Thread 718221537

Cosmic Horror seems hard or even impossible for modern video-game developers to portray.

might be when the goal of most vidya games is to 'beat' it

>The whole point of the concept is something is vast and incomprehensible
>It doesn't work in vidya
Who would've guessed.

>>718221537 (OP)
Because Lovecraft troons brains will explode if you dare to imply that someone might not go crazy if they see a squid man from outer space

>>718221621
if it's incomprehensible, then what exactly is "the concept"?

>>718221537 (OP)
have you ever played an indieslop horror game? it's like the most popular trope.

One of the unexplored facts of Cosmic Horror is that it is like Mars deciding it is a monster and it will eat Earth immediately. That shit is probably hard to implement as video game.

American and Japanese writers and devs of the past solved this by making the Cosmic Horror decide to shrink itself to Human level and actually dealing with the characters as if it cares enough to resolve some plot point through Dialogs.

>>718221593
no one wants to be defeated

>>718221537 (OP)
Cosmic horror IS hard or impossible for a vidya to portray because it relies upon the experience(er) of actual reality to experience extrem warping of reality.
Of course a vidya (palyer) is not experiencing reality but is in itself an escape from reality. An immersion in a fictional world.

Saying that, I did see a video of an indie game where the player is chased by a massive human, Kind of like the size of a celestial in marvel comics or that movie. Fucking huge and just watching the vid of the gameplay freaked me out.
Idk the game, was an in development indie game. Gameplay looked shit but the giant human glaring upon you taking up the sky freaked me out.

>>718221537 (OP)
cosmic horror works a lot better when implied, having a big monster with tentacles that bends time is honestly too lame too often
moon presence is fine ig

>>718221537 (OP)
They handled it perfectly fine in Soul Sacrifice.

>>718221537 (OP)
Not impossible, but I can't think of any other game than Dead Space accurately portraying cosmic horror

>>718221537 (OP)
Cosmic horror doesn't work if you depict it.

>>718222526
>Cosmic horror IS hard or impossible for a vidya to portray because it relies upon the experience(er) of actual reality to experience extrem warping of reality.
this is really stupid. you can establish a mundane routine/setting for the player and then start doing weird stuff with it after a certain amount of time. it actually pisses me off that you would act like such a simple concept is impossible.

>>718221537 (OP)
Picrel comes close. In the one ending where you finally do get a chance to "view" the Visitor, you go insane by glimpsing just a fraction of it, and your rapidly-mutating mass of flesh ends up engulfing the world and dooming humanity.

Even indirect observation causes some brutal transformations, let alone looking at the one piece of it that's lingering on Earth.

But yeah, as others have mentioned, the moment you actually TRY to portray it, you lose, because you're trying to condense something incomprehensible into something that can be, losing the whole effect.

>>718223110
DS3 feels like it was written by two different people, one who wanted to tell a spooky story of cosmic horror and a knuckle-dragging American subhuman who kept injecting shitty stereotypes into the plot and characters.

>>718221537 (OP)
Within an hour there'll be some cunt on jewtube making a retarded video about beating the unknowable cosmic horror with nothing but a physics enabled toothpick and a speed glitch

Explain why Bloodborne doesn't depict cosmic horror properly

>>718223274
I think you are too low intelligent to even comprehend what cosmic horror is.
How can you experience a warping of reality if the premise of your experience is already known to be NOT reality, i.e playing a video game.
The exact same reason why cosmic horror movies dont gain traction or are able to give the viewer the feeling, because the viewer already knows that they are just watching a movie.
On the flip side it is the same reason why lovecrafts books hit people with cosmic horror, because they are using their own imagination to warp their own sense of reality.

Of course, this is gonna elude you because of that low INT shit we just talked about.

>>718223279
This game was fucking ruined by inexplicably making it a generic RPGmaker party RPG and going full quirk chungus the minute you get to the ground floor, especially that cafe/restaurant full of Undertale characters

>>718223505
I had this game in my backlog and reading this shit just immediately made me delete it off my list.

>>718223505
I'm not a fan of the RPG Maker gameplay either, but it works at making you really look at the grotesque art, which is the real point. And the ground floor was built up, so the insanity didn't put me off.

Also, the fucking OST, man...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py-eu1KipNw&list=RDpy-eu1KipNw&start_radio=1

>>718223505
>mfw I just got to the ground floor and loved the game until now
you might have just ruined it for me anon, the most recently added party member being the quirky funny soda machine should have clued me in

>>718223470
because a skinny human can kill gods with normal weapons

>>718223336
I assume that was exactly what happened due to EA's interference. The devs clearly wanted to make the horror game they had been making the last 2 successful and popular games, while EA executives had a bunch of demands for content related to popular multiplayer shooter trends.

>>718221537 (OP)
Bloodborne does it perfectly. You’re still left with questions and are still unable to comprehend the planes of existence or motives of the beings and their servants you fight, but they’re killable. The eldritch truth present in Lovecraft is even a gameplay mechanic in the form of insight and frenzy. Honorable mention to Dead Space as well for nailing the tone and horror of Lovecraft.

I think anything cosmic horror like the name implies, would have to either take place in space or between dimensions. Any game that has an enemy that's just really really big, but is small enough that you can just climb on top of it and defeat it or in the case of bloodborne or dank souls just roll around and tickle its feet with a breadknife until it dies. In that sense I feel Cthukhu's depiction in media is usually WAY too fucking small. Cthulhu is not supposed to be small enough that he's the size of a colossus that you can climb on top of. Cthulhu is the size of a fucking mountain. You should have no chance of killing him any more than you would have killing Mt Everest.

Dead Space 3 did a good job portraying an actually cosmic horror, an enemy that is literally just several living planets. If I were tasked to make a video game about an eldritch horror it would be one of two things: Either the game would be something like Uzumaki where the world around you is being twisted and manipulated by something unknown until you finally stumble into the dimension of the eldritch horror and you find that it is not a humanoid comprehensible being but infact the entire dimension itself that is alive and sentient, or alternatively it would be a sci-fi space exploration game (think Eve) where you are fighting off organic infections making asteroids and planets sentient horrors until you eventually stumble upon the source being a writhing sentient wall spanning the entire one side of universe and your hope is not to defeat it but to simply influence it to retreat to whence it came.

Or alternatively if you wanted to make cosmic horror on a scale human vs enemy, it would have to be a sci-fi shooter game where you are granted access to weaponry to literally level mountain sized threats. Think Helldivers, but if your weapons in your arsenal had the power to level an entire city in one shot, and you needed several well placed shots for your enemy.

>>718223952
>>718224463
If that first image is from bloodborne (I have not played it, not a fan of souls like) then I'll concede that Bloodborne did cosmic horror correctly

This is the only game that I think does cosmic horror justice and I think that was on accident.

Cosmic horror is easy, just make the player deal with the consequences of it rather than attack it directly.

For example imagine a rogue planet scenario. It enters the solar system and flies through but its mere temporary presence causes the orbit of every other planet to change. You'd be stupid to try launching nukes at the planet instead all you can do is suffer and hope to survive.

>>718221537 (OP)
>Needs to be coherently managed to perform well
>You can't do horror with free third person camera controls, especially not over the shoulder camera. Fixed or floating camera is the best chance at third person horror.
>"Where are the tentacles, isn't this cosmic horror?" - some consultant/manager/investor who has 90% of the final say in the project
These are the permanent roadblocks.
>>718225076
So "A roadside picnic"?

>>718225076
Yeah that make sense too. Games are too focused on always making you the hero that defeats the bad guy, a real cosmic horror would have a threat that isn't even aware you exist and your focus isn't to defeat it but to survive incidentally being in its presence.

Manmade horrors beyond my comprehension (but not beyond my astral path access)

>>718221537 (OP)
Yes, because we already have unimaginable horrors walking around in brought daylight. People are not that easily scared anymore.

>>718221537 (OP)
It's not. The real problem is everyone misunderstands cosmic horror and thinks it means squid men or some shit. Cosmic horror is a form of existential horror, where the horror is realizing that in the grand scheme of the cosmos humans are insignificant and reality doesn't give a shit about what we consider to be moral, good or evil, or how hard humanity strives to triumph.

The movie Alien (1979) is cosmic horror. It is about an alien species that may or may not be a form of bioweapon that reproduces through parasitism and doesn't particularly care about humanity beyond being good for more reproduction. Add on the fact that the xenomorph is likely just one of the horrors out in the cosmos humanity will have to deal with now that colonization among the stars is possible just adds to it.

But everyone thinks to be Cosmic Horror you have to have some living moon that devours consciousness while making people mutate into pools of goo, and none of those actions serve any purpose, because the moon doesn't actually need to devour consciousness while turning people into goo, is "Cosmic Horror" and it just does it because, "Oooh, big scary space thing!"

>>718221537 (OP)
Dead Space does it.

bookniggers are at it again.

>>718226457
To add on: Cosmic Horror is not that something is "Incomprehensible and dangerous!" It is that it is, in fact, entirely comprehensible if not reproducible, clearly has a purpose, but the purpose and function doesn't particularly care or consider if other conscious beings might be harmed, and humanity's outrage at any indignities suffered doesn't even begin to factor in.

Although I haven't finished it, I think Returnal counts. There's always this ominous feeling of dread coming from the way art and level design are handled, coupled with the way the game drip feeds you information about the world it's as though there's a kind of cosmic horror filtering through the gameworld as you play it which you learn more and more about with each run.

well i'm spooked

>>718226457
>midwit describes the same thing twice and says they are different

>>718221537 (OP)
>Cosmic Horror aka
>DONT SHOW THE MONSTER
>in a
>VIDEO DEPENDENT GENRE
I wounder why there are two and a half good cosmic horror games? hurr durr

>>718221862
Smooth.

>>718223505
>and going full quirk chungus the minute you get to the ground floor,
are you actually mentally retarded?

>>718221656
Your imagination, hence why niggerman was a writer.

>>718221537 (OP)
Go play Stars Die.

>>718229468
looks cool, shill it to me

>>718223110
No it is not, the moment you start shooting shit you throw cosmic horror straight out of the window.

>>718221537 (OP)
I actually think that it's done best in those 30 minute long indie horror games where you do some mundane task until you see the giant monster for a couple of frames and then die. But I also accept having the monster be some giant mass in the distance and never clearly seeing it.

>>718229543
Can't really shill it more than the steam description without ruining the whole thing. Also do not fucking play in chill mode, the whole point of it is that everything happens in real time.

>>718221537 (OP)
Cosmic Horror can't appeal to most modern audiences, it's rooted in antiquated fears that have largely already come to pass or that we've been conditioned to not take seriously. The massive, inevitable Cosmic horrors are actually just thematic stand ins for societal change.

Shadow over Innsmoth is essentially a whole story where a character comes upon the awful realization that he is actually part Ir*sh. Mountains of Madness is abouts the fear of freed slaves destroying our society. The Dunwich horror is about what happens we let the undesirable lower classes access our higher spheres of learning.

>>718221537 (OP)
Look Outside did it great. The trick was actually to focus on "How has the Cosmic Horror effected society as a whole" Where the mystery of the monster is only fully revealed via fulfilling a number of goals.

>>718221537 (OP)
Elden Ring and BloodBourne do it fine.

I think a game set in pic related would be really fucking cool

One way would be to not actually interact with the creature directly and only deal with the aftermath of its influence. Like this image >>718226689 you can have a spooky mystery game about things going wrong in a seaside village and only at the end do you see the cause of it from a distance.

>>718223505
unironically 100% correct, the game peaks right at the start
it's not even like he couldn't have managed to toe this line of goofy/horror, the Fred apartment perfectly navigates the two tones imo, where you think "haha what quirky guys" before quickly being reminded that most are horrible monstrous psychos who want to inflict unimaginable horrors

I don't get why "cosmic horror" is even so revered. So humans are insignificant in the grand scheme of things and a more advanced race might wipe us out entirely incidentally or view us the way we view ants? Big deal. Maybe this kind of concept was shocking to a religious populace back in the fucking 1930s or whenever Lovecraft wrote, but it's just kinda the default understanding of things now.