So it's like micro-transactions or EA games; You know they it exists but there's nothing you can do because it's a part of the game.
Daaaaaamn MrZee spitting some truth around here......
Yeah
eyyy abi
Yes, you are right.
There's only one way to accomplish "fighting Cthulhu" in a game and that is when the "self empowerment" aspects carries you completely outside the realm of humanity. Your character would need to progress to a point where they are no longer human and that the rest of humanity is beneath your notice as much as it is for Big C himself. You may have had companions along your journey, but they are a distant memory and whether they are alive or dead and, if dead, by your hand or something else's, is something about which you absolutely could not care less. If you want to have a slobber-knocker with an eldritch horror, you must become one yourself.
I'd play that :)
basically God of War then
only problem being that Cratos was still human shaped
Bloodborne for sure. In one of the ending, the hunter literally becomes a squiggly alien.
Yeah but all of those games have characters with "vaguely human" levels of strength. A cthulean horror would need to be so powerful it can destroy earth, not through some small intentional act, but as an unintended consequence of merely being in the area. So powerful that all logic or reason fails to comprehend what has happened.
"Make it so your choices don't matter." So...like a Telltale game? :^)
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH!!! SAVAGE!!! >:D
Or Life Is Strange
Mass Effect
Toomany .Toastuhs Has anyone ever heard of a game that glorified Cthulhu.
*oof*
Well, Bloodborne handled being able to kill Cthulhoid beings fairly well. Probably because the point is that you can kill individual Great Ones, but you're still always playing by the rules of other, greater powers, never fully in control of where your character goes. So the powerlessness and sense of smallness in the universe that Cthulhu represents is still present, despite being able to kill Great Ones. Also, the majority of people in Yharnam are fully aware of the Great Ones and worship them, which is very unusual for Lovecraftian horror, but it ends up working rather well in Bloodborne.
aresdotexe Well, in Bloodborne, most of the people are already mad, they're in the process of turning into beasts, but they refuse to believe that the old blood is the source of the scourge, they refuse to believe that it was the church (that got them to worship the old ones) all along, they refuse to believe that they themselves are beasts, and honestly, to me, my favourite old one is Oedon, I'd love to see what From Software is about to bring us about him in the expansion
Even the ending where you yourself become a great one has some strange implications, considering that the hunter's dream exist before you came along so you can't be the host, Gehrman is dead so he can't be the host, and the moon presence is dead so he also couldn't be the host.
But if you go to the abandoned workshop you can see the dolls finger twitching if you look closely, the hunter's dream may have been the dolls all along and now you, as a great one, are sort of her surrogate child, and as we know from the description of the umbilical cord "every great one loses its child, and yearns for a surrogate."
***** In my opinion, the doll isn't a great one but is going to acquire powers to defend the infant great one, like Mergo's Wet Nurse, which still has an unknown origin
as far as lore goes, I think it's pretty stablished that the wet nurse is a great one.Much like the pressence and amygdala, it only exists and "can be defeated" in the dreamlands with I think suits well with hunters being more that what meets the eye
Diego Carnero Ortega Great Ones can exist outside dreams, Ebrietas for example was a Great One who was left behind after the other Great Ones have ascended to the cosmos or such, in which case they can only manifest themselves to humans through dreams, Mergo was the child of Yharnam, the queen of the Pthumarian's, she was pregnant with a physical child of a Great One, and unlike other children of Great Ones, Mergo survived, and was taken to the nightmare by some way or another, not sure how, but it was for him to ascend I think, and it was probably the School of Mensis who beckoned for the Wet Nurse to take him, or it can be that the Wet Nurse was real and she was a Pthumarian, and gained powers from the either the beckoner/host of the nightmare or the beckoned Great One, like the doll who gained sentience when Gehrman beckoned the Moon Presence, it is most likely that Mergo is the real Great One behind the scourge of the beast and not the Wet Nurse whether she herself is an Old One or not, welp, not sure about it
In my opinion, explanations ruin horror in general.
For example: You have a horror movie with a scary creature. Is it a demon? An alien examining human anatomy? Welp, I see you are very curious, so here's the solution to the mystery - It's ghost avenging his own death after being executed for a crime he didn't commit!
Now, almost anyone familiar with horror movies - can agree that this is the part where the film becomes much less scary.
Unraveler in my opinion, knowing only to realize the insurmountable gap between you and the monster gives more horror. Cthulhu and eldritch abominations wouldn't be so scary if we didn't know what they were. They would be just normal monsters instead of being monster of all monsters.
The trick however is to do the 'backstory' right, which Hollywood likes to dumb down for the average viewer thus making them less scary.
An example I could give is the Aliens. Before Prometheus and Covenant, we knew that the xenomorphs are engineered by aliens far more ancient and powerful than us. Thus if they couldn't contain the alien, what hope do we have? But now we know that it is actually a human android that created the iconic alien and it spoiled everything.
Unraveler Basically Insidious in a nutshell
It's why I hate when we have horror prequels, or whatever to explain the origins of the creature/villain. I don't want to know that Michael Myers was bullied and mistreated as a child, stop making me feel sympathy for him, you're making him less scary by doing that.
The Babadook avoids this issue well
It might make it more scary if all the characters can do is survive and not fight back
C'thulu is invincible
Except for against steamboats
He doesn't take steamboats well
Danny Hampson
Lol
So steamboat kamikazes are what he fears.
At least it isn't a green rock.
Exactly its like the video fella doesn't know what he is talking about...
HEY LOOK A HUGE GREEN MONSTROSITY WITH THE POWER OF A GOD!...let's ram it in the head
Last time someone tried to steamboat Cthulu... _"farewell Thunderchild"_
" _Lashing ropes and smashing timbers_
_Flashing Heat Rays pierced the deck_
_Dashing hopes for our deliverance_
_As we watched the sinking wreck_
_With the smoke of battle clearing_
_Over graves in waves defiled_
_Slowly disappearing_
_Farewell Thunder Child!_ "
Ooooooolaaaaaaaaaaahhhh !!! As they say on Mars ; )
He did reform after that incident, and just went back to sleep with a minor bruise, like a bruise you'd get by punching a wall, it didn't kill him, he just went back under the waves to reform, then the stars unaligned cause Cthulu has the worst luck so he is forced to go back to sleep
Last summer I played an amazing D&D campaign revolving around a cult trying to summon an ancient being. We were set inside a train going through a long period in its journey where we were to far from any towns to bring aid. The way the DM went through the story truly captured that the ancient being wasn’t a really supposed to be a being, but something that was happening to us, unpreventable. The only thing we had control over was trying to stop the cult from summoning the being, and that sense on desolation felt like we as the players, the force behind D&D, were utterly powerless. I completely agree with everything said in this video.
The game "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream" came pretty close to being the kind of game you are describing.
4a8p9x my God that game
Yeah, though that game is more Harlan Ellison (mostly because it's based off one of his stories), and in the end, the protagonists DO have a chance of beating AM. But it does show the feebleness of human existance, and is pretty disturbing at times. It's just not Cthulhu because, well, you CAN win.
That short story is amazing! That's how you make sci-fi horror
Terraria does this the best. Not seeing him directly, yet living in a world after his influence has set it.
But you kill the moon lord so…
@@gianttacogod cthulhu, not moon lord. You never see cthulhu because his body was torn apart before the game starts
@@Chemtekmain i thought in lore moon lord was actually cthulu
According to the official wiki and an FAQ with the game creator, the moon lord just is Cthulhu. Also his brain and eye are pretty much fodder, and the real deal isn't even really the hardest fight, that honor goes to the empress of light daymode.
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
"S I N C E W H E N W E R E Y O U T H E O N E I N C O N T R O L ?"
Undertale was awful.
+Tulpa nah
Tulpa ?why
Tulpa Don't need none of this on a thread I started, calm down.
No, you have a point. Toby Fox did something with the files that would change the title depending on where you were or crash the game, and assuming people don't see the Meta resurgence, that could be the way to go. crashing and relaunching with the title changed to eldritch runes at random intervals, changing it's icon on your desktop. Onviously, don't make it a gimmick - small things for the observant player
"Now, at my end, I can fully see. My last case opened in me a fear, a real fear. A fear of myself; of what I am, and what I've always been. All that I was is now lost. Hope? Purpose? Pleasure? All meaningless. I now walk in the shadows between worlds, and it is there that I have finally glimpsed what lives in the dark corners of the earth..."
No one seems to remember the amazing game "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth" a survival horror game, the first to use the sanity loss concept before "Amnesia: The dark descent" and most times makes you genuinely feel not in control of the situation. I love how loyal to the mythos logic has, I mean, in the game you never get to fight nor even see Cthulhu, only Dagon, Hydra and its cultists, but even being influenced by Cthulhu's dreams is enough to turn the main character mad and make him kill himself eventually...
This game is amazing; I play it about once a year. Not only is it exactly the perfect game described in this video, but it was WAY ahead of it's time. It was the first game I ever played with iron-sight aiming for guns, it had you running helpless from enemies years before games like outlast existed, a sanity loss system similar to but better than Amnesia; the game is just great.
This game is horrible. You spend like 80% of its time shooting weapons.
Arthur Salles - that describes most games.
Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is also overlooked, maybe because it was the only M-rated game to be a Gamecube exclusive. Sanity meters 3 years before CoC: Dark Corners, excellent use of historical research and locations, and the only way to kill an Elder God is to summon another Elder God and hope that it doesn't turn its attention to you before killing the first Elder God.
Also, one "good" Elder God is manipulating events to kill all its competition, and you have no way of knowing if it will still find humanity's continued existence useful in the future.
So yeah. Now I know another good Lovecraftian game to try, and so do you. I think you might like Eternal Darkness. :)
Friend: YOU KILLED CUTHULU!!!
Hero: No, I bored him to death
Cthulu could have a health bar, that when you decrease it to zero, it could just not die, and instead, the health bar could go the other way.
like i've said to someone else.
give the illusion of control.
and part way through, do something like rapid regeneration, or make the health bar completely disappear while damaging the other player's or change up the controls or even remove the controls part way through the fight.
so that once you get them to half health, you can't move or do anything. your forced to watch as cthulhu slowly devours your mind and body while your character just stands there in fear
ye, cthulu could have (in an UT esq thing) the fight and mercy buttons switched at the last secont, so you flee from him out of your control and someone else kills him while you're on the overworld...
Cthulhu should have a health bar that when it reaches zero it is not dead which can eternal lie, for with strange aeons even death may die.
Yes you can do the thing, it achieves its true form when it finds itself at 0 health, and the health bar just goes the other way, and even attacks you.
That sounds like just the kind of thing that Lovecraft would do.
MOON LORD IS DEAFETED FUCK YEAAAAHHHH
Brony HUN
Nice Try But that was his brother........
NinjabeeRedtricity ooooouuuhhh *sad violin plays*
+NinjabeeRedtricity it isint confirmed it is his brother
Also cuthulu is dead
Dr Poo You may be right about that ,Cenx said its not his brother but REPRESENTS it.
Then a year later, Bloodborne came out. Thanks From for listening!
To "beat" cthulhu is to stay sane for one more moment
The real horror is that humanity has not even a hope of holding out against things like this. Cthulhu might not be the biggest threat out there, but no matter what we have no hope of ever withstanding him or the other elder things if they ever decide to squash us out. We're as consequential to them as a gnat is to us, something they wouldn't even think of for more than a few seconds after crushing into nothingness. All of humanity, all of life, all of the earth itself could be eradicated in an instant by the errant swipe of a terror from beyond the stars, and no amount of foresight or intervention could prevent it.
The scary thing is, the real universe is like this. Life on earth has only managed to last so long in the universe because ultimately we are VERY lucky. The earth could have been bombarded with radiation and reduced to a lifeless husk eons ago, or destroyed in the planetary impact that created the moon. If we were too close or too far from the sun, we'd be a burnt out rock or a frozen ball of ice. We've faced several mass extinctions from huge meteors in the past, and even within the earth itself are things that could easily destroy us. Supervolcanoes, earthquakes, rare diseases (Ebola has NOTHING on naegleria fowleri), hell even the higgs boson could wipe us all out with little resistance.
At the same time, the cosmic horror of cthulhu is a little dated because these days we don't think of our insignificance as a thing of horror, but rather something of wonder. It's amazing that the universe is so vast and exists on a scale we can't even fathom. It's fascinating that the earth has survived long enough for us to exist. That's perhaps the real reason why Cthulhu is becoming a killable enemy instead of the implacable horror he once was. In Lovecraft's time, going to the moon was inconceivable. Now it's practically a day trip for astronauts. We're preparing for commercial space flights, and readying for life among the stars. How can we fear that which we've come to know so much about?
The answer is: we reveal that which we do not. Cthulhu and co. belongs there, lurking behind what scientists call "the black wall", the upper limit of our knowledge and comprehension as a whole. He is beyond space, beyond time, beyond any ability to quantify or define. To him, the universe is a plaything, and perhaps the time when we venture forth as a whole race to walk among the stars will be the time when he finally notices us, the little gnat buzzing in his ear.
*swat*
well said!
my favorite way to do cathulu with a life bar is when that lifebar does not go down at all
tbh i'd prefer a lifebar starting like midscreen going into one direction and when reaching the "0 hp" it starts building up in the opposite direction, so the player still has some hope but has to realize that there's no way of doing anything at all
also there would need to be something happening if somebody manages to defeat him which would be impossible by default, but might become possible by cheating (or adding a incredibly hard to find easteregg, that might only have a low% chance of even working) to make the players still wonder if there might be a possible intended way of beating him and feeling insecure about their own mind and possibility to judge whether there is a way or no way at all
a healthbar that doesn't go down at all would tell us it's not possible to do any damage. it's something we can comprehend without any problems. there needs to be mystery, giving players the idea there might be a way, giving them hope, playing with their minds and expectations
i'd personally let the healthbar be filled and decreased again by filling it up on the original side again. if you do it often enough you'll expect this to happen so it will still be like this for a while, letting people think that's all. if you tryhard it bc u still think something might happen if you do it often enough theres always the option of adding something different when nearly everybody lost their expectations of something to happen
imo if you're trying so hard to defeat cthulhu, the possible ultimate horror (for a gamer) should be unleashed and the game should wipe itself, leading to a player not knowing whether to like the game because there actually was something happening if you kept trying and you got "rewarded" for it or to hate it because it did this
you can't use cthulhu in a game without playing with the player's mind, without playing with his sanity
Doom0fGods In practice, those ideas are only inpractical child fantasies. The idea that they could ever work is possible only because of ignorance
The problem is the moment you quantify the unquantifiable, it makes sense. Cthulu does NOT make sense, EVER
A good idea from my side: never let the player find out that the world is based on the Cthulhu mythos, only by some small chance would they stumble upon someone mentioning them. For example, what Bloodborne did with the Moon Presence. it had been there the entire time, giving the player directions, controlling them. It had been there even before the player, ever since it created the hunt, the Dream and trapped Gehrman within. Probably, not even Gehrman knows of it. I don't remember the game ever hinting at simple peasants - like Gehrman used to be - knowing at all of the Great Ones. For example, when the prostitute whose name I'm too lazy to google gives birth to a Great One, she sees it for what it is - a monstrosity - and does not react like would, for example, members of the Church. Gehrman doesn't know how many hundreds of years have passed outside and that Ludwig is dead and gone to the Nightmare and Willem - close to dying. he knows there is something, because he knows to channel energy from the Moon. But he doesn't know what it is and what are its intentions
+Ernests Stroinovs Bloodborne is a very interesting example of cosmic horror done right, I think.
Three endings:
1) You complete your task and wake up. You go up to some scholars and tell them that dreams are actually real and exist on different dimensional plains, and that they are the domain of things that normal man can't see, then you get called a fucking nut and shunned. All your eldritch knowledge only alienates you from your fellow man, and on top of that, you just spent who knows how long slaughtering people, and things worse than people, so any ethics and morals you may have had have likely been eroded away to the point where you might consider killing someone simply because they annoyed you- cause hey, killing something has solved a lot of your problems so far.
Essentially, you're not really fit to inhabit human society anymore, because
2) You kill Gehrman, and take upon yourself the patronage of the Moon Presence. Which means, you get to guide hunters through their own dreams, all the while possibly being confined to the Hunter's Dream for however long you have before someone de-thrones you or the Moon Presence no longer needs you. You lose control of your life and become a mouthpiece for a terror that just so happens to help out humanity because humanity are pretty good tools for killing it's competition.
3) You trascend the hunt, kill the Moon Presence before it can take ownership of you, and due to your understanding of the cosmos and your expanded senses, you become so divorced from Humanity that you are forcibly evolved into the very kind of creatures you've been killing; a Great One. You the player lose control at this point, because you're no longer human and therefor no longer have a real human view of the world. The "you" that you knew died, and whats taken your place is a far different, far stranger "you".
*****
You could've gone without explaining the endings because everyone and their grandma know about them XD I really love how the worst outcome looks exactly like a good ending - you wake up to see a beautiful new day. While the Presence awaits in the shadows, waiting for new pawns. I like how you mentioned the society shunning you and calling you crazed, despite you having so much damn insight. Also, same goes for Dark Souls, with its two endings - you becoming human firewood or leave the world in darkness so humans can now "rule the world" and the reign of gods is over. But it doesn't matter and the world will be taken by darkness no matter what and all humans will become hideous beasts because that is their nature and their fate - the Dark Soul. And the human desire to be the crown of all brings about their inevitable demise.
Ernests Stroinovs
Gotta love downer endings.
*****
I mean, the "good" ending in Bloodborne is good because there is a chance that the protagonist will make tons of money starring in hyper-realistic tentacle porn.
+Corto Maltese i think in the "good " ending when you wake up you forget everything, though you would most likely have a hard explaining your new reflexes and instincts.
The loss of control makes me imagine a weird concept you enter the typical spooky maze dark hallways and a mysterious voice guiding you but without realizing it the game takes away things a bit at a time you start out with custom messages to the voice then preset then small uncontrollable noises like huh and what and then not talking at all,you start having less control over the game and getting more descriptions in the end you realize you were in a concrete cube and every texture every mystery was carefully drilled into your head not by complicated things like vr but just a simple voice hence showing how powerless the human mind is
Hearing this and as a game designer I immediately think off creating a character where schizophrenia is the main focus and showing the world around them and how they react to it, mental illness is something that not alot pf people grasp or understand remotely so having a player deal with it throughout would give all of the senses you are talking about, disempowerment, to gain the feeling of lose of control and to asert that to the player I think showing a character across their life as schizophrenia really is something that stays with you and offers no real cure, only that things might not get worse faster.
Just a quick thought.
To a small degree this has been done in Vampire masquarade bloodlines. One of the races you can play as is basically insane and all the dialogue makes little to no sense. Unfortunately the effect is small by comparison to real madness as it only effects dialogue and it only really grips you if you play it first without know anything about the world prior.
To really make what you said you would need to play on all the senses of the player.
Wish i saw your comment when i made mine, it is an interesting concept to just make your character insane or just the hint that there is something wrong.
There was an old text adventure game called "Bureaucracy" for the Apple II computers written by Douglas Addams. All you had to do is turn in your change of address form with out dying. Sounds simple? Not by a long shot. Rather than a life total you have "Blood pressure" that you have to manage. One point I died listening to the answering machine because some of the messages stress you out or piss you off. The whole game feels next to impossible with out a guide and I made out maps and everything trying to figure out what order I'm supposed to do which thing in which order until I gave up.
I was thinking of something similar after this video but have two stats you have to manage: Reputation with others while your own stress/sanity. Stress/sanity gets too high and you start "seeing things". Problem is some of the things you see may actually be real. Reputation gets too low and you get locked up. Could base the whole thing like being a crewman on a small cruse ship at sea and you have to convince the captain to turn around before it's too late.
Most of the main game characters have schizophrenia. They expect to be loved and celebrated for killing everyone.
I'm a schizophrenic myself. I'd love for there to be more games where people could get a sense of what I deal with. So, I support your idea.
I think that games could execute Cthulhu properly, but instead of an FPS game it should be along the lines of an "Amnesia" Game, a Horror/Mystery/Detective game. Where you basically are just learning and surviving, only to go mad in the end.
Exactly
Let's add some VR and make a game that borderlines psychological torture! :^)
***** I like where you're going with this good sir, but I'd also like to be non VR Compatible, not everyone has 700$ Equipment..at least not yet e3e
How about a deconstruction? Have the player character set out to destroy an eldritch abomination- and fail?
Of course, the game isn't that simple. Things never are.
You're an eccentric. Deluded. Perhaps just a little mad.
A world traveller.
You stop one night outside of Resolute Bay, an arctic settlement in Nunavut. Your wealth affords you the option of ignoring practicality, so you decide that you'll sleep as an Eskimo in an igloo (ignoring that this practice has long since been abandoned). Your dreams are tormented. You toss and turn, talk in your sleep, and can't get the words out of your head.
Ph'nglui. Mglw'nafh. Cthulhu. R'lyeh. Wgah'nagl. Fhtagn.
You hear the chanting words (Chanting? Yes, they are chanting, but not in churchgoer's voices) approaching. You can't see anything. A light grows in the distance. It's getting closer. You can almost see the shape that brings the light. It's huge...
A voice (YOUR voice) gasps. Run. You need to get away.
You awake panting, grateful to have an anchor to reality again. You've been sweating all night, and a hole has melted through the igloo. You thank your God that there are no wolves or bears nearby, as you just barely manage to make it to town before the sweat that lines your parka freezes you into a sparkling trophy for your rescue team.
You start telling people about your dreams.
Initially, they blow you off as another rich kid who's had a bit too much to drink, but as you get more and more insistent, indifference is replaced by anger.
Why anger?
Why are they... angry? Afraid?
You wisely decide to reamin quiet and return home to the Louisiana bayou.
You talk about your dreams again. Back home, everyone knows you and they know better than to risk incurring the wrath of your lawyers.
But they don't know what you saw.
That almost-perceived shape takes up every moment of your time.
It's getting closer.
You keep having the dreams.
You want to know, you need to know, you DESERVE to know!
But every time you cross that threshold we call sleep, a voice holds you back.
Conscience, maybe.
Sanity?
No matter. The voice is getting weaker.
You decide to pursue that object. You comb through libraries, you sift through scrolls and books that could very well have once inhabited Alexandria.
At last, you find the words: Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn.
There is a warning with those words. They translate from an unknown and nigh-unspeakable tongue into "In his house of R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming", and whomever hears these words slowly descends into feverish madness.
Mere pages further, you read that this house, R'lyeh, is lost beneath the shifting waters of the South Pacific.
At last, a location.
You have funnelled untold riches into this expedition, and have managed to turn a fortune that rivalled Mansa Musa's into a debt to rival countries. It will be worth it, you tell yourself, for I and I alone shall rid the world of this monstrosity.
You've read up on the mythos. Most dismiss the writings of Howard Philip Lovecraft as fiction, but your years of research have found accounts of his characters in mad scrawlings contemporary to most of recorded human history. It appears that since the Epic Of Gilgamesh, whispers of the Great Old Ones have occupied the margins of human writing.
They all foretell our doom.
The 'Call of Cthulhu' ends with the monster intact, and you know that it's a folly to try to kill it.
And yet, you rationalize, all that the protagonist did was try to ram the beast with a ship constructed of mere wood. Decades of military advances separate you and the protagonist. Where force has failed, nuclear fire will not.
And if that fails? the voice wonders.
Well then
You'll have to engage it yourself. A mental domination of sorts.
You brought along a psychic for a reason, after all.
In retrospect, you should have seen the madness creeping in. Had you kept a journal, at the very least you would have seen your own hubris.
Instead, you brought a crew of eight of the smartest, fastest, strongest, and all-around best specimens of humanity you could find.
Heroes of this age, you call them.
Your submarine has spent the better part of a year searching for the famed city, and the dreams have plagued you all the while. Your crew would have killed you had they not also succumbed to the dreams. They begin to worship the almost-visible image. WORSHIP!
You'll need them, though.
You are not the first to search for R'lyeh, and you suspect you shall run into more than a few of your precedents. You'll just have to face Cthulhu alone.
Your predictions were correct. You found R'lyeh, and meet the crazed explorers there. Your crew is attacked, and they help you to fend off the cultists.
You proceed through the tunnels. You see tentacles in the backgrounds. As you turn to inspect them, they vanish.
This isn't good. You're going mad.
Your crew begins to turn.The cultists are getting stronger.
Your crewmates mutiny.
You can't let them live. You strip down your party to just you and the psychic.
You find the dormant form of Cthulhu.
You call down your vessel to carry your trump card:
A thermonuclear bomb.
It never makes it that far. Cthulhu stirs and swats the ship. If not for the fact that Cthulhu ay between you and the bomb, you would surely have been atomized.
And yet
Cthulhu looks no worse for wear.
You fire off six rounds from your sidearm. Futile, yes, but one can hope.
You need to subjugate Cthulhu, to take control of him.
This would drive any mortal mad, but you've already filled that criterion.
You struggle to retain any sense of identity as the eldritch monstrosity begins to wake.
Mercifully, the connection is cut off as your psychic is killed by an errant swipe from the hulking slumberer.
You flee.
Amid the wreckage of decades of submersibles and submarines, you manage to find one left intact.
You make yourself scarce, praying that Cthulhu shall see no reason to pursue.
The cultists will not let you leave, but their idol does not share their fervour.
You spend years of your life in an asylum, in fear for your life and screaming at shadows.
Your rehabilitation is achieved after ages upon ages of therapy, but you know the truth.
There is something else out there, and only you know what it is.
Cut to a shot of the phrase "When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky..." from Call of Cthulhu.
The protagonist looks up to the skies, and sees that the cosmos have shifted greatly in his years of absence. Once-familiar constellations no longer form the desired patterns. Shadows cut across the sky, briefly blacking out stars or portions of the moon. You point this out to passers-by, but they take no notice. You and you alone can see the form of Lovecraft's celebrated Great Old Ones taking form, and you are powerless to do anything.
You crouch, clutching your head, then release and weep at the now blotted-out moon.
Fade to black.
Roll credits.
Good idea
lettersandnumbers21 Someone should turn this into a game...
lettersandnumbers21 This ought to be a thing.
WE GOTTA KICKSTART THIS!!!!
Sonata Dusk I wish. Still a student, I'm afraid
Bloodborne breaks your three rules from 4:14 onwards, and yet it remains one of my favourite games and the most true Lovecraftian horror game I've played.
You have not played a good lovecraftian game.
The call of chtulhu?
Bruh play the newest Call of Cthulhu. It’s really good. I thought I was in control of my character and how the story would turn out til I got to the ending
@@leprechaunluck24
Blood borne IS the good Lovecraftian game
How about in a game, if you DO fight Cthulhu, nothing works. You try shooting it, the bullets just bounce off. You try hitting it, but you end up hurting yourself. In the fight, Cthulhu would be bigger, stronger, more powerful in every way, so in the end, you just can't win.
+Souper Potato exactly what was thinking. Not a single health bar. And after a few attacks, you realize that your target is an illusion, and turns into enormity, or darkness, much vaster than us.
Lucas, the Merry Prince of Cats Yes, exactly!
+Souper Potato Yay! I'm glad that my statement is understood!
Lucas, the Merry Prince of Cats also i watched this video with my crocheted cthulu mask. CTHULU IS LIFE CTHULU IS ALL
+Souper Potato Crocheted cthulu mask? Have you ever red something called homestuck?
I guess I have to stop calling the Reapers "Giant Mecha Space Cthullus."
But "Giant Mecha Space Cuttlefish" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Sounds like a great name for a band, though.
"Music beyond human comprehension"
I've been calling them "Space Cuttlefish of Doom" for forever, adding a 'Mecha' in there wouldn't be too bad.
Ahh yes the reapers, the beings that can only be stopped by placing an instagram filter over the universe.
Mr. BDece I've found that "Evil Robot Space Squids" Works fairly well.
So... Pacman then? It's unwinnable.
Actually the Pac-Man universe just crumbles until your demise
I love this so much. I'm wanting to make a d&d one shot, and I want my players to lose. Lose horribly, but survive. And you bring up such good points that I'm going to try and use for said one shot.
I wonder about the possibilities of doing a truly powerful-beyond-imagining Cthulu in your standard power fantasy game. Obviously the fear is a difficult (and maybe impossible) thing to instill there, but just imagine Cthulu as boss monster... whose model extends beyond the players' view distance. Perhaps the very surface you stand on is an awakening Elder horror, the temple crumbling around you as you flee. Does he have to have a health bar? Okay fine, you do 1 damage to it at a time. If you stick around long enough to deplete it, it just replaces itself with a new one.
Maybe...It's already difficult to get right in a movie, where you don'tt even have to care about player agency and challenge...so I wonder, until it's done right in non-interactive visual media, if it's even possible to get it right in a game, especially as a boss monster.
This said, games are evolving faster than movies, so we might get our real great visual transposition of lovecraft in a game rather than in a movie.
There's some possibility in the things you say, but there's still a small problem with the fact that - in a standard game - I as the player know that there must be some way to "beat" it. I played a game with a powerful boss that healed itself completely after every turn, making it impossible to beat. It wasn't Cthulu, but it had tentacles and was an immortal being of unimaginable power. However, another immortal being came in and used/sacrificed his immortality to seal away the immortality of your enemy, making him beatable. The fight is still absolutely crazy. At one point, the enemy begins to literally devour worlds just to be able to keep up the energy to fight you. Eventually, you find a way to stop him from doing that, and finish him off.
Another (similar) way we can convey powerful-beyond-imagining enemies is to empower the player in powerful-beyond-imagining ways. It's not a horror thing, but it can convey concepts of amazing and overwhelming power. For example, in Bayonetta, I've heard that the final boss throws galaxies at you.
Lawlietftw30 The thing is though, you don't have to beat it. Killing the enemy isn't the only goal games have. You could very easily make it about running away. That's all you can do with eldritch horror after all. You can't beat it. Your best bet is to run away and hope it decides it has better things to do.
Gen Doukeshi
Well, that's all you can do with an Eldritch horror in horror games. As you mentioned, this is other types of games, like a "standard power-fantasy games."
In these games, you can be what the monsters and indescribable horrors are afraid of when they go to sleep. You can be the nightmare's nightmare. You can be...THE DOCTOR!!!
(Heh, sorry about that last outburst. :) Got a little carried away. Easy to do with Doctor Who.)
Gen Doukeshi Like getting ganked by a 10/0 Udyr...
If I had Cthulu as the big boss in a game, I would make the fight start with just a pitch black room that deals damage, but you can't see how. Every time you die, it gradually shows Cthulu as most people show it, but absolutely enormous. When it completely reveals itself, the controls completely randomize (would be pc only game) with all of the keys on the keyboard. Every time you die after that, it randomizes again and again. The only way to 'win' would be to quit and uninstall it. If you don't uninstall it after the fight, your computer will have faint traces of its presence in subtle sounds and by slowly darkening your screen or something. No idea how to do that, but it's the thought that counts :)
+Sans You know how they say that a creature existing purely in 2D would see the world through infinitesimally thin cross-sections? We would only see magic eye cross-sections, which, when some clever white hat put them together from the internal data, would sorta resemble our squid friend.
Stranger Danger heck yeah
I'd have something seen, but unbeatable. You could deal damage to it, but the health bar is literally infinite and you only chip one pixel's with away from it at a time. That is in direct contrast to the rest of the game where you are just fighting demons and so on, but you are actually trying to fight an Outsider here. With all of your power, with all of your magical meteors, with all of the really damaging things that you can summon, that health bar will just infinitely go down with no apparent damage to the creature itself and no indication that the fight is actually progressing.
And then you (finally) die, and the entire game just... evaporates and only leaves a text file and the game installer behind.
Inside the text file reads:
"I'll let you in on a secret, one who has seen the unseeable. Your life is and shall be... nothing. I will break through and show how your lives are insignificant. I shall take back what is mine, and i shall never exist as you think of me no longer.
We will take your world, one step at a time no matter what you do. We are eternal. Your "god" may have sealed us, but we are eternal.
All that will be left of this blight will be us, and we will shape it to our liking, and no one will be the wiser.
We are eternal."
+The Exiled Nomad. I'd do something like having the health bar work normally at first, but then start acting weirdly like regenerating all of the sudden, getting bigger, or disappearing all together. It would do everything to completely confuse the player , in a way where the player can't figure out or understand.
TheRezro I feel like Cthulhu couldn't be anything but an end game "boss", so I don't know if you'd even need a cut scene, honestly. Since it'd be unbeatable, What would happen that you needed to see? I think it would be a great twist to have the player expect to win, but then reveal that it's impossible. Adds more to that confusion and misunderstanding. But I'm not a game designer, so I just speak from personal preference, I guess.
I'd have it that the moment you see C'thulhu, you lost. Your character starts moving irradically, not responding to the controller
You say this about Cthulhu, but this actually is the description of nearlethotep, Cthulhu is a great old one, not a god like nearlethotep.
Yep, Cthulhu is "just" a high priest of the outer gods.
It's all semantics relayed to us as third-hand information from one unreliable narrator to another, anyway: there are no "gods" in Lovecraft's cosmic horror stories of that era in any traditional sense of the word, they were generally "sufficiently advanced aliens", to borrow from the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote ("...Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic....") Nyarlathotep doesn't seem to fulfill a role very much more advanced than Cthulhu in the variously (wildly different) appearances it makes in the stories as a sort of trickster who has to use deception, curiosity, and fear to control the "mild gods" here or convince humans to sign its book or attend its lectures there, while masquerading as a sort of herald angel for the likes of Yog-Sothoth and Azathoth....
One gets rather the impression from a careful reading of the stories that Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu both are very old and advanced alien ancestors of human beings who are basically just screwing with their naive and impressionable younger brothers by telling them elaborate lies and fairy tales about the nature of the universe and the amount of power that humanity's "Great Older Brothers" hold in it....
Which all rather makes sense when one realizes that Lovecraft was actually inverting Theosophical New Age mythology about wise and noble alien ascended masters of the universe who were telepathically leading humanity through New Age cults into a dawn of a new age of enlightenment and spiritual and material evolution....
Good video, but then there's the concern of breaking the immersion. Some monsters in games are just something to run from, and nothing else.
What I would love to see is a monster than I can fight back against, but will quickly realize that all my actions against it is meaningless, and realize that I absolutely HAVE to run from coming to that "o sh**" realization.
Yes! The best panic is when you try to fight back, to no result.
going the wrong way in a souls game...
I also kept getting the feeling that the lack of control could VERY easily result in a lack of agency. Meaning, that you'll loose interest because you have no role to play or are simply a fly on the wall
***** The hard part is that it still has to be threatening. The moment you realize that big threatening creature is actually incapable of killing you (or even worse, is basically just a set piece), then it loses all effect. It needs to be actually threatening, not just scary
Nathaniel Jordan Exactly, games like Slender for example... all you have to do is never turn around and you'll be fine.
On the subject of questioning the characters' sanity, there's a brilliant moment in Silent Hill 3, where Heather mentions the monsters she's been killing, and the man she's talking to says "Monsters? They look like _monsters_ to you?" Turns out he's yanking her chain, but it was a real OMFG moment.
I think Alan Wake did a pretty good job on Cthulhu, the game feels like you're going more mad the deeper you go, and your victories don't matter much long term
Alan Wake is a good example. I would argue that it lets you make some meaningful progress but inserts enough doubt about that progress the farther you go. It doesn't immediately turn around and say, "hah look, you were wrong" very often, which gives your character a sense of continuity and purpose even as everything is turning dark.
I somehow haven't heard of this game before now. I'll have to check it out.
Theres a elder scrolls game that does it well, the one where your the Champion of Hemanus Mora.
Bloodborne did it right
Kind of
No
@Ant Aug can you kill a massive abomination? If you can, then you dun did fucked up
@Jared Lind i... i meant the bosses. But fair point
@Jared Lind Not really. The fact a mortal can find a way to face them wouldn't happen. The idea is No Matter What Humans Do we cannot even scratch it. If we found a way to become more than a human it's still from a human, therefor we are still nothing.
I want to make a game now, and have Cthulhu as a boss. But, when you beat him, someone goes up to you and tells you, "That wasn't him."
Main character: "Wha- What do you mean?"
"That wasn't the real Cthulhu. Did you honestly think that you would just be able to waltz up to the lord of madness, look him dead in the eyes, shoot him in the face, and be done with it? No, if so much as saw a glimpse of him, you would instantly either die or go insane, as your mind would rip itself in pieces, shatter."
Then, if you try to disagree with him and claim Cthulhu is weak or something, all of a sudden, the roof starts getting torn off. When you look to see what's happening, all *you* can see (as in you the player, not the main character) is a mass of black tendrils coming from the heavens. Then, either the game freezes, or the picture starts getting shaken with some sort of color effect changing the colors at random, before the picture simply shatters and the game crashes. You sign back in, and when you get back to the title screen, it shows a special message saying, *".negnin hsiloof, em gnitbuod rof teg uoy tahw s'taht"*
And then you find a body next to your spawn point that looks exactly like your character, except they look like they were driven insane right before death, where you find a journal. It'd all be pure madness, with a few distinguishable lines. Things like, "It's all meaningless. Life is a lie. Reality is insanity. Mortality is the ultimate weakness not even the mightiest or most righteous can push past. The universe is only a drop in terms of knowledge. *He is real. He is coming. Never doubt. Lest ye end up lost in your own asylum that becomes of your mind.*"
How meta.
NICE.
I always was kinda dissapointed with how they handles the cultists too: "if we can stop their ritual, we can stop cthulhu!" But cthulhu will come whether hes worshiped or not. Hes an unstoppable force. If they would have a scene ehere a cultist would explain how his own worship of the creature is inconsequential, I think that would help paint the right picture for the player to really see how hopeless it is. Because even though cthulhu can be pushed back, he will keep coming, like the tide. And eventualy, he will succeed. Its only a matter of 'when'.
Cool...where I can suport the game sending money to you make it? I want this now!
I would so play that game! Let us know when you finish it ;)
Except we have a surefire weapon against Cthulhu. Steampowered ships. You say its to no effect but Big C goes back to sleep afterwards.
Paranormal Encyclopedia again I said this to another person. the mythos states when the stars align then cthulhu will rise from the depths...obviously he was just getting a midnight snack and simply said "I'm too tired for this shit"
Ry'leth rose from the depths. I'd say the stars were right.
How about a boat simulator where you fight cthulu?
Paranormal Encyclopedia
Correlation is not causation.
Occham's razor is not always the best solution.
The story specifically says that the stars were right ("The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight'), and further says that if the stars are wrong, they can't awaken at all, not that they awaken weakened or anything ("but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.")
This was supposed to be Cthulhu's big awakening... but one boat to the head and he went back to sleep again.
So darkest dungeon?
While it was critiqued as repetitive and heavy grinding, it portrayed Cthulhu mythos pretty much perfectly.
Damadicius Phoenixia yeah exactly, cthulhu is a concept that doesn't work as a video game imo
Well now you've made me want to play Darkest Dungeon. I've kept switching between wanting and not wanting to play it since its release, but noe I'm definitely going to
Remember that the tentacle monster in the game isn't the chutulu is the sambler, and you will die if you face the sambler.
I'd throw Bloodborne into the mix here, especially because in Bloodborne (spoilers) as you move on your early choices to save person X or Y or not save person Z get stripped away. In 2/3rds of the endings the hunt continues, just your part in it is done. In the other one you become the monster.
I think Lovecraft's writing was so good becuase he understood that horror comes from the fear of the unknown, so he explains very little.
This video reminds me of an old discussion I had, about "Why the Lady of Pain has no character sheet and why she should never have one"
If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up Planescape and Planescape: Torment
Yup. If you stat it, they will kill it.
Iunderstoodthatreference.jpg
Sigil is a better place because of her. I love it.
As a D&D enthusiast, I appreciate this mode of thinking.
Ah the Lady of the Plot Device...I heard a rumor someone out there could be remaking Planescape: Torment.
Dark Orion If you are talking about Torment: Tides of Numenera, it's not a remake. But it is a Planescape Torment game ;)
To make it truly powerful would be to have a massive game to play, and that Cthulu could be encountered, but in a different way for every single copy of the game, or at least only one outcome from a wide pool available. That way, should a player encounter it and try to discuss what happened and what they did, no-one else would find it and call them insane. It wouldn't even be Cthulu as we know it, but maybe a force that, say, destroys a village, only for the village to return later, or something equally powerful, in a way that leaves no trace later.
Or, to REALLY get in the player's head, it could detect if there's some kind of streaming device and, if it's at all possible, not show that to the people watching the video, only to that actual player, or to be invisible should the player try and print-screen what they see. Of course, I'm not entirely convinced that would work, but imagine watching someone online break down at a screen that, to the people watching, has nothing happening on it, or freak out at a cow that looks like it's doing nothing but the player sees it grow exponentially in size and have the game turn dark and the cow explodes as something quickly vanishes and the cow just looks like it was killed using the player's sword.
+DiscoClam Well Meeting Cthulu in game defies the Idea of Cthulu, you can not create a "Picture" of Cthulu, it is the entiere point that Cthulu himself defies the our understanding of Reality. In the entierty of Lovecrafts works, the reader encounters only once Cthulu and we get only vague descriptions of him, that are more "felt" then actually seen. And only a small glimps of him drove the protagonist into a raving lunatic. Or to ask differently, how do you show "Non Eucledean Geometry" in a Game? How do you show "Rectangel Shaped Triangles"? The true horror in Lovecraft is, that there are not only things out there that are powerfull beyond our imagination, but that these things proofs that the reality we think we can understand is in truth non existence. Ever seen something that let you stand still and say to your selfe "did that realy just happen?" now take that feeling and multiply it thousenfold.
+DiscoClam I like the way you think, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.... or do I?
One of the greatest moments while playing Eternal Darkness was, we had a veteran playing through the game for me, as two of us watched on. It was amazing to see his skill at the game, and then, one time, the game crashed... but duh, the game messes with your sanity like that, so we sat there and waited for like a whole 1~5 minutes just going "so, when do we return to sanity?"
OMG, have a path of the narrative that say, has cthulu spare a town because of some major choice you made in the game, and then CRASH! Oh no, none of the saves after that major choice "work", and now, you can't even figure out how to get the choice again, because the path has now been closed. You thought you were making meaningful decisions the whole branch, but it turns out THE DEVS WERE LEADING YOU DOWN A GARDEN PATH! "Hurray, you're a hero! ... sorry, we're taking that away now, and it turns out, there's no way to save the village canonically."
Or an ever present danger that your insanity has separated you from reality and your save games stop working, or ... they randomly change every time you load them! "I didn't save you, I saved the other NPC..." NPC: "What are you talking about? Our love was so strong you could bear let me die, and so you painfully sacrificed your friend for your lover." "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, WE'VE NEVER HAD ANY ROMANCE TREES?!?!?!"
My favorite Cthulhu tabletop game involved my character learning early on that he was destined to become the "Man in the Yellow Cloak" and that it is a tradition carried down through our family. So I confront one of the other players who appears to know what's going on, and he suggests that this is all just a play, and act. None of it matters. OMG, the freedom to do whatever you want with no consequence? To complete the ritual we had to kill my dad who was on an altar, and my character (a medical doctor) was all "sure thing", and just slashed his throat open with his hand-claw-thingie, whereas everyone else is all like "OMG! WTF ARE YOU DOING?!" while trying to stop me. But I'm all "just playing my part in the play!" So, we all get transported back to reality except for my younger brother, who ends up finding a yellow cloak, and meanwhile my character, having completed his part in the play, just walks to the nearest hospital and starts severing his hand off because he still sees it as a claw, and everyone else is all "OMG HE'S JUST CUTTING OFF HIS HAND!"
Ah man... the stories...
+A Meier Antichamber is a proof of concept in non-euclidean gameplay. There are certain elements to the mechanics in games like Portal which can be applied to similar effect. Game's have to be somewhat intelligible, and working - at least mostly - on the basic fundamentals of physics is a good starting point, but it's possible to twist those rules in ways other game types can't.
I think probably the best way to represent Cthulhu would be for the player to be facing down a cult rather than the entity itself. your goal is to investigate/defeat a group of people attempting to summon some kind of eldritch abomination. There would be some areas in the game where reality breaks down to varying degrees. Maybe there would be several places where it might happen, but no guarantee that the player will end up in those places, and no guarantee that any of them would actually generate the effects, only a possibility. The closer you get to the entity, the more the rules of the world would distort. If you keep going towards the source of the disturbance, there would be obstacles preventing you from getting too close, but persistence would get you close enough to the entity causing the disruption to gain their notice (poor thing). At this point, your control of your character's situation would begin to break down, potentially leading to a non-standard game over, or your character being led to do something that makes it look like you were the villain instead of the hero.
Another possibility is that you could have the protagonist still survive, but become traumatized for life.
+Jerry Quiroga "Traumatized" sounds way too light of a description to those of us who have actually played Call of Cthulhu. "Reduced to a babbling creature bearing a vague resemblance to a human being" sounds more like it.
Bloodborne: "Well, let me introduce my self"
I only recently found this channel, and I've gotta say, it is everything a UA-cam channel should be. Amazing content, with some amazing presenters, all entertaining whilst also learning something about gaming. I appreciate the hell out of what you're doing. Thanks so much, I'm a huge advocate :)
Cthulhu doesn't resonate with people anymore because unlike in Lovecraft's time we aren't only now coming to realize how insignificant we are. We know full well how insignificant we are are. Our age is more defined by discovering how we ARE significant.
we are not significant, what little significance we might have is being thrown out of the window the moment we realise how large the universe is in comparison to us and how that there might even be infinite realities
Infinite Realities are possible, but it's all in how you define them. The human mind is a very scary thing, even in this day and age
It's not as simple as knowing how insgnificant when it comes to Lovecraft. What Lovecraftian themes are all about is the fear of the unknown which is something everyone is born with no matter the time. Like you just said, our agr is more defined by discovering, in general. But what drives our passion to discover is in itself thay fear of not knowing. Of not being able to explain something. If you think about it all horror relies in that. Weather it's paranormal or psychological.
Mims Zanadunstedt It's possible, we just can't *confirm* it.
It's not just that humanity is insignificant, it's the implication of how vulnerable and powerless that leaves us which makes Lovecraftian horror interesting. Everything that matters most to us, that builds the foundation of our lives and goals, means nothing in the scheme of things. There is no cosmic order to guide and protect us, no fate too horrible to befall us, we're at the mercy of a vast and indifferent universe, and our lives are small and fragile in comparison. That's always going to be at least a little unnerving to most people who aren't in denial about it. I think it's still as relevant in this self-obsessed, social media age as it ever was when Lovecraft first wrote his stories. Most people still seem quite delusional about their place in the world and take too much comfort in the pretense of power and control that we cling to in our day to day lives.
Cthulhu was "defeated" by a swede ramming him with a yacht.
James Caldwell no cthulhu in that story simply said "fuck this its to early for this shit" you don't beat cthulhu you simply hope that it is early and that he is unwilling to put up with your feeble struggles
Still a win in my book
Yea. It's implied that Cthulhu is only going away for the time being, but the boat ram is probably the biggest "fuck it" moment in Cthulhu mythos. And for all we know, he really might have stopped Cthulhu from destroying the world by turning around and ramming him with a fucking boat. After all, like half the Eldritch beings in the Cthulhu mythos have some inevitable doomsday event tied to them. That moon could roll around and start screeching, or that human-faced spider could finish spinning its web before Cthulhu ever wakes up again.
I think the character was Norwegian...
Sam Roe
Right, right. Johansen was from Oslo. Herdi derdi ferdi perdi bork bork bork.
Thank you, dear mortals, for clearing this up.
Wow, cthulu uses UA-cam. How petty
@@johnsmith-eo3nz seems like technology is even dominant than gods
ya, i have no health-bar... deal with it
This summed up what is wrong with horror games in general. The games will put you in a frightening situation, but then they'll give you some way to "beat" the horror, making you complacent. The fact of the matter is that I'm not scared of a zombie if I can shoot it in the head. Nor am I afraid of a monstrous boss if I can level up enough XP to kill it. Because that gives me a sense of empowerment, and empowerment isn't scary. *Disempowerment* is scary.
Mostly true. Though, horror can be based on the concept of power itself, like the consequences of using it poorly. Quite a bit of the horror in Spec Ops: The Line stemmed precisely from the power you held - and how tragically and hideously it was misused. 'course, I guess you could argue that's also a form of disempowerment, and it wasn't the sole focus of the game anyway.
Venatius I haven't played spec ops, but I suppose that you mostly feel disgust towards your character, rather than fear. I guess it's not the same kind of horror. Although I guess games ought to try different kinds of horror, rather than focusing solely on the suvival.
And indeed, being forced by the game mechanics to do horrifying things is a twisting of the feeling of agency, and a disempowerment of the player in favor of a monstruous character he is supposed to play...kind of if the game was playing you...
True, because you're not relying on something far greater than the horror to get you out of it.
Some games do that right. But they are rare. Like Amnesia the Dark Descent, Outlast, The Crooked Man, Paranoiac, Mad Father, The Witches House, Fear 1 (because the fact is no matter what you do, you cannot kill alma) those are great horror games, but that is a very limited list of monsters and creatures that you cannot kill.
On Spec Ops: The Line you feel disgusted about yourself, not the character. The fact that you committed those acts. The game plays you, and it is fantastic to see.
StormWarriors2 Be the disgust directed to yourself or your character, you do not feel fear.
I wonder if the distinction exists in english between the horror genre and the scary genre. IIn french we sometimes use "film d'épouvante" for movies that use suggestion and fear rather than gore and violence. Many games have horror without fear, and many times, the fear is more present wherever the gore is discreet.
Peppers make me feel inconsequential.
There is literally a game coming out in like 28 days, it’s about Cthulhu and you literally can do nothing about it and even looking at it in the game causes insanity.
Ok it's been a year what's the game?
George Robinson call of Cthulhu
@@adamosca6399 well that sucked
Guess it's back to punching culstist
Cthulu is probably the wrong figure in Lovecraft's mythos to use in this video, since as the comments mention, you can totally knock him out with a yacht to the face.
Now Azathoth, on the other hand...
You couldn't do a game with Azathoth though. Disturb him and all of reality goes away.
I think Nyarlathotep would work. He/it likes meddling after all.
If the idea is to keep someone else from awakening Azathoth, it might work better. A setup where someone's delving too deeply into Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and it's not the player character, would make sense and be an interesting reversion of the usual RPG format.
I don't know. It seems like if Cthulhu is such an incomprehensible threat of an overwhelmingly powerful entity, Azathoth, it's safe to say, would be well beyond mankind's league to even consider. In the mythos there are greater beings making certain that Azathoth remains eternally asleep. For mankind to even think it could have any influence on that matter would be literally like mankind worrying about what it can do to preserve the entirety of the cosmos when it can hardly handle the preservation of it's own planet.
+Meidolaon to be fair Cthulhu is also used wrong because it is the incarnation of Lovecraft's fear of deep water. Azathoth was the fear of one day not existing. In both cases they are things we as humans cannot dare face because it would simply face us back and win without a single doubt, a outer god or old one that would work from Lovecraft's novels would be someone like Nyarlathotep because it would set up a protagonist in the "hero that fails" sense where we would be led to believe we won simply to realise we had lost long before we sat at the table.
Meidolaon Cthulhu wasn't *knocked out* per se, he just decided to fuck off (for the time being.)
*At the Mountains of Madness spoilers* In "At the Mountains of Madness", there are clearly Cthulhu spawn referenced, so Cthulhu is indeed a creature, if not a race.
Perhaps biologically, but that is not its function in a narrative sense.
Cthulhu does have children but it is not a race.
Couldnt they also change its existence and its body?
Right. That’s what I thought. And the Old Ones brought the Cthulhu-spawn to a stalemate. So it seems to me that even though they are beyond human comprehension they still are susceptible to other star spawn.
It makes logical sense that things beyond human comprehension are susceptible to other things that are also beyond human comprehension.
Yes, The Elder Things (Old Ones) despite being devolved by that point, still managed to push back Cthulhu's thugs and establish neat territorial boundaries for all.
The only Call of Cthulhu role playing game I've played where anyone "survived" it turned out in the end that we all died in the intro and the game went through the five stages of grief in purgatory. I've never been mad at the gamemaster that everyone died, because even though it wasn't plain from the beginning that victory conditions were minuscule, we all died in reasonable ways.
Sunless Sea and Fallen London do this really well as part of their extended lore.
Despite not being part of Cthulhu mythos, it has a lot of cosmic horror built into the deeper story of the game that show how ultimately nothing you do matters. It's a reveal that's so deep in though that it would kind of be massive spoilers, even though it's freely explored in the newest game.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth did this well. How? By never actually having you encounter Cthulhu itself. Sure, you encounter lesser Old Ones like Dagon and Mother Hydra, but they are less Outer Gods and more just particularly massive monsters. However, there is a moment in the game when you are trapped in a room with an statue of Cthulhu, and the more you look at it, the more your sanity-meter dwindles until you go insane. That works pretty well since you get a firsthand experience of the mind-shattering power of Cthulhu, but you never actually get to see it for yourself. But you get the idea of how Cthulhu's true form is so horrifying and beyond human comprehension that even a pale-imitation of him like a statue or a picture of him can drive a person mad.
Same goes for classic villains like Sauron, who does have a rather Lovecraftian feel to him sometimes. Yes, he had a specific motivation and character and all, but if you didn't know his backstory, you'd simply know that he's a being that was defeated and weakened, and all he needs to return to power is the One Ring. And again, the characters rarely actually encounter Sauron himself, and when they do they are left terrified and in shock. But the true terror of his character is the effect he has on other characters, not Sauron's character himself. What he turns his servants into and the lengths they are willing to go to resurrect him.
I'd have Cthulu as a cosmic entity. As the game progresses, you see Cthulu approaching from space, slowly getting larger and larger, and the game world and characters becoming ever more terrified of what it will do.
Eventually, he gets close enough to affect the world itself, storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, have him devastate the world, just by being near it, Cromulon style.
So the game has you building an army, or amassing weapons, preparing in some way to challenge this titanic creature, who's head alone can span the horizon, a feat seemingly impossible.
You build up the challenge, develop the threat, have the player anticipating the end game battle, even have the player gear up, they're ready for this fight, and it will be epic!
B..u..t.. then Cthulu just carries on, floats on past our tiny blue marble, not even throwing us a cursory glance, never even registering the attacks if the game even lets you go for the kill.
Throw in a good vs. evil plot on the planets surface, disguised as a secondary plot, or side missions, and you've got a game. Better yet, you have a perfect excuse for your player character to become the most powerful entity on the planet, Ala most games, yet still powerless before Cthulu.
I think your subconsciously describing the majority of Majora's Mask lol
from what I've heard, I wish I wasn't saying this, but I've never played it
just imagine how yog sothoth and azathoth are even more powerful than cthulhu. human race is for cthulhu what cthulhu is to azathoth.
yah, even though azathoth is not self aware.
Safwan Kazi yeah, that nigga's dumb as a door knob lol
he/it is almost like a dark parody of the christian god.
kalel abud Well Cthulhu would see them as more of his Elders, while we see Cthulhu has our present danger.
Evi1M4chine It's Nyarlathotep and he's just a trickster and loves manipulating humanity.
This was my first extra credits video! I came back to it a year later and it’s still as good as I remember!
All right new rule: whenever devs use Cthulhu poorly we just call him Zoidberg.
From what it seems, the only game that got Cthulhu done right is Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
WackyModder84
:SPOILERS:
Half of the game is an uninspired shooter, and in the end you blow Dagon away with a battleship. That's pretty much the opposite of a good Lovecraft game - which is a shame, because for the first half of the game, the player really is completely defenceless as he descends rapidly into madness.
Lee Coffill
You're comparing Dagon to Cthulhu, dude.
Dagon is just the Father of the Deep Ones.
Cthulhu is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BALLGAME from Dagon.
Dagon & Hydra actually can actually BLEED, because they're basically just Giant Deep Ones.
Cthulhu cannot. He's some Next-Level Shit.
WackyModder84 Also, you said they did CTHULHU right.
You never specified anything else.
This is good on your part. Good lawyer skill.
WackyModder84 Meh, of what I know about Lovecraftian Lore, Dagon and the Giant Deep Ones, despite being able to be bleed, be killed, so on, have the capacity to comprehend Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones. So, it makes me wonder how it can be depicted that humans can comprehend the Giant Deep Ones, and even in some cases harm them, but we cannot comprehend that which the Giant Deep Ones can, so the Great Old Ones, despite being very real to the Giant Deep Ones, are so incomprehensible that they are nothing more than a 'figment' of our imagination that has the capacity to do more harm to us than any 'figment' we could ever encounter.
Lee Coffill They still got Cthulhu right. You look at a statue of it for too long, your character goes insane and kills himself. No matter that the game was a bug riddled mess. Also they got the Shoggoth somewhat right. run away from it as it crushes the vent behind you.
Flash forward 6 years from now: Call of Duty Space Soldiers in Space, the War on Insanity
+Dogyphil would play that
+Dogyphil Call of Duty Space Soldiers in Space, the War on Insanity prank (gone wrong) (gone sexual)
+Joseph Dipalo The Zombies map, Shadows of Evil, is based on Lovecraftian creatures.
The thing about cthulu is its sheer monstrosity. It's like "I have no mouth and must scream " you have no hope at all, it's existence is so other worldly, so uncomprehendingly powerful that everything you do means nothing and that the fact that you got this far is purely by eldritch design. You are there because they want you to be. And you will die because it is their design and you will fail. That is what cthulu is.
How exactly can a non-physical idea be rammed with a ship?
+Ryosuke The Lord Of Anemones Cthulhu is an actual being, but what it and all the others in the mythos represent is often looked over, and their relegated to just big monsters.
A Disappointed Horse Yeah but Fred's missing brother here said specificly that videogames were doing Lovecraft wrong because Cthulhu was an idea. An idea that can be rammed with a ship.
The whole aspect of the "mythos" is just fanfiction. It wasn't even written by Lovecraft at all, it's just August Derleth's immagining of Lovecraft's work.
As far as I understand the Cthulhu that exists in the physical world is just the portion of the being that is knowable by humans. Cthulhu exists on a wider dimensional scale than us which is why he can lie dreaming whilst his physical body is dead, I think Lovecraft was trying to illustrate this with the unknowable dimensions of the door which contained him.
***** I think you're taking the 'Cthulhu Fhtagn' thing a little litterally. Cthulhu isn't actually dead, on any level.
***** "In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming" does appear as a quote a lot in the Call of Cthulhu, but it's not quite that literal.
It's just another of those mad-sounding phrases that Lovecraft throws out a lot. Same as "that is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange aeons even death may die".
It's a very good point, but I think Cthulhu isn't a great example from the mythos (aside from the fact his name is the most widely recognized). Cthulhu was a fairly "ordinary" entity. The Elder Things weren't much intimidated by him, and he got his head knocked in by a yacht, for pete's sake. He was basically Lovecraft's Godzilla, a warning that nature contains things that will mess mankind up, but not especially uncanny. Cthulhu NOTICED humans and antagonized them, quite unlike the way humans ignore eyelash mites. The time-travelling Great Race were much more of an existential threat, or Azatoth the primordial, relentless chaos. But always remember that Lovecraft's foremost terror was miscegenation. Race-mixing scared him more than anything, the old bigot.
+steveasat2 not necessarily, it scared the people who would read his stories, so he included it to creep them out. whether or not he personally agreed, I have no clue
+696190 Fair point, but from what I've read, Lovecraft was pretty bigoted against some groups. While occasionally positive about Hispanics and Jews, his wife was Jewish; his comments on African Americans an Irish Catholics were pretty viscous. Oddly, a lot of his views changed in regards to people he viewed as "well assimilated" individuals. Now, early on in the late 1800s/early 1900s, his views were not abnormal, but what sticks out is that his views remained constant even after much of public precept had begun to evolve.
+steveasat2 I'm so glad to have found someone in the comments who has *actually F-ing read Lovecraft*. Cthulhu was a real creature, and he was kind of a chump. (a madness inducing chump, to be sure, but he was killed by 1 dude in a boat)
+spenny Well, to be fair to the big guy, his head was reforming so he was likely going to shake it off like a lucky punch...but yeah, just the fact he could be inconvenienced by it puts him on a level that belies the video's premise. More to the point, he had a HOUSE. Pan didn't have a house. The gravitational constant doesn't have a house. Maybe a good argument could be made that what triggers horror in us is more like the "uncanny valley" - something that is right on the eerie border between a concept and an entity. If Chthlhu were also described as the cause of dreaming itself, that would be suitably humbling, I think.
+steveasat2 I want to preface this by saying that I agree wholeheartedly that Cthulhu isn't the best example of what they're talking about in this video. Cthulhu isn't the most 'pure' example of the unknowable horror of the mythos nor, as you said, the most powerful being within it (for me the Call of Cthulhu story sort of got ruined by all the build-up). But that's sort of why I think he works better than a lot of the other ones; The problem with a lot of the other Lovecraftian things is that they're entirely too unknowable to really put yourself in relation to in any meaningful way. It's kind of like trying to relate to the inevitable heat-death of the universe; It kinda sounds scary at first but worrying about it is just wasted energy and it's really far off anyway so who cares. I imagine eyelash mites would feel the same about people. ;) With Cthulhu the "horror" comes from the idea that we're trespassing mice trapped in a sleeping angry giant's larder, and mice are noticeable enough too have to be real careful not to draw attention to themselves.
Too bad he didnt do this episode after bloodborne came out
I was just going to say that
Mitchell Staley yeah it did lovecraftian horror spot on
Actually no, in this game not only you somehow understand, observe and fight the "Great Ones" on an equal level, you even become one your self
Though the game is marvelous, its like the rest of Miyazaki's creations, a collection of stories he didint quite understand and left us to fill in the pieces calling it "lore"
Which is wonderfull
But calling it "spot on lovecraftian horror" is wrong
NuCLeaR 22 I think bloodborne is pretty close. The player can only fight "great ones" by receiving blood transfusion, by taking upon themselves the cursed old blood of the great ones themselves, and become something other than human in the process. And the three endings of bloodborne (spoilers) I think support this. You either run away, finding your worth in the waking world, are subjugated by the moon presence to be the next host of the dream, or give up your humanity to be reborn as a great one, which the player has no influence over. While not perfect, it shows that no matter how badass a person you are, no human can actively stand against the great ones. You can sacrifice your freedom, give up the fight or abandon your humanity, but not win. Because a human can never win.
It's by no means a perfect "Cthulhu game" but it gets pretty darn close nonetheless.
seeing and fighting great one's makes you go insane in bloodborne and the only places where you can actually go toe to toe with any of them is within nightmares and dreams except for ebrietas and even in that case we just thought a left back remnant of a great one, never even being close to kill her completely since the augur of ebrietas, a spell within the game, supposedly summons tiny parts of ebrietas and is still usable after defeating her. so we only fight manifestations of great ones on different levels of reality to rid these planes of their nightmares. and even if you manage to become what is thought of as a great one in the end, i'm pretty sure you just replace the moon presence's manifestation within the hunter's dream, useless to really do anything yourself, picked up by a doll, a creature thought to be much less powerful than just a regular human.
What about
Dark corners of the earth?
You "defeat" the avatar of Dagon and Hydra in this dimension
But
You didn't even see Cthulhu you just know that HE is there
And that HE is coming
If we get pass the bugs and add some patchs
Is the best adaptation of Cthulhu Mythos to videogames
BLOODBORNE.
They did it well, but they took inspiration from the oniric cycle, where the protagonists can achieve things, not the so called mythos. It also respects the ending rule (even though they scrapped a lot of late game things), so It's probably the only game that achieves killing eldrich gods without making them underpowered.
I don't think you can really achieve much in Bloodborne. Bloodborne is a power fantasy, but in the end the game turns it upside down, because it doesn't matter how strong you get, there is nothing you coul do, nothing really changes. By the end of the game Yharnam is no more, everyone there is either crazy, or dead, or became a beast. You may let Gherman sever your connection with the dream, you got the cure for your disease, and you can return to your home. Gherman promisses you that you will not remember anything, but that is not true. Djura and Eileen have been severed from the Hunter's Dream as well, and they still (albeit vaguely in Djura's case) remember dreaming. And still remember all the horror. So you are free to go, but can you really live with the memory of everything you did? Knowing of the eldritch horrors out there? And nothing changes. The second ending have you take the place of Gherman, becoming a mere puppet, the new surrogate child of the Moon Presence. That is the worse ending, you are now prisioner in the Hunter's Dream. And than there is the last ending, where you supposedly kill the Moon Presence and becomes a Great One. But what does it mean? You become something tha you (the player) can't even comprehend, completely devoid of eerything that made you human, and may very well, become the new Moon Presence. But is the Moon Presence really dead to begin with? The dream still exists, the Doll is still there and the Moon is still bright in the sky. There is a very interesting theory about that, that say that the Doll is a hypostasis of the Moon Presence, a face, just like the monster that came from the moon that you killed. If the Doll too is a manifestation of the Moon Presence, this ending may very well be the true victory for her: she finally have a true child, not a simple substitute like Gherman, but a true great one, just like her. You become something so fundamentally different that it may very well not beyourself anymore. Even if you really beat a Great One the implications is that overcaming eldricth horror means become eldritch horror. The Hunter, the city and humanity are doomed one way or another.
wow. that's deep. also A+ on your essay.
Thanks! Really glad you appreciate it! :D
ThePsychomancer. Goddamn, I want to play Bloodborne so much... I've been keeping myself unspoiled in the hope that one day I might play it. The problem is that I don't have a PS4 and I don't have the money to buy one.
Damn, Bloodborne sounds so good! Ah, Aiat.
I actually watched this at night. And it truly scared me.
Haha, idk how but I guess it could work.
TheCrazy Crew I’m pretty sure you haven’t payed attention too the video, Cthulhu isn’t a monster as you describe him.
and that music at the end...
That tentacled Bruce Springsteen and the narrator's helium-infused voice did it to me too.
Go watch “Bandersnatch” Black Mirror on Netflix
Well... I think Cthulhu himself is ironically a bad example for this sort of discussion. In the original story the protagonist knocked Cthulhu out by hitting him in the head with the Alert. It wasn't "inconsequential" and it did damage. The Outer Gods like Nyarlathotep and Azathoth are more on the level you're talking about.
Hermaeus Mora seems pretty obviously inspired by Lovecraft’s aesthetic at least, and even though it’s very different, I think it works really well as a creepy eldritch monster. He is all knowing, not really an enemy or ally, and impossible to beat. Far far better than making such a thing the enemy.
What game has non-Euclidean geometry?
Antichamer
VPSantiago Call of Cthulhu Mario ROM Hack
Portal technically.
Euclidean
Tetris
I think Cthulhu doesn't and flat out can't work in a game in any form. I'm a heavy tabletop RPG gamer and I have a strong dislike for Cthulhu. Why? Because it goes against the very nature of RPGs, which is that no ending is written in stone.
In virtually every game of Cthulhu I've ever heard of, by the end, every character is either dead or mad. So you can never win. Now it's not the lack of winnability that bothers me, it's the fact that the end is determined before you begin. I never want to play a tabletop RPG where that is true.
That's not true. The entire point is that there is an end. The "end" however, is so vast, that you yourself are too unimportant to actually be placed in the grand scheme of things. No end is set in stone. Everything influences what happens to characters around you, just as your actions do in the real world. A truly cosmic end, just as in our own universe, will never involve beings as inconsequential as us.
kaidar12 Alright, I can accept that. But it doesn't change my point that in EVERY tabletop RPG version of Cthulhu, the characters all enter the game with the players knowing that every one of them will die, go mad, or at best, run away.
That doesn't sound very heroic to me. I don't mind trying and failing, but I dislike the notion that succeeding isn't even possible.
I love role playing games, I play 2-3 times every week. But I can't enjoy CoC very much, because of this.
you're one of those people that wont see a movie when you know the ending arn't you?
i can go into most movies (and games for that matter), FULLY aware of how its going to end, hell most movies spell it out from the get go, but i watch to see HOW they reach the end, to see the paths taken and obstacles overcome as opposed to whether they win or not
Khelvera A movie (or a book) is not an interactive experience? Do you feel that when you sit down to play an RPG that the plot and ending should be known in advance?
I'd rather much of that emerged from the players decisions and choices.
Even as a GM, I certainly prefer not knowing how the game will end before it starts.
Sooo tabletop RPG are about winning? Damn i always think it is about playing a role and geting the story, to experience it. Not to win something. Hell who win?! GM? PC? NPC?
You venture under the sea in your vessel you see a ginourmous green squid like humanoid
"Fire torpedoes" rolls a d20
"Nat 20!" They exclaim.
"Miss" the Dm said
Cthulhu uses Crushing Fist.
GAME OVER
Totally agree. But... In the book "montains of madness", there is a mention of a conflict between cthulu and the primordials. And they didn't win, but managed to spare some land and keep cthulu's forces at bay. Somehow...
It's not just "At the Mountains of Madness", but a number of Lovecraft's stories from the era that revealed other bits of that narrative told from different points of view: "The Shadow Out of Time", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Thing on the Doorstep", "The Mound" - Lovecraft had found his stride in what he called "Weird Fiction", and was using it as a vehicle for describing vast epochs of impersonal time in which many great and terrible alien civilizations rose up, one after the other, each in their time on earth, before decadence and decay and entropy and nature wore each in its turn down and left only ghost-haunted crumbling ruins.
To Lovecraft, it was one level of bleakness to conceive of a universe where human beings are one of the less important beings to exist, and an entirely different level of bleakness to add on top of that the idea that the Star Spawn of Cthulhu, the Great Race of Yith, the Deep Ones, the Shoggoths, the Elder Things, the Mi-Go, and all the other hellish aliens - as powerful and ancient and wise and immortal as they were - were really no more significant than mankind, and no more immune to the ravages of time. And so, human beings have simply inherited an old an indifferent universe from far older and greater beings, and will rise and fall in their brief human time, before being replaced in their turn by much greater and more important races in their time.
Notably, the human race goes extinct in a manner too horrible and too humiliating for Lovecraft's narrators to describe, only to be replaced by a far more successful "coleopterous" race that essentially descended from cockroaches possessed by the ghosts of a race of alien vegetables to rule earth far longer and far more wisely than man did, only to be replaced in their turn by a final race of giant spiders that ruled Earth's final, freezing days as the sun's death progresses to the point where earth's surface is at last uninhabitable, driving the spiders deeper and deeper into earth's "horror-filled core" before the Earth's end.....
So yeah, various sorts of weird horrors ruled earth before humanity, and saw their civilizations rise to great heights before losing steam and seeing decay set in, until at last each race saw the ravages of time take its toll on them, and forced them to retreat and surrender from younger horrors that likewise could only claim to be rulers of earth for an all too short time before their times each came to an end. It's part of Lovecraft's philosophy: if Great Cthulhu and its immortal race of hellish titans could not live and rule forever, then what hope does mere man have of any significance in the universe?
I think bloodborne has no doubt been the best action game to focus on lovecraft, gotta love From
DrManiac and darkest dungeon the best rpg
Stijn Verhagen definitely. While I have a slight gripe with the randomness of the difficulty, it fits the concept of a lovecraftian game perfectly
Meh. In both of those games the hero ultimately CAN have an effect, though. That's so unlovecraftian that it's absurd. It's impossible to truly defeat the evil or save the world, but it is possible to fight back and win against the forces set against you. That's just not Lovecraft.
***** I agree with you there, I don't really like that you can kill great old ones in bloodborne, it's pretty stupid. On the other hand, the endings all reinforce that you never reeally win, the night continues regardless. There's even an easteregg where upon starting a new game, the waifu doll stands up from the grave your previous character was buried in, as if to say that you're just doing the same futile thing again
Anthony Bowman or the hero (or the player) MAY think that he or she had an effect on the world. Bloodborne's story is (like any other From Soft game) very open to interpretation. If you think there are good/bad endings in Bloodborne, I'll say that's just your interpretation. To me, the game lefts the player in oblivion about the ending. I've beaten it enough times to see each ending, and I can't point out a good/bad/neutral ending among them. I feel that just fits very well with the Lovecraftian theme.
Bloodborne did it good.
Mr. Nobody Forever Bloodborne is actually a great example. You gain insight, which reveals more about the true nature of the world to you, but it's implied that insight drives you insane, it makes the game harder, and it literally fills the inside of your head with eyes. There are Great Ones, which resemble the Old Ones of Lovecraft lore, and you fight a few things that you think are Great Ones, but of the ones you kill, one is a defenseless infant, not even born properly, one is an artificial attempt to create a Great One, one is the stillborn child of a dead Great One, and one is simply a powerful creature that exists in the same realm as the Great Ones. You only fight one true Great One, and only after consuming three thirds of a Great One's umbilical cord, turning you yourself into an infant Great One, and thus fulfilling the Great One's plans to create more of their kind. And really, no matter what ending you get, the Great Ones still win.
This is pretty deep man
The creators said that Bloodborne was specifically designed around to only the plague but of hopelessness. That no matter how hard you try, no matter how many things you kill no matter who you take, you can’t save them. They all go insane, turn into monsters, kill each other or wander off and die. In the end you can’t even save yourself and you are given three choices, move on and forget what you’ve seen living your life as if it was just a nightmare, die and struggle to stop the terror, or give into the plans of the Great Ones. You can fight or struggle all you want but you can’t win and everyone loses.
I’m not good with words but what you and all the replies say. Well said
luke marshall that is basically me on youtube and facebook.
"I can't put it to words,but I totally agree with you!"
A game where all your choices didn't matter, no matter what you decided to do...
So, the greatest Cthulhu game is Mass Effect 3? Why did none of us realize this before?!
The tabletop Call of Cthulhu does this very well. They give Cthulhu stats, but not so players can fight him, rather to show how insignificance they are.
A interesting game concept and something incredibly difficult to sucessfully pull off. I would say cuthulu is what a lot of horror games try to pull off but mostlu fail.
In other words, to do Cthulhu right, you have to make Spec Ops: The Line.
Companies want good selling games more than they want good games. People want affirmation more than they want a deep philosophical Lovecraft experience. They're not doing it wrong, they just have different priorities.
Just so. And while such games may not appeal to Lovecraft purists out there, Lovecraft purists are a very tiny portion of the market. In fact - and they ought to appreciate the coincidence here - they are an _insignificant_ part of the market. Lovecraft is already niche, and most Lovecraft fans are not purists. I'm a fan myself, but certainly no purist.
Gilmaris I personally play a lot of casual games, but i do enjoy a more sophisticated gaming experience from time to time. A shame that's not where the money is, because this whole existential horror thing sounds kind of intruiging. My only knowledge of lovecraft comes from Hellboy, i've never read any of his books or played any of the games.
Isaac Plumbo I'm just a casual Lovecraft fan myself, and I have a love/hate relationship to his writing. I love the mood he sets, I love the setting, but his writing is extremely heavy. The only one of his stories I managed to read in a single sitting is The White Ship, which is just over three pages long. Let's face it, his writing is boring, and yet there is something about it I like. And he is not remotely scary. Perhaps he was once, but times have changed - we have long come to terms with how insignificant we are in the universe as a whole, and the cosmic unknown is the least of our modern worries.
In my opinion, the most accurate portrayal of Cthulhu in a game is in Break a Leg. In this game, you have to feed a baby uranium until it grows into a giant, then you feed the giant baby to Cthulhu. You have to do this three times until the baby actually ends up eating Cthulhu.
All of this is said, and I agree that this would make a really cool idea, but I hear lack of control and choice, and that gets me thinking: Would people understand the subtlety of this fear? Or would they simply get mad and call the game "linear", accusing the game of not having any meaningful choices? Would people understand that the whole idea of Cthulu is being so insignificant that anything and everything that you do is meaningless to the point that you'd be better off not doing it? It would definitely make hardcore H.P. Lovecraft fans happy, but what about everyone else? It's not even a matter of people buying the game, it's people respecting your decision to do this to a game revolving around Cthulu, and understanding why you chose this path instead of having choice in this game.
Well, the answer to that is "It's really the matter of how well you execute it."
Many great games with very unique mechanics could have been incredibly bad if the execution had been bad, and the problematic, broken mechanics of many bad games might have actually been strengths if they'd been done better. Many great games with unique mechanics probably sounded terrible on paper when first conceived, but people with vision made them work. And conversely, many games that sounded great on paper fell short because they just couldn't follow through with it.
It would certainly require a good designer and people who had the talent to execute it well, but I think it absolutely could work.
Goblin Rat I agree. Design with enough talent behind it can make anything seem good. But, to me, at least, people would still get mad that the choices made have no real effect, whether or not it's central to the game. My best example of this is BioShock Infinite. You are given a few choices in the game, and the game never even mentioned having meaningful choices in the game, but people still got mad, as the choices made, such as the Bird or the Cage had no effect on the game whatsoever. In Wolfenstein The New Order, you are given a choice to save two characters, and even though the game never boasted having meaningful choices in the game, people were still mad that such a choice existed, even if the choice made had some sort of effect. Imagine a game in which you must make decisions, but the decision you make has no actual meaningful outcome, and you were frequently reminded of that. Most people do not understand the subtlety of Cthulu. Hell, I didn't before seeing this video. No one will understand why this decision was made, and simply write it off as bad game design.
ryallenquake
Hmh. You might be right. If nothing else, Cthulhu's modern status as more or less OH LOOK A BIG ICKY MONSTER IT EATS CITIES (as well as Lovecraft's status as "Something nasty from beyond eats your face, and we mistakenly think that's the scary part") would probably make it even harder. You would probably have to use something that's not exactly Cthulhu. Something that's just a similar kind of a cosmic horror whose very existence means that all you know about this world is absolutely wrong and you cannot actually even understand the universe in any way. And even then, that might not be enough to differentiate.
But then, I can think of one big control-robbing moment in a game that was actually lauded as a very brilliant sequence. Back in Modern Warfare, the first one, that Big Moment (which anyone who played it probably immidiately knows) absolutely took control away from you, and more or less forced a failure state on you. People really liked that, but it might be that it was the shock more than anything. Might just be that you still got to play afterwards and it didn't actually take away your ability to win.
Eh, it's a difficult subject. You'd have to find a really strong way to do it, and a really strong place to begin.
Goblin Rat I do remember part of that scene, but I never made it out of the helicopter. To this day, I don't know what was outside of it. I crawled towards the opening, but backed away because I thought that I would die if I did. I died in the copter. It was boring.
They'd complain alright. Gamer's don't want meaning, they want to play a game.
The whole idea of the Cthulhu Mytos is that we as human race are unable to even comprehend the power of the Cthulhu, even less fight it.
They actually did a pretty good job fighting the power of Cthulhu in "The Call of Cthulhu"... I mean, the attack with the boat made Cthulhu decide to just go back to sleep again, and I'd say that constitutes a successful attempt at fighting him.
why can't you play as him instead? id play that.
store.steampowered.com/app/107310/Cthulhu_Saves_the_World/
@@KonoNana it's called Scribblenauts.
You can: it sounds like every "god sim sandbox game" ever, when played "wrong"....
Not that any of us have designed Sim-City cities as toxic hell-holes with nightmare traffic tied up on non-Euclidean streets, or spent hours pulling ladders out of Sims swimming pools for the laughs....
In Bloodborne, you can secretly play as Cthulu...
You, puny human, play as Cthulhu? Come on...
Production Manager: How many spoilers do you want in this video?
The Writer: Yes
You're missing a point about satisfaction from shooting Cthulhu in the face.
U-wah-ahah.
Even if you survive, you could still be haunted for life.