This video has consumed my life for 5 months. Please give it a like 🥺🥺 EDIT: Thank you for 50k views! ALSO, I have multiple videos lined up that are very similar to this style and format, so stay tuned!! 🧡
My theory; The Player is part of this extradimensional species. The player character was born and raised outside of the species domain and when they learn about this ancestry they travel to Bleakstead in search of answers. This is why some of the humanoid characters appear as white noise but also say "You're finally here" as if they were expecting you. Because the player is of the same species as them the player can identify them and tell them apart from normal humans, the two female characters in the hotel room. It's also why at the end you're greeted with "Welcome Home" as if you've been absent for a time and why you can't read the runes but can absorb their meaning by touching them and why the player character doesn't seem too bothered by weird rituals, bleeding rocks and a camera exposing invisible monuments.
This goes really well with a lot of early Lovecraft type work too. Returning to a 'home' you didn't know was your home and being fearful until you realize this is how it's supposed to be is a very common theme. Shadow over Innsmouth being the most popular example. (Whether you've gone mad to realize that or realized it because you are also a fishman or something is a bit of a deeper topic but still a theme.)
@@Fuzduf I also don't think there's some timeline merger going on. If Bleakstead is rural Arizona then it's completely believable that it's not a priority for the advancement of infrastructure and goods. The TVs and radio are old because it's what they had when it was built and they just haven't gone to get newer models. The laptop is from outside the town so it's obvious that it would be "modern", also the white noise on the TVs is something specific to Cathode Ray sets(CRTVs), newer LCD/LED and the like TVs quite literally CAN'T do that because the white noise screen is an artifact of the Cathode Ray Tubes used. Also to send you deeper into the Lovecraft rabbit hole; H.P.Lovecraft's works were inspired by The King in Yellow written by Robert W. Chambers. This inspiration is very prevalent in his stories and Lovecraft effectively copied Chambers' "method of only vaguely referring to supernatural events, entities, and places, thereby allowing his readers to imagine the horror for themselves."
Just to note, this story is fairly similar to a scenario called Blackwater Creek from the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG. A small town forms around this river with magical healing properties, which taints the land and people around it. It turns out to be secreted from an avatar of a fertility goddess (Shub Nigurath). I think you might be onto something with the Cthulhu great old ones theory
I was gonna say, this whole thing sounds a lot like a Shub-Niggurath cult in the Arizona Desert that has consumed a town to the point everyone has returned to the "source" - that being the Black Goat-Mother of a Thousand Young. Hence the "welcome home" at the end and the land literally being this thing's flesh. Shubby's a weird eldritch abomination to use in a Mythos story but I'm really glad She's getting more attention! She has tons of potential for body horror, sexual horror, gender-related horror, and all sorts of weird cosmic stuff. A very underappreciated Lovecraft creation IMHO.
@@ThePhantomSafetyPinIsnt wilbur from his dunwich horror (sorry it's been 10 years since I read all his stories and I only read them once so I might confuse the names) story a child of the black goat? That one could have easily become a movie or a short horror game like dago. I recently found out there are some lovecraft stories turned into manga books, I really need to get some of them when I have money again
I just wanna say that they really nailed down the pacing of Eldritch horror. You could easily dismiss alot of this as just weird stuff for the sake of weird stuff, but digging just below the surface reveals inner workings that tangles your mind up as you try to unravel the info. They never relish in the dread or melodrama, they let the implication carry the tension. A real love letter to the genre.
has no one mentioned that the rocks might be from the mountain range, said rocks originating from the matriarch of dirt, being that it was once her body, given that the rocks bleed, it is safe to say that they worship the rocks, because are the matriarch's literal flesh.
Concerning that picture at the beginning, I feel reminded of that meme where it's a shadow person with the text "I forgor" and a person made of light with the text "I rember"
Just a random guess, but maybe the reason why most stuff is from the 70s is just that people can't/won't leave the town, the women are probably "out of towners" like you, bringing the games from outside, as did the photographer. This would probably imply that wherever caused the trade with the outside to stop relatively recently tho, but anything that's mentioned in the story seems quite a lot... Older (or perhaps the town was built in the 70s after the highway and never had a real outside trade since then) The food has to be imported tho... Is the cherry pie important? Am I overthinking it? Idk
DUDE, when I first decided to make the video, I cut a lot of details like that out because I didn't know if talking about cherry pie for 5 minutes was a good idea or not 😭 Also, all the buildings except for the Motel have sinks. Which obviously mean they have/had running water. So where's the water coming from?...
Welp- there are "explanations" the town that was reall probably was built in 70s, before people left or it disapeared due to proximity. There's already a trail of "things not being as they seem" so the cherry pie might not be a pie at all, nor made from actual cherries .
Honestly I had the same opinion, it’s very possible that this is just an old fashioned kind of town with people travelling through it. Im 100% on board with the two women also being interlopers, afterall this is a motel, someone would be staying in it.
@@jakehood806it's funny because nyarlatoteph canonically can be on places like Elden Ring, Dusk, Warhammer, Remnant 2, some random horny Anime and more without messing up with the "Canon" nyarlatoteph just cares about delivering messages when it haves to and messing (horrifically or just funny) with conscious life forms, no matter age, time or reality
Laptops, tube tvs, antique radio, real newspapers, vending machines, mechanical cash registers, brown interior decor... dude that was the 90s. I was 4-14 during the 90s, they were my whole childhood, and the mash of old clunky things and new gadgets is everything I remember. Digital typewriters, the email will take too long I'll just fax it, I gotta get off the phone line to do either though so I'll call you on my car phone. Do you wanna play Atari or Playstation? That was the 90s
I'm barely over 30sec into the video and I'm already terrified. either you're messing with us or this game truly is some kind of deeply cursed eldritch abomination because there is no way someone actually found what they were looking for on tumblr without the involvement of some dark power beyond human comprehension
Another MAJOR component of Eldritch horror is that you come to understand, if only for a moment, two things: 1: there are things so much more advanced and more intelligent then humans in the universe that our desires and needs, the very basic things needed for life as we know it, no longer apply to them. ( Best conveyed in the most famous poem, And with strange eons even death may die) 2: that our placement and understanding of the universe is flawed so fundamentally wrong that how everything actually works is wholly incompatibe with what we call science and knowlede, and those that actually understand the universe can mold and manipulate reality with simple thought.
A good comparison i heard for eldrich horror is akin to a photo of a mouse that electrocuted itself by accidentally completeing a live circuit with its paws. One day, through no fault of its own, the mouse encountered something it had no possibility to understand and no means to grasp what it was doing. One moment he was searching for food or shelter and then he was dead. Replace the mouse with humanity and the circuit with forbidden knowledge. You now have the ultimate ending for those who seek to know more than what they can understand.
@@FuzdufOh no no, the creature in your thumbnail looks like an old video game character that's an earthworm named Jim. It's a silly fun game so seeing your thumbnail had me thinking it was talking about how EJ is the scariest game ever made 😂 Maybe I'm getting too old and my references don't hire as much anymore 💀
You’ve just earned yourself a subscriber. This was one of the best breakdowns of a lovecraftian horror game I’ve seen on UA-cam. The Nyarlothothep thumbnail immediately piqued my interest and I was not let down. Also if you’re looking for more games like this, kitty horrorshow’s games are extremely similar thematically and visually, you ought to give them a try :D
In old mythology (f.e Norse) the world was crafted out of the corpse of a giant (Ymir) I'm not entirely sure if other mythologies do this to but it reminded me of that :) I also think the cherry pie is a reference to twin peaks ;)
Yeah even older is Tiamat, the sumerian primordial serpent goddess of chaos mother of monsters, slain by Marduk and split into the sky and earth. Also the Greek Titans kinda.
its a common theme in mythology and creation stories in general, the land being created out of some primordial being, like geb and nut from egyptian mythology or the others mentioned.
Nice to see someone appreciating Valerie's games! I love her stuff. I'd highly suggest checking out Kitty Horrorshow's works. They're nowhere near the same, but some of the vibes are a bit similar in some games and her stuff is really just worth checking out, or maybe a video if you're intrgued enough. I really suggest Ghost Lake, Seven Days, Decommissioned City #65 (unfinished and on her Patreon, but there's still a lot of interesting stuff there.), Tenement, Black Marble Complex (Patreon-only), ANATOMY, Exclusion Zone (and Actias. I feels very slightly connected to me, but that's just a theory), Tin (Patreon), The Sieve of the Moon (Patreon), Needlerust (Patreon), Hornets and Monastery (in that order), Spine (Patreon. This one really knocks around in my head), Dust-Of-Her-Mouth (Patreon), Rain House Eternity and Garden Shape Eternity (the latter is on Patreon. and in RHE, after (without spoiling) entering the door, you need to relaunch the game.), Leechbowl, Pente, Wraithshead Gardens (Patreon), Amalia (Patreon), Factory (this one's a bitch to navigate. There's 7 places you need to find though, if I'm not misremembering. Also on Patreon), Dust City, Scarlet Bough, Sunset Spirit Steel, and Roads. ...Okay that was way too many names, BUT pick and choose the ones that sound interesting. All of her games are worth a play, really. Anything not mentioned being on Patreon is somewhere on her itchio, and a lot of them are in her Haunted Cities collections. AND. Know that some of these games just... don't have an "ending" and you need to close the game yourself. Some of them will close on their own, others you need to relaunch when they close, and some you just need to explore until you think you've found everything and then close it yourself.
@Courage_The_Cowardly_Dog thank you so much😭😭 Also I love courage the cowardly dog! I REALLY want to make a video on the cartoon sometime down the road
What I feel when I look at that picture is, "Hey, you. You're finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there."
I'm not sure why the thought of 70's technology being dominant in a deep rural town in the 2000's leads to thoughts of extra-dimensional shenanigans, its pretty common for deep rural towns like the one shown in the game to only have modern tech coming from the very few people that come into town
26:22 _"That doesn't make any sense"_ he said after leaving the masked spirit's encounter, on his quest bestowed from the whispers of those made of TV static.
Great video! I love finding new indie games, both horror and not, and the wild theory section was a great addition to the already mysterious little world of Bleakstead. Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
The Elder Scrolls references honestly make sense, throughout this whole thing I was getting Morrowind vibes. It could just be the visual style, but something about it reminds me so much of the architecture, atmosphere and lore of Daedric Ruins - which are WAY creepier when you actually go into them, by the way. Google doesn't do them justice.
Well, I guess the answer as to why he makes it out that way lies somewhere in the first 20 minutes of the video where he says "Maybe this is where I will finally get jumpscared". As someone who gets really unnerved by the sound of static I absolutely get how the game would build tension for me. And also, lets be honest... much more people will click "the most terrifying horror game" over "a pretty okay horror game."
Dude your pc background is a... screenshot from Mass effect 1? Thats my favourite game from all time. I love the exploration sistem. This make me feel nostalgic, your screenshot is amazing. I would like to have kt
I…I do not see what you saw. It was one of those "add filter to hide the graphics" kinda game. And the story seemed, well, to be really honest, bad. But good to see that you enjoyed it! Not being sarcastic here, not everyone likes the same games. :D
Man, I didn't expect so little views! This video is underrated. Your voice is quite intresting, I found it very soothing and easy to listen to. Keep up good work!
Yeah, I agree tbh. I respect highly edited videos, but I also think sometimes they lose authenticity bc of that. But if I'm being real, I had to make a compromise with the editing intensity bc I work a full-time job. It would've taken even longer to make
I think this is the first time I've seen one of your videos, and I really enjoyed both your story and theorycrafting. This is my positive comment to appease the almighty algorithm :3 PS- as someone who's been semi-aware of Lovecraft for quite some time, I think you did a good job of giving us a short and sweet Lovecraft 101 course.
@GoobsNYC I really, really, really appreciate that compliment. Before I released the video, I was so self-conscious about the pacing of the vid. And I was like "well its been 5 months already, i need to just get this damn thing done already." 😂
12:00 I’ve been to rural motels that for one reason or another never borthered to upgrade their tv’s. I’ve seen this as recently as a few years ago. Edit: just in general there’s lots of places(especially in America) that seems lost to time. For one reason or another there metaphorical healing rivers dried up many years ago. People stopped visiting many moved away and thoese who remain are old and slowly dying off. These communities are often poor with little income and all the old people have dated tastes leaving the towns look like there stuck several decades in the past. It’s an interesting but deeply existential thing to see in person. I over all like your theory but I’ll say I think the time line is linear
Holy cow i have never been this interested in Lovecraftian Horror or even the Cthulhu mythos outside of popular media. And I've never watch a long ass video without getting bored since ages so i would definitely subscribe to you if you do more of this type of content
@Politictrolerandenthusiast I plan too! It was loads of fun putting it all together! The only downside was that with such a big project, it became difficult to manage at some points while working a full-time job as well. (Also, the reason why it took 5 months to complete). But I plan on quitting my job thus winter, so more content like this is on the way!
I know exactly what's going on here, it's clear as day to me: This is a cosmic horror tale in the vein of Lovecraft, Campbell, and Twin Peaks with maybe some shades of True Detective in there. I'd bet my copy of the Necronomicon on it that this is a very specific eldritch entity and very specific thing going on, here's what I think happened: Bleakstead was an Arizonian mining town that, sometime in the 1970's, dug too deep and uncovered an ancient Eldritch thing. This thing happened to be Shub-Niggurath, also called the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, but She's half asleep here like many cosmic entities on earth are. She doesn't realize the humans above Her have found Her. Mining however, wounded Her and so now, her blood and flesh taint the area around Bleakstead, offcast from being injured. These things create the abominations you see around you like the bleeding rocks and the blood river. The humans then began having odd auditory hallucinations, hearing Her whispering in the wind, and these whispers tell them to come home to Her. Bleakstead therefore started to slowly grow more and more obsessed with this Earth-Mother figure, to the point they became as corrupted as the land around them and went mad, and one by one they all went to Join her in the mountains, facilitated by the old woman - actually a priestess of Shub-Niggurath. Soon the town was nearly empty save a few people. But the Mother remains, waiting, and those who go too far on the bus line and end up in Bleakstead end up in Her sphere of influence. That's also why the timelines are fucked, because timespace is warped by the presence of an eldritch entity. Some people have a more sensitive nature to this call, just like in Innsmouth in Lovecraft's story, and go there on purpose. Your character is one of these people who followed this call, ended up in Bleakstead, and eventually returned to the Mother. They have some aspect in their blood or minds that makes them susceptible to Her, just like in Shadow Over Innsmouth with the people who have the Innsmouth Look in their bloodlines being drawn towards Devil's Reef. Your character is here looking for the Mother, they just don't realize it until they start looking around. The static images you see aren't people, they're memories of people. The Mother took their bodies, only the spirits remain, and they are able to help you also "ascend" this way... because that was always your destiny, wasn't it? That's why you don't leave and why you just start asking around. You're here because on some level, you followed a call and you want to find its source. You heard the Whispering and can't stand it anymore. This... is your resolution.
I really appreciate the words of encouragement!!! And I'll never stop making videos! This is something I want to do for the rest of my life, no doubt. Even if I can't earn a livable income 💀
Isn't it strange how the runes at the altar and pyramid are written in first person "we", but the runes at the spires are written in the third person "they"?
It’s extremely common for poor areas to still use outdated appliances for decades after it existed. I was born in 96 and I knew a few households that still had tvs like that. Tech standardization is a very new occurrence.
While I can't exactly fault you as an outsider, especially since I'm mostly one myself, also being merely a fan, I would say very few creators *directly* intend their work to actually take place within the Cthulhu Mythos. They're more allusions to that style. To the *concept* of Old Gods. While some authors closer to Lovecraft's era did, like Robert Bloch and August Delerth, nowadays, thanks to some copyright issues with specific iterations of the mythos (like the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game, among others), as well as just time and...well, Lovecraft being racist as Hell, most people prefer to simply build off the core ideas, rather than connect to Lovecraft's works directly. Most of the work that still does sticks mostly to prose, rather than games or movies. So I doubt any direct connection like you posit was intended by Valerie.
I talked to her after the video was mostly finished. She said she was somewhat inspired by lovecraft's works. However, she was mostly inspired by the entire idea of the cosmic horror genre itself and wanted it to be very vague and open-ended. So yeah, you're correct!
I'm sorry to say but thanks to the pose and the dialogue starting with "YOU'RE FINALLY-", my first feeling upon seeing that image was not loneliness, curiosity, despair, OR sadness, but embarrassed amusement at finding I'd read the dialogue in the Skyrim Nord voice in my head... 🙈
@Fuzduf I saw either Alpha Beta Gamer or Manly Badass Hero or some other channel play it and I don't remember much besides the fact the memory reminded me heavily of Pathologic and Paratopic(please check this out its short and really well put together) with how dreamlike and surreal the environment and atmosphere was and it alway stuck with me, even made a reddit post(something I never do) describing a desert town but got no responses to it but I've actually found it now
around 36:40 I started noticing the bg music and it didn't hit me until about 37 min where i HAD to go back as well as check the description to see if i was right or delusional and for that my good sir i feel like you deserve a double or a triple like from me (but since you can't like a video more than once i decided to write it as a comment) ps, i'm so glad i'm not the only one who goes through game objects dating them like crazy in order to figure out the timeline :33
Just because something is inspired by Lovecraft and cosmic horror does not whatsoever mean that it's in the Cthulhu Mythos. This looks like an entirely original work with no connection to preestablished lore. It's entirely its own setting. The term "Old Ones" or "Great Ones" or "Great Old Ones" or "Outer Gods" and so on and so forth are used and reused throughout media to describe similar entities or related concepts that were inspired by Lovecraft's work, but they aren't necessarily set in that same setting. Plenty of works are like that.
Im only about halfawy through the video right now, so it may be brough up later, but i feel like the static fuzz NPC's are those statue people.like they're people who have come before you to enter the heart of the mountain and "come home" as the statue dudes say at the end of the game. Kindof a shadow over insmouth type deal
your interpretation is really well formulated and a very interesting analysis, I do think you went way deeper than the author though. the story I got was that you play as a traveler possessed by the dirt mother during her reincarnation. you have visions of static-y figures from past worshippers that appear to you as you become more and more the dirt mother. eventually her ritual is complete and you have been fully possessed; she is home
I will say that I think deep analysis of indie horror games is oftentimes wasted. The reason is that a lot of horror projects don't have that much effort put into them, as it's an old technique for horror to use the excuse that "the unknown is what makes it scary" and then just do a bunch of weird stuff and let whoever is playing come up with their own connections that the writer never would have. While not a horror game "Dear Esther" is an example of a game like this where there seems to be a consistent narrative, but the point is there really isn't one, and the point is what you can project onto it... or so I understand, I've never been a fan. In watching this video, hilariously, the stones everywhere made me think of the old kid's horror show "Children Of The Stone" that ran on Nicklodeon as part of the "The Third Eye" block... and that was pretty terrible. I also wanted to say that HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" was not entirely his own creation but something he did with other writers of the time. The idea was to create a general mythology that seemed real, and could be inserted into all kinds of weird tales by anyone who needed it. While the ring leader, and greatest contributor, a veritable "who's who" of weird fiction talent from the era contributed. One of the most famous contributors now would of course be "Robert E. Howard" of Conan fame who actually wrote letters back and forth with Lovecraft, he wrote a fair few stories in the mythos including some like "The Mound" and "The Journal Of Alonso Typer" (I think that's the proper name of the latter) that heavily influenced things. This is also why for D&D players the issue of "Conan Vs. the Mythos" was a recurring gag way back in the day. I have great respect for Lovecraft as a creator, even if some of his socio-political sentiments have aged like milk, but I think when it comes to this type of fiction he's less the father of the whole thing, and more a sort of ring leader that got a lot of people with similar ideas from the weird tales community of the time to work together and build a sort of communal mythology all future writers and creatives could draw on. If I had to really analyze this game in the video from what I saw, I'd guess that it's a statement about gaming itself on a lot of levels. I think there is little in-world logic and that is part of the point, and the disjointed style was simply because video games can be surreal, and the creator just used asset flips that served the purpose. I think the key to the whole thing might be that the mother and daughter are the only real people because they are playing a game, and everyone else is static as they aren't "real" because they are characters in the game. "Welcome Home" was addressing you as the player to the realization that it was all a game or something along those lines. The hint being that your a real person playing the game, and the only people that appear actually real in the game are the two playing a game. Now that could of course be wrong, but if I had stumbled on this I'd be thinking in those sorts of terms, and well... everything else is just arty stuff and to give it an attention getting vibe. At any rate for anyone who read this far, that's kind of what I'm getting at here, good writing and works of fiction of any sort ultimately do wind up explaining themselves. The fact that I could project that direction of thinking onto it, as opposed to taking the "horror narrative" seriously is exactly the problem, and why people who just leave things mysterious and open ended don't have much talent in my mind because anyone can just do a bunch of weird stuff and pretend there is something deeper going on. If some network executive decided to be a troll and claim in his dying letter that there was sekret, occult, meaning to "Pee Wee's Playhouse", I can almost guarantee you'd see people go over every episode with a fine toothed comb and come up with theories out of nothing that would be massively deep, but ultimately meaningless if the guy was just trolling as revealed by "I did it for the lulz" being carved on his never-visited tombstone.
Laptops did predate flat screen TVs by quite a bit, but none of them were gamer laptops like the one in this game looks to be. My mom had an IBM Thinkpad from work that weighed about 8lbs and probably cost $4,000 in early/mid 90s money. We were super excited to get a 50" rear-projection screen around that time that was just a big square and wasn't even widescreen. T2 looked awesome on it though, even though it was probably only standard DEF like the tube TVs were. It wasn't until the late 90's that the flat screen TVs started coming out, and I'm pretty sure there were even bigger and bulkier laptops years before my mom got hers. I bet that thing couldn't even run DOOM, but I would have been buried in the backyard if I tried to install it so I'm not sure.
the orb triangle was referred to as a temple it wasnt uncommon for temples to be highly centralized, typically with the centerpiece or center chamber as the part where the most well respected action takes place..whatever that could be here
My theory is (and this isn't me saying "hey you're wrong," or anything like that!) that the Matriarch of Dirt is slowly reviving. The river dried up because she drew it back in. And humans are considered a part of her, hence the deserted town, the oddly shared knowledge, the uniformity of the few people still around, and how it says "Welcome Home" at the end when you delve as deep as can be.
Well, I did watch it, very nice video. There's a game by the name of "Marrow", which may interest you, as this game did. Just be careful, it's a pretty unforgiving 2D platformer.
I'd like to point out that in the original stories by Lovecraft, there was no distinction between the eldritch pantheon. They were all called the Other Gods (not outer gods). The only beings called Old Ones in the original stories were the Cthulians from Call of Cthulu, which weren't even gods. *The more you know thingy plays* Edit: Also, it's never stated that Azathoth dreams reality. In fact, there's a story where a guy travels to the future, only to see that Azathoth has awoken and hasn't ended reality yet. Those are common misconceptions, though, so I understand, especially since you're new to the mythos.
This video has consumed my life for 5 months. Please give it a like 🥺🥺
EDIT: Thank you for 50k views! ALSO, I have multiple videos lined up that are very similar to this style and format, so stay tuned!! 🧡
You already have a Southern accent. You didn't need to do an impression xD
THIS VIDEO FUCKS
It's a very high quality vid, so I'll def give mine. I'm really glad youtube suggested me your channel
@@betanick14 That's actually a fair point 😭
@@Lone_Watcher Thanks for watching!
Fun fact, the woody structures inside a saguaro cactus are actually called ribs
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Nerd
@@ametuergamer1524i’m gonna touch you
@@ametuergamer1524 it's ok, you don't have to be smart.
@@DarksteelHeartnerd
0:12 the internet has poisoned me because all I thought was "Ah, you're finally awake" from Skyrim but the person has modded it til it broke or smthn
LMAO
Most horror crap is stupid crap because adults realize the horror is a planet of pseudosapient monkey people
Bro went on a full side quest simply by seeing a single image for a sec😂
ADHD go crazy sometimes
@Fuzduf the lengths we will go for dopamine are as incomprehensible as the Old Ones
bro visited his friend
hyperfixation is a blessing and a curse
@@Fuzdufwell we gotta get dopamine somehow and doing drugs is discouraged. Internet rabbit holes, however? Fair game
My theory; The Player is part of this extradimensional species. The player character was born and raised outside of the species domain and when they learn about this ancestry they travel to Bleakstead in search of answers. This is why some of the humanoid characters appear as white noise but also say "You're finally here" as if they were expecting you. Because the player is of the same species as them the player can identify them and tell them apart from normal humans, the two female characters in the hotel room. It's also why at the end you're greeted with "Welcome Home" as if you've been absent for a time and why you can't read the runes but can absorb their meaning by touching them and why the player character doesn't seem too bothered by weird rituals, bleeding rocks and a camera exposing invisible monuments.
Dude, this is interesting as hell. I love this theory!
This goes really well with a lot of early Lovecraft type work too. Returning to a 'home' you didn't know was your home and being fearful until you realize this is how it's supposed to be is a very common theme. Shadow over Innsmouth being the most popular example. (Whether you've gone mad to realize that or realized it because you are also a fishman or something is a bit of a deeper topic but still a theme.)
@@Fuzduf I also don't think there's some timeline merger going on. If Bleakstead is rural Arizona then it's completely believable that it's not a priority for the advancement of infrastructure and goods. The TVs and radio are old because it's what they had when it was built and they just haven't gone to get newer models. The laptop is from outside the town so it's obvious that it would be "modern", also the white noise on the TVs is something specific to Cathode Ray sets(CRTVs), newer LCD/LED and the like TVs quite literally CAN'T do that because the white noise screen is an artifact of the Cathode Ray Tubes used.
Also to send you deeper into the Lovecraft rabbit hole; H.P.Lovecraft's works were inspired by The King in Yellow written by Robert W. Chambers. This inspiration is very prevalent in his stories and Lovecraft effectively copied Chambers' "method of only vaguely referring to supernatural events, entities, and places, thereby allowing his readers to imagine the horror for themselves."
This is what I was thinking.
You're one of them.
@@prettyevil6662000 sounds like buddhist awakening
I've heard about games having static NPCs but this is ridiculous.
Actually a really clever joke 😭
*laugh track*
I wanted to play this one unique horror game called pathological 2 but all the npcs don't move and it threw me off lol
BOOOOOO!
i cant overstate how much i appreciate the gentle, cinematic camera handling
Thank you😭😭
@@Fuzduf fr, man. Not many let's play youtubers take care as to not give the audience motion sickness. this is greatly appreciated.
Just to note, this story is fairly similar to a scenario called Blackwater Creek from the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG. A small town forms around this river with magical healing properties, which taints the land and people around it. It turns out to be secreted from an avatar of a fertility goddess (Shub Nigurath). I think you might be onto something with the Cthulhu great old ones theory
@@danielthemaniel7461 thanks for sharing! That's very similar to Bleaksteads situation!
I ain't drinking a THING the Black Goat Of The Woods SECRETES-
Bleakstead needs a pig.
I was gonna say, this whole thing sounds a lot like a Shub-Niggurath cult in the Arizona Desert that has consumed a town to the point everyone has returned to the "source" - that being the Black Goat-Mother of a Thousand Young. Hence the "welcome home" at the end and the land literally being this thing's flesh.
Shubby's a weird eldritch abomination to use in a Mythos story but I'm really glad She's getting more attention! She has tons of potential for body horror, sexual horror, gender-related horror, and all sorts of weird cosmic stuff. A very underappreciated Lovecraft creation IMHO.
@@ThePhantomSafetyPinIsnt wilbur from his dunwich horror (sorry it's been 10 years since I read all his stories and I only read them once so I might confuse the names) story a child of the black goat? That one could have easily become a movie or a short horror game like dago. I recently found out there are some lovecraft stories turned into manga books, I really need to get some of them when I have money again
I'll be honest... the first thing I thought when I saw that picture was "this is great meme template material"
Yeah, I can definitely see that 😭
Hey, you... You're finally here.
I just wanna say that they really nailed down the pacing of Eldritch horror. You could easily dismiss alot of this as just weird stuff for the sake of weird stuff, but digging just below the surface reveals inner workings that tangles your mind up as you try to unravel the info. They never relish in the dread or melodrama, they let the implication carry the tension. A real love letter to the genre.
has no one mentioned that the rocks might be from the mountain range, said rocks originating from the matriarch of dirt, being that it was once her body, given that the rocks bleed, it is safe to say that they worship the rocks, because are the matriarch's literal flesh.
Concerning that picture at the beginning, I feel reminded of that meme where it's a shadow person with the text "I forgor" and a person made of light with the text "I rember"
Just a random guess, but maybe the reason why most stuff is from the 70s is just that people can't/won't leave the town, the women are probably "out of towners" like you, bringing the games from outside, as did the photographer.
This would probably imply that wherever caused the trade with the outside to stop relatively recently tho, but anything that's mentioned in the story seems quite a lot... Older (or perhaps the town was built in the 70s after the highway and never had a real outside trade since then)
The food has to be imported tho... Is the cherry pie important? Am I overthinking it? Idk
DUDE, when I first decided to make the video, I cut a lot of details like that out because I didn't know if talking about cherry pie for 5 minutes was a good idea or not 😭 Also, all the buildings except for the Motel have sinks. Which obviously mean they have/had running water. So where's the water coming from?...
Welp- there are "explanations"
the town that was reall probably was built in 70s, before people left or it disapeared due to proximity. There's already a trail of "things not being as they seem" so the cherry pie might not be a pie at all, nor made from actual cherries .
My first thought about the pie was that it was a light reference to Twin Peaks.
Honestly I had the same opinion, it’s very possible that this is just an old fashioned kind of town with people travelling through it. Im 100% on board with the two women also being interlopers, afterall this is a motel, someone would be staying in it.
Well, can't watch just yet, but I'm definitely gonna leave a like for Nyarlathotep in the thumbnail.
@@Kaedevirus Hell yeah
I love Dusk
@@jakehood806 Oh, yes, I was pleasantly surprised by Dusk multiple times, including the final boss.
@@jakehood806it's funny because nyarlatoteph canonically can be on places like Elden Ring, Dusk, Warhammer, Remnant 2, some random horny Anime and more without messing up with the "Canon" nyarlatoteph just cares about delivering messages when it haves to and messing (horrifically or just funny) with conscious life forms, no matter age, time or reality
Laptops, tube tvs, antique radio, real newspapers, vending machines, mechanical cash registers, brown interior decor... dude that was the 90s. I was 4-14 during the 90s, they were my whole childhood, and the mash of old clunky things and new gadgets is everything I remember. Digital typewriters, the email will take too long I'll just fax it, I gotta get off the phone line to do either though so I'll call you on my car phone. Do you wanna play Atari or Playstation? That was the 90s
I'm barely over 30sec into the video and I'm already terrified. either you're messing with us or this game truly is some kind of deeply cursed eldritch abomination because there is no way someone actually found what they were looking for on tumblr without the involvement of some dark power beyond human comprehension
Another MAJOR component of Eldritch horror is that you come to understand, if only for a moment, two things:
1: there are things so much more advanced and more intelligent then humans in the universe that our desires and needs, the very basic things needed for life as we know it, no longer apply to them. ( Best conveyed in the most famous poem, And with strange eons even death may die)
2: that our placement and understanding of the universe is flawed so fundamentally wrong that how everything actually works is wholly incompatibe with what we call science and knowlede, and those that actually understand the universe can mold and manipulate reality with simple thought.
Nerd
@@ametuergamer1524 More just annoyed that people think eldritch, cosmic horror, or lovecraftian horror is just "OOOOOOOOOOHHHHH TENTACLES!"
A good comparison i heard for eldrich horror is akin to a photo of a mouse that electrocuted itself by accidentally completeing a live circuit with its paws.
One day, through no fault of its own, the mouse encountered something it had no possibility to understand and no means to grasp what it was doing. One moment he was searching for food or shelter and then he was dead.
Replace the mouse with humanity and the circuit with forbidden knowledge. You now have the ultimate ending for those who seek to know more than what they can understand.
I thought we were about to get an hour essay on why Earthworm Jim is one of the most terrifying games ever made.
Seriously? I'll have to check it out !
@@FuzdufOh no no, the creature in your thumbnail looks like an old video game character that's an earthworm named Jim. It's a silly fun game so seeing your thumbnail had me thinking it was talking about how EJ is the scariest game ever made 😂
Maybe I'm getting too old and my references don't hire as much anymore 💀
@@Bell.- Ohhhh ok, 💀
@@Bell.- I got it unc, that reference went crazy
You’ve just earned yourself a subscriber. This was one of the best breakdowns of a lovecraftian horror game I’ve seen on UA-cam. The Nyarlothothep thumbnail immediately piqued my interest and I was not let down.
Also if you’re looking for more games like this, kitty horrorshow’s games are extremely similar thematically and visually, you ought to give them a try :D
Really appreciate the kind words, it means a lot!! And thank you I'll check the game out!
Ah, Kitty Horrorshow. She doesn't get nearly enough credit 💜
0:10 that one meme man who sits and shines
Sad Keanu?
In old mythology (f.e Norse) the world was crafted out of the corpse of a giant (Ymir) I'm not entirely sure if other mythologies do this to but it reminded me of that :) I also think the cherry pie is a reference to twin peaks ;)
That's really interesting!!
Yeah even older is Tiamat, the sumerian primordial serpent goddess of chaos mother of monsters, slain by Marduk and split into the sky and earth. Also the Greek Titans kinda.
@@scavenger4704 woah that's cool, gonna look that up later!! I'm not that well versed in Greek mythology besides the basics haha
its a common theme in mythology and creation stories in general, the land being created out of some primordial being, like geb and nut from egyptian mythology or the others mentioned.
Nice to see someone appreciating Valerie's games! I love her stuff.
I'd highly suggest checking out Kitty Horrorshow's works. They're nowhere near the same, but some of the vibes are a bit similar in some games and her stuff is really just worth checking out, or maybe a video if you're intrgued enough. I really suggest Ghost Lake, Seven Days, Decommissioned City #65 (unfinished and on her Patreon, but there's still a lot of interesting stuff there.), Tenement, Black Marble Complex (Patreon-only), ANATOMY, Exclusion Zone (and Actias. I feels very slightly connected to me, but that's just a theory), Tin (Patreon), The Sieve of the Moon (Patreon), Needlerust (Patreon), Hornets and Monastery (in that order), Spine (Patreon. This one really knocks around in my head), Dust-Of-Her-Mouth (Patreon), Rain House Eternity and Garden Shape Eternity (the latter is on Patreon. and in RHE, after (without spoiling) entering the door, you need to relaunch the game.), Leechbowl, Pente, Wraithshead Gardens (Patreon), Amalia (Patreon), Factory (this one's a bitch to navigate. There's 7 places you need to find though, if I'm not misremembering. Also on Patreon), Dust City, Scarlet Bough, Sunset Spirit Steel, and Roads.
...Okay that was way too many names, BUT pick and choose the ones that sound interesting. All of her games are worth a play, really. Anything not mentioned being on Patreon is somewhere on her itchio, and a lot of them are in her Haunted Cities collections. AND. Know that some of these games just... don't have an "ending" and you need to close the game yourself. Some of them will close on their own, others you need to relaunch when they close, and some you just need to explore until you think you've found everything and then close it yourself.
That picture is the light dude meme and I felt none of the things you mentioned, so you already lost me
In my opinion, you are criminally underrated. I listened to this while I was drawing some fan art of The Lich. Thanks for an awesome video. 🔥
@Courage_The_Cowardly_Dog thank you so much😭😭 Also I love courage the cowardly dog! I REALLY want to make a video on the cartoon sometime down the road
@@Fuzduf You should 100% do it! I look forward to watching it if you ever do make it, have a great rest of your day ❤️
@@Courage_The_Cowardly_Dog you too!
this is wild this is like your 4th or 5th vid. big A+ cant wait for more unheard of deep dives
I was wondering when you would upload again! Definitely watching now !
Thank you for coming back! You a real one fr
I keep finding small channels like this right as they make a banger, well done with this one :)
@keccakec i love finding channels like that too! More videos coming! ♥️
What I feel when I look at that picture is, "Hey, you. You're finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there."
NOT AGAINNN
Hoooowaaaaard!!!!
the most [adjective] [media] youve never [type of media consumption]
@@Gamesux421 yes
And it gets me every single time.
i really don't like this format of summary, but the thumbnail looked intriguing
You sir, have a very relaxing and pleasant voice!
@JukeboxOddities That really means a lot! Thank you so much. That's would’ve been the last description I would've given it 😭
I'm not sure why the thought of 70's technology being dominant in a deep rural town in the 2000's leads to thoughts of extra-dimensional shenanigans, its pretty common for deep rural towns like the one shown in the game to only have modern tech coming from the very few people that come into town
26:22 _"That doesn't make any sense"_ he said after leaving the masked spirit's encounter, on his quest bestowed from the whispers of those made of TV static.
Great video! I love finding new indie games, both horror and not, and the wild theory section was a great addition to the already mysterious little world of Bleakstead. Looking forward to seeing more of your work!
Thank you so much for watching! Also, I have more on the way
Alpha Beta Gamer spotted
WHAT THE FUCK IS COMMENTARY 💯💯💯
Surprised youve got such a small following, this is great, keep it up
@ifureaddisugay I really appreciate the kind words! Hope you enjoyed the video!
The Elder Scrolls references honestly make sense, throughout this whole thing I was getting Morrowind vibes. It could just be the visual style, but something about it reminds me so much of the architecture, atmosphere and lore of Daedric Ruins - which are WAY creepier when you actually go into them, by the way. Google doesn't do them justice.
"so i found this weird pic on the Internet. this is how i found Cthulhu mythos"
😭
Spoilers: The game is not as terrifying as he makes it out to be. I am not sure why he is so afraid of it.
Fear is subjective. What scares one person doesn't scare another, and so on.
IDK either bro
Well, I guess the answer as to why he makes it out that way lies somewhere in the first 20 minutes of the video where he says "Maybe this is where I will finally get jumpscared".
As someone who gets really unnerved by the sound of static I absolutely get how the game would build tension for me.
And also, lets be honest... much more people will click "the most terrifying horror game" over "a pretty okay horror game."
Wannabe video essayist utilizing clickbait.
Lowkey one of the best video essay about a game ive seen in a while, no where close to as many views as this deserves
@Tired_Tomorrow That really means a lot. I had soooo many doubts while making this vid
That intro was really clean!!
Thanks man!
I saw the thumbnail is an edited Entity card from Yu-gi-oh called Nyarla
@shadeslayerzycron6209 bro, that's crazy 😭
The entity's full name is Nyarlathotep
@@Noxara wait so Nyarlathotep is actually in Yu-Gi-Oh???
@@Fuzduf Yes they added the Cthulhu mythos in Yu-Gi-Oh in their own Yu-Gi-Oh way
@@Fuzduf ya. Same with Azathoth, Cthugha, Hastur, Nordens, and N'tys.
I appreciate the randomness, hardwork and structure of this video. Thanks for the content liked and subbed ✌️
I really appreciate your kindness, thank you!
My first video of yours and I'm loving it so much! Subscribed for sure my dood! :D
@@alexb7039 thank you so much! ♥️♥️ More on the way!
@Fuzduf VERY much so looking forward to it! :3
Pausing the video now to go check the game out, I love how the vibes look. Can't wait to get scared
Dude your pc background is a... screenshot from Mass effect 1? Thats my favourite game from all time. I love the exploration sistem. This make me feel nostalgic, your screenshot is amazing. I would like to have kt
It's actually not my screen shot! I got it from a website called "wallhaven". Just type "mass effect mako" and it should come up, I just tried it
I…I do not see what you saw. It was one of those "add filter to hide the graphics" kinda game. And the story seemed, well, to be really honest, bad.
But good to see that you enjoyed it! Not being sarcastic here, not everyone likes the same games. :D
Man, I didn't expect so little views! This video is underrated.
Your voice is quite intresting, I found it very soothing and easy to listen to.
Keep up good work!
Thanks so much! That's great to hear
Your dialogue is giving Postal Guy vibes, very awesome
@_saintyork_2333 is that another content creator or a character? 😂
@Fuzduf postal guy is from a series called postal. You should look up quotes or play the games. They are very unhinged.
@@jacobcaron2280 alright thx. I'll look into it
damn its been quite a journey going from reverse searching a random picture to lovecraftian horrors and bleeding rocks. great video.
Thank you so much! That means a ton coming from you brother
"matriarch of dirt" so.... mother earth?
😭
how does this video not have more views? doesn’t make any sense to me tbh, keep it up you were def cooking with this one!
Thank you so much! I'm glad you stumbled upon it!
Great video g, keep it up. Im enjoying this a lot. Some joint escapism
holy crap man this is impressive! hopefully i see you grow
Thank you! That really means a lot!
i'm from arizona, its just like that here. this was just a video game of a regular tuesday
I really enjoyed this, It's hard finding good content about a game without to much editorialised commentary.
Yeah, I agree tbh. I respect highly edited videos, but I also think sometimes they lose authenticity bc of that. But if I'm being real, I had to make a compromise with the editing intensity bc I work a full-time job. It would've taken even longer to make
I think this is the first time I've seen one of your videos, and I really enjoyed both your story and theorycrafting. This is my positive comment to appease the almighty algorithm :3
PS- as someone who's been semi-aware of Lovecraft for quite some time, I think you did a good job of giving us a short and sweet Lovecraft 101 course.
Appreciate it! (:
wall:is covered in spikes
"why does this wall hurt me?"
"What do you feel when you look at this picture?" Honestly it's giving the opening of Skyrim
2:24 ICYDK this is a twin peaks reference.
38:21 um no. Laptops were around at least a decade before flat-screen tvs.
? Is it so hard to spell?
"What do you feel when you look at this picture" I feel like im on the toilet looking at a dude made out of tv static xD
The realest comment so far
“Southern impression”
Talks in the same drawl he’s been talking in all along
That’s a cute joke
Entertaining commentary and information about obscure vidya gaems? Yes, please.
Liked and subbed
@@albishie THANK YOU
Insane quality from small channel
@@MansourAlfredi-j6e thanks man
I'm happy to see Alpha Beta Gamer getting a little more recognition
40:24 mario soundpack go hard
The script and pacing of this video is really well done :)
@GoobsNYC I really, really, really appreciate that compliment. Before I released the video, I was so self-conscious about the pacing of the vid. And I was like "well its been 5 months already, i need to just get this damn thing done already." 😂
12:00 I’ve been to rural motels that for one reason or another never borthered to upgrade their tv’s. I’ve seen this as recently as a few years ago.
Edit: just in general there’s lots of places(especially in America) that seems lost to time. For one reason or another there metaphorical healing rivers dried up many years ago. People stopped visiting many moved away and thoese who remain are old and slowly dying off. These communities are often poor with little income and all the old people have dated tastes leaving the towns look like there stuck several decades in the past. It’s an interesting but deeply existential thing to see in person. I over all like your theory but I’ll say I think the time line is linear
That's interesting! That thought did cross my mind, but I figured it was just a little too old
I've watched two videos at least days apart. Subscribed
Appreciate you 🙏🙏
He he :3 spooky pumpkin man goes brrr!
YOOO BLUELAD ‼️‼️
wait wait wait this production quality wtf! superb! def 100+ aura
0:31 exactly how i fell when i started watching the video, seriously what tools and how are these edits made?
ok literally the desktop 34:09
was literally just going through your channel the other day wondering what you were cooking up
Haha, thanks for being here dude! Hope you're doing well!
Holy cow i have never been this interested in Lovecraftian Horror or even the Cthulhu mythos outside of popular media. And I've never watch a long ass video without getting bored since ages so i would definitely subscribe to you if you do more of this type of content
@Politictrolerandenthusiast I plan too! It was loads of fun putting it all together! The only downside was that with such a big project, it became difficult to manage at some points while working a full-time job as well. (Also, the reason why it took 5 months to complete). But I plan on quitting my job thus winter, so more content like this is on the way!
I know exactly what's going on here, it's clear as day to me: This is a cosmic horror tale in the vein of Lovecraft, Campbell, and Twin Peaks with maybe some shades of True Detective in there. I'd bet my copy of the Necronomicon on it that this is a very specific eldritch entity and very specific thing going on, here's what I think happened:
Bleakstead was an Arizonian mining town that, sometime in the 1970's, dug too deep and uncovered an ancient Eldritch thing. This thing happened to be Shub-Niggurath, also called the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, but She's half asleep here like many cosmic entities on earth are. She doesn't realize the humans above Her have found Her. Mining however, wounded Her and so now, her blood and flesh taint the area around Bleakstead, offcast from being injured. These things create the abominations you see around you like the bleeding rocks and the blood river. The humans then began having odd auditory hallucinations, hearing Her whispering in the wind, and these whispers tell them to come home to Her. Bleakstead therefore started to slowly grow more and more obsessed with this Earth-Mother figure, to the point they became as corrupted as the land around them and went mad, and one by one they all went to Join her in the mountains, facilitated by the old woman - actually a priestess of Shub-Niggurath. Soon the town was nearly empty save a few people. But the Mother remains, waiting, and those who go too far on the bus line and end up in Bleakstead end up in Her sphere of influence. That's also why the timelines are fucked, because timespace is warped by the presence of an eldritch entity.
Some people have a more sensitive nature to this call, just like in Innsmouth in Lovecraft's story, and go there on purpose. Your character is one of these people who followed this call, ended up in Bleakstead, and eventually returned to the Mother. They have some aspect in their blood or minds that makes them susceptible to Her, just like in Shadow Over Innsmouth with the people who have the Innsmouth Look in their bloodlines being drawn towards Devil's Reef. Your character is here looking for the Mother, they just don't realize it until they start looking around. The static images you see aren't people, they're memories of people. The Mother took their bodies, only the spirits remain, and they are able to help you also "ascend" this way... because that was always your destiny, wasn't it? That's why you don't leave and why you just start asking around. You're here because on some level, you followed a call and you want to find its source. You heard the Whispering and can't stand it anymore. This... is your resolution.
Just watch your Skyrim retrospective and all I have to say is:
Please don't stop making videos.
I really appreciate the words of encouragement!!! And I'll never stop making videos! This is something I want to do for the rest of my life, no doubt. Even if I can't earn a livable income 💀
How did bro just spawn in with 3k subs and god tier content
💀💀💀
That thing in the ground during the ritual kinda looks like a sigil from the demons of the Ars Goetia, can't say for sure tho, just reminded me of it
Isn't it strange how the runes at the altar and pyramid are written in first person "we", but the runes at the spires are written in the third person "they"?
Pretty sure I played this on either a "Cursed Demo Disc" or Dread X collection. Back to scrolling for something I've actually "never played".
I kept half-expecting some burnt up person/thing to crawl out of the stoves for some reason.. 😨🙃
Nicely done, have a sub.
@@Mister-Sinner0 appreciate you 🙏
It’s extremely common for poor areas to still use outdated appliances for decades after it existed. I was born in 96 and I knew a few households that still had tvs like that. Tech standardization is a very new occurrence.
The image at the beginning looks like the "I Forgor" meme
💀
While I can't exactly fault you as an outsider, especially since I'm mostly one myself, also being merely a fan, I would say very few creators *directly* intend their work to actually take place within the Cthulhu Mythos. They're more allusions to that style. To the *concept* of Old Gods. While some authors closer to Lovecraft's era did, like Robert Bloch and August Delerth, nowadays, thanks to some copyright issues with specific iterations of the mythos (like the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game, among others), as well as just time and...well, Lovecraft being racist as Hell, most people prefer to simply build off the core ideas, rather than connect to Lovecraft's works directly. Most of the work that still does sticks mostly to prose, rather than games or movies. So I doubt any direct connection like you posit was intended by Valerie.
I talked to her after the video was mostly finished. She said she was somewhat inspired by lovecraft's works. However, she was mostly inspired by the entire idea of the cosmic horror genre itself and wanted it to be very vague and open-ended. So yeah, you're correct!
I'm sorry to say but thanks to the pose and the dialogue starting with "YOU'RE FINALLY-", my first feeling upon seeing that image was not loneliness, curiosity, despair, OR sadness, but embarrassed amusement at finding I'd read the dialogue in the Skyrim Nord voice in my head... 🙈
@@submariNervous 😭
Great video, I hope you make more like this.☺
@@Draygarth appreciate it! And yes, more is on the way!
I've literally been looking for this game for like 2 years now almost
Wait fr? Why were you looking for it, and how did you know about it?
@Fuzduf I saw either Alpha Beta Gamer or Manly Badass Hero or some other channel play it and I don't remember much besides the fact the memory reminded me heavily of Pathologic and Paratopic(please check this out its short and really well put together) with how dreamlike and surreal the environment and atmosphere was and it alway stuck with me, even made a reddit post(something I never do) describing a desert town but got no responses to it but I've actually found it now
around 36:40 I started noticing the bg music and it didn't hit me until about 37 min where i HAD to go back as well as check the description to see if i was right or delusional and for that my good sir i feel like you deserve a double or a triple like from me (but since you can't like a video more than once i decided to write it as a comment)
ps, i'm so glad i'm not the only one who goes through game objects dating them like crazy in order to figure out the timeline :33
Just because something is inspired by Lovecraft and cosmic horror does not whatsoever mean that it's in the Cthulhu Mythos. This looks like an entirely original work with no connection to preestablished lore. It's entirely its own setting. The term "Old Ones" or "Great Ones" or "Great Old Ones" or "Outer Gods" and so on and so forth are used and reused throughout media to describe similar entities or related concepts that were inspired by Lovecraft's work, but they aren't necessarily set in that same setting. Plenty of works are like that.
Looks like a twin peaks fever dream to me.
Im only about halfawy through the video right now, so it may be brough up later, but i feel like the static fuzz NPC's are those statue people.like they're people who have come before you to enter the heart of the mountain and "come home" as the statue dudes say at the end of the game. Kindof a shadow over insmouth type deal
your interpretation is really well formulated and a very interesting analysis, I do think you went way deeper than the author though. the story I got was that you play as a traveler possessed by the dirt mother during her reincarnation. you have visions of static-y figures from past worshippers that appear to you as you become more and more the dirt mother. eventually her ritual is complete and you have been fully possessed; she is home
may not even be temporal, and rather the static representing followers consumed by the influence of the dirt mother
reminded me a lot of the movie Disappearance (2002)
I will say that I think deep analysis of indie horror games is oftentimes wasted. The reason is that a lot of horror projects don't have that much effort put into them, as it's an old technique for horror to use the excuse that "the unknown is what makes it scary" and then just do a bunch of weird stuff and let whoever is playing come up with their own connections that the writer never would have.
While not a horror game "Dear Esther" is an example of a game like this where there seems to be a consistent narrative, but the point is there really isn't one, and the point is what you can project onto it... or so I understand, I've never been a fan.
In watching this video, hilariously, the stones everywhere made me think of the old kid's horror show "Children Of The Stone" that ran on Nicklodeon as part of the "The Third Eye" block... and that was pretty terrible.
I also wanted to say that HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" was not entirely his own creation but something he did with other writers of the time. The idea was to create a general mythology that seemed real, and could be inserted into all kinds of weird tales by anyone who needed it. While the ring leader, and greatest contributor, a veritable "who's who" of weird fiction talent from the era contributed. One of the most famous contributors now would of course be "Robert E. Howard" of Conan fame who actually wrote letters back and forth with Lovecraft, he wrote a fair few stories in the mythos including some like "The Mound" and "The Journal Of Alonso Typer" (I think that's the proper name of the latter) that heavily influenced things. This is also why for D&D players the issue of "Conan Vs. the Mythos" was a recurring gag way back in the day.
I have great respect for Lovecraft as a creator, even if some of his socio-political sentiments have aged like milk, but I think when it comes to this type of fiction he's less the father of the whole thing, and more a sort of ring leader that got a lot of people with similar ideas from the weird tales community of the time to work together and build a sort of communal mythology all future writers and creatives could draw on.
If I had to really analyze this game in the video from what I saw, I'd guess that it's a statement about gaming itself on a lot of levels. I think there is little in-world logic and that is part of the point, and the disjointed style was simply because video games can be surreal, and the creator just used asset flips that served the purpose. I think the key to the whole thing might be that the mother and daughter are the only real people because they are playing a game, and everyone else is static as they aren't "real" because they are characters in the game. "Welcome Home" was addressing you as the player to the realization that it was all a game or something along those lines. The hint being that your a real person playing the game, and the only people that appear actually real in the game are the two playing a game.
Now that could of course be wrong, but if I had stumbled on this I'd be thinking in those sorts of terms, and well... everything else is just arty stuff and to give it an attention getting vibe.
At any rate for anyone who read this far, that's kind of what I'm getting at here, good writing and works of fiction of any sort ultimately do wind up explaining themselves. The fact that I could project that direction of thinking onto it, as opposed to taking the "horror narrative" seriously is exactly the problem, and why people who just leave things mysterious and open ended don't have much talent in my mind because anyone can just do a bunch of weird stuff and pretend there is something deeper going on.
If some network executive decided to be a troll and claim in his dying letter that there was sekret, occult, meaning to "Pee Wee's Playhouse", I can almost guarantee you'd see people go over every episode with a fine toothed comb and come up with theories out of nothing that would be massively deep, but ultimately meaningless if the guy was just trolling as revealed by "I did it for the lulz" being carved on his never-visited tombstone.
Man your thumbnail game is immaculate.
Thank you!
Laptops did predate flat screen TVs by quite a bit, but none of them were gamer laptops like the one in this game looks to be. My mom had an IBM Thinkpad from work that weighed about 8lbs and probably cost $4,000 in early/mid 90s money. We were super excited to get a 50" rear-projection screen around that time that was just a big square and wasn't even widescreen. T2 looked awesome on it though, even though it was probably only standard DEF like the tube TVs were. It wasn't until the late 90's that the flat screen TVs started coming out, and I'm pretty sure there were even bigger and bulkier laptops years before my mom got hers. I bet that thing couldn't even run DOOM, but I would have been buried in the backyard if I tried to install it so I'm not sure.
How the f*** was this so terrifying and unsettling with no actual Danger
I get scared easily
the orb triangle was referred to as a temple
it wasnt uncommon for temples to be highly centralized, typically with the centerpiece or center chamber as the part where the most well respected action takes place..whatever that could be here
My theory is (and this isn't me saying "hey you're wrong," or anything like that!) that the Matriarch of Dirt is slowly reviving. The river dried up because she drew it back in. And humans are considered a part of her, hence the deserted town, the oddly shared knowledge, the uniformity of the few people still around, and how it says "Welcome Home" at the end when you delve as deep as can be.
Well, I did watch it, very nice video. There's a game by the name of "Marrow", which may interest you, as this game did. Just be careful, it's a pretty unforgiving 2D platformer.
@Kaedevirus Thank you! I'll look into it!
@@Fuzduf You're welcome, don't get your balls crushed.
@@Fuzduf I know about Marrow! Just know that traveling can and will be confusing. You might need to look at a walk through from time to time.
In retrospect, Nyar really gives me "screw you dad" energy. If the world is a dream and he's just trying to spitefully mess with it.
I'd like to point out that in the original stories by Lovecraft, there was no distinction between the eldritch pantheon. They were all called the Other Gods (not outer gods). The only beings called Old Ones in the original stories were the Cthulians from Call of Cthulu, which weren't even gods.
*The more you know thingy plays*
Edit: Also, it's never stated that Azathoth dreams reality. In fact, there's a story where a guy travels to the future, only to see that Azathoth has awoken and hasn't ended reality yet. Those are common misconceptions, though, so I understand, especially since you're new to the mythos.
Truly The Most Terrifying Game I've Never Played