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Seriously, the dude's legacy is lifted up by dozens of other writers but we still call it Lovecraftian because hot drat that's a bankable name and also 40 years of franchising. I would love nothing more than a push towards cosmic horror or eldritch horror but Eldritch Horror is a trademark and cosmic horror suggests something more science fiction and this entire subgenre is marketed to the same range of nerds who quote "that is not dead." It's why the Lovecraft argument is frustrating to me but on the opposite end of the spectrum. The response to "Lovecraft was racist" should be "he sure was, but have you read Laird Barron?"
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Oct 26, 2018 18:54
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'Lovecraftian' is just shorthand for a number of horror themes, really. It's like saying a game is a 'roguelike'. A friend asked me wtf that meant, and I had to explain to her the legacy of Rogue, it's mechanics, and stuff, and 'Lovecraftian' is similiar. Like, you could say 'oh this is a story with elements of horror that deal with an uncaring and capricious universe, with ancient creatures and beings that are unknowing and uncaring of humanity to the point where their random whims mean destruction and insanity for us simply from their presence', or you can say 'it's Lovecraftian'. The term 'cosmic horror' hits many of the same notes, but doesn't connote quite the same things.
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Oct 26, 2018 19:01
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Doesn't hurt that it's also a very unusual and memorable name. I'm sure people wouldn't have gotten so stuck on if he had been named Smith or Johnson instead.
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Oct 26, 2018 19:03
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Skyscraper posted:It'd be nice if the whole genre could move past Lovecraft as a name for the subgenre. I mean I'll be real, some part of it sticking so well is probably that "Lovecraft" is just a pretty cool 'spooky setting' sounding name. Cardiovorax posted:Doesn't hurt that it's also a very unusual and memorable name. I'm sure people wouldn't have gotten so stuck on if he had been named Smith or Johnson instead. Yeah exactly this.
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Oct 26, 2018 19:04
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howard phillip starcraft
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Oct 26, 2018 19:14
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Bogart posted:howard phillip starcraft The Thin White Dork
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Oct 26, 2018 19:18
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I propose we all refer to him hence forth as "Howie P, turboracist" in an effort to help society and this thread move past
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Oct 26, 2018 19:26
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Chev posted:I feel his fear of penguins is immensely more interesting to discuss, especially once you look at how he describes the elder things. well you see they're both white AND black
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Oct 26, 2018 20:50
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Drunken Baker posted:It's been loving years since I read that, but I thought he got speared by the bow. It's just a (really big) high priest.
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Oct 26, 2018 21:31
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Cthulhu is the high priest of the Great Old Ones, who are powerful enough to travel through the cosmos on their own power and conquer worlds basically all by themselves, but they're fundamentally defeatable, just ancient, ageless and basically undying. The real gods, however, are the Outer Gods, like Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath. They're on another level of magnitude altogether and use Great Old Ones for toothpicks. Luckily, there are great many Old Ones, because Shub-Niggurath alone has way too many mouths and most of them even have tooth-analogues.
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Oct 26, 2018 22:06
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Every couple of months I check on Steam if there's any progress on Albino Lullaby: Episode 2. I really liked the first one, but the second episode has been getting pushed up for the last two and a half years. Noticed recently that its name got changed to Alice's Lullaby though, and I remember seeing a trailer that suggested they're throwing a sudden Alice in Wonderland story.
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Oct 27, 2018 06:14
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What was the last story that Lovecraft wrote? I'm wondering how late in his career he wrote In the Walls of Eryx because I feel like that entire story was Lovecraft desperately trying to be like "guys I'm sorry, please, forgive me, I'm not as racist as I used to be, still racist tho"
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Oct 27, 2018 07:33
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FirstAidKite posted:What was the last story that Lovecraft wrote? According to Wikipedia, the last thing he wrote on his own was a short story called "The Haunter of the Dark"; "In the Walls of Eryx" was written around the same time, but was a collaboration with a dude named Kenneth Sterling. While Eryx was written about a year before he died, it wasn't published until after his death.
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Oct 27, 2018 07:42
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I hope the frogwares horror game is good. Their games are at least interesting mechanically.
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Oct 27, 2018 08:23
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I know John Carpenter can't really be trusted to design a game, but why the hell is no one reaching out to him to make at least a soundtrack and story board for a horror game?
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Oct 27, 2018 08:24
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They remember FEAR 3
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Oct 27, 2018 08:42
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Signing him up for F3AR was great, because the game had a randomised spook director. Sometimes enemies appeared out of a different window, or lights flickered or not, or creepy dolls stared at you or not. John Carpenter presents: randomly flipping scare switches in a tunnel of love.
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Oct 27, 2018 08:59
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Agent Escalus posted:And have you ever seen a photo of the guy? He even looks like a total sperglord who dwells in the basement. Put a bowl cut on Lovecraft and he legit would look like a school shooter.
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Oct 27, 2018 10:41
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davidspackage posted:Every couple of months I check on Steam if there's any progress on Albino Lullaby: Episode 2. I really liked the first one, but the second episode has been getting pushed up for the last two and a half years. Noticed recently that its name got changed to Alice's Lullaby though, and I remember seeing a trailer that suggested they're throwing a sudden Alice in Wonderland story. I thought I remembered seeing a blog post that the new estimated release date was first quarter 2019. That may have changed thought. The final episode of Bendy and the Ink Machine is out. I'm sure everything will have a neat resolution and not leave unanswered questions for a sequel bait.
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Oct 27, 2018 13:22
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davidspackage posted:Noticed recently that its name got changed to Alice's Lullaby though, and I remember seeing a trailer that suggested they're throwing a sudden Alice in Wonderland story. Not sure on that, but I remember when the game was getting a lot of it's 'first episode' or whatever buzz, a bunch of people did complain about the name coming off crummy, having 'albino' framed with horrible worm people.
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Oct 27, 2018 15:18
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Sakurazuka posted:They remember FEAR 3 That's more of an indictment of Steve Niles, to be honest. The man can't end a story to save his life. John Carpenter did the cutscenes and they were fine. But gently caress, he should have done the soundtrack, that'd have been awesome.
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Oct 27, 2018 15:22
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I beat this one on the stream last night, and aside from a few hilariously stupid kills it was a pretty  experience for everyone involved. Also free, if you want to for yourself. 1. Little Nightmares 2. OK/NORMAL 3. Unforgiving - A Northern Hymn 4. Rise of Insanity 5. Paratopic 6. Rusty Lake Paradise 7. Cube Escape: Paradox 8. INFERNIUM 9. Dead Secret 10. All Haze Eve 11. Welcome to Hanwell 12. Gray Dawn 13. The Last Cargo 14. Observer 15. Dark Deception 16. Cultist Simulator 17. House of Evil 18. Nevermind 19. CONCLUSE 20. Sagebrush 21. The Painscreek Killings 22. A Room Beyond 23. The Evil Within 24. Yomawari: Midnight Shadows 25. Dead Secret Circle 26. Disturbed: Beyond Aramor 27. Lucie    Dramatic twists can be amazing additions to any story, but they can’t be the entire story. Predicating your entire tale on an unexpected reversal threatens to sap the vitality from your characters and other plot beats, which is why they’re often avoided or discouraged. Lucie is a prime example of this phenomenon, a game that leans so heavily on its eventual twist that it seemingly forgets to develop the actual plot at all. What you’re left with is a jumble of creepy scenes and stiff enemies ushering you on to an ultimately disappointing reveal that makes you question what you just spent your last hour on. Presumably you play as Lucie, a young lass who finds herself in an extremely not-right mansion. The creaking floorboards and peeling paint hide terrible creatures who want nothing but the worst for her, and indeed the entire place proves to be one big deathtrap. Only by following the guidance of the dream diaries she finds can Lucie make her way to her goal and maybe find a way out of this nightmare world. The logic of the place makes it hard to know when she’s safe and who she can trust, so death will be her constant companion on this dark journey. I’m not kidding about that last part, either. Early on, you’re tasked with finding a snack for someone. There are two boxes you can search, one is visibly moving, and if you try to open it the game double-checks to see if that’s a good idea. Of course you’ll be viciously impaled if you open it, and that’s the game being nice to you. From that point on, every time you interact with something there’s a chance it’s going to decapitate you, incinerate you, crush you into jelly, or worse. There’s only the loosest logic to these instant death options, and only a proliferation of save points to keep them from getting too annoying to stomach. The other issue with Lucie is that, for its entire hour-long runtime, you’re not going to have a clue about what’s going on. The game starts you off right in the thick of things, with no proper introduction to anything and no real direction to follow. You proceed through the halls and chambers because they’re there, not because you have any reason to besides escape. At the very end of the game you get the big twist, which feels like a thin substitute for a story and may actually inspire more questions than it answers. Even now I’m pretty unclear on what happened or why I should care, and that’s after beating the thing in one sitting. I know there are good RPGMaker horror games out there, but this isn’t one of them. In terms of horror it deals too heavily in attempted jumpscares, sending shadowy creatures skittering around now and then. These sequences come too frequently, and suffer from some presentation issues that sap them of their power to terrify. The graphics and sounds are only competent, and if you’ve played any amount of indie horror games before you’ll recognize more than a few of the encounters. Lucie ends up feeling like a passion project, a singular vision to build a game around one twist that leaves out too many other aspects of design to enjoy.
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Oct 27, 2018 16:25
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catlord posted:That's more of an indictment of Steve Niles, to be honest. The man can't end a story to save his life. John Carpenter did the cutscenes and they were fine. Like Halloween 2018 shown that he hasn't really lost his creative and visual flow and can still work in our lovely times to scare, but he probably doesn't know how games work to go about putting thought to code. Get him his kids to help make music and a good programing and writing team, he could probably make his own Until Dawn for pure spook or the video game equivalent of Escape from New York for like a RE4 kind of psycho action game.
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Oct 27, 2018 17:22
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quote:lovecraft chat have some audiobooks on youtube
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Oct 27, 2018 17:46
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Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8u8wZ0WvxI
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Oct 27, 2018 23:30
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I played Painscreek demo and there was totally a dude in robes watching me from a distance. Too spooky for me!
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Oct 28, 2018 06:28
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DrSnakeLaser posted:The final episode of Bendy and the Ink Machine is out. I'm sure everything will have a neat resolution and not leave unanswered questions for a sequel bait.
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Oct 28, 2018 10:49
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al-azad posted:I played Painscreek demo and there was totally a dude in robes watching me from a distance. Too spooky for me! The main character is hilarious though, because she can't climb over loosely hanging chain barriers, or move a chair to gain access to some drawers, but breaking into cars with a slim jim is her second nature.
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Oct 28, 2018 11:44
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SelenicMartian posted:My favourite thing about Painscreek is that I don't have the carry ten packs of camerabatteries. On one hand it really feels like a cheap Unity game held together by the most generic assets. I’m pretty sure it’s using the default first person controller and sound effects which make every footstep sound like you weigh 900 pounds. But it really is a detailed world that demands you pay attention and it nails the atmosphere of a comfortable but slightly off picturesque town.
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Oct 28, 2018 16:31
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Painscreek had a lot of atmosphere and yeah they get sleepy town right. I also completely dig their concept (investigate a dead town to find what happened) but it needed to be less linear and, most of all, needed to rely on more than diaries to tell most of its story. But while it had it's jank and sudden stupid twist in gameplay at the end , I still considered it a net positive. It really is for people who dig the concept tho.
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Oct 28, 2018 16:44
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I know the thread was pretty positive about Anatomy, but Kitty Horrorshow's Cathedral from the second Haunted Cities pack is also really, really good.
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Oct 28, 2018 17:16
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DrSnakeLaser posted:The final episode of Bendy and the Ink Machine is out. I'm sure everything will have a neat resolution and not leave unanswered questions for a sequel bait. Spoiler: It was a giant mess of a 'final' episode, you sit through like a 7 minute long opening scene that just meanders like crazy while the couple characters talk but don't really say anything, then the actual episode itself is like, maybe close to 30 minutes of gameplay in very samey environments with another agonizing fetch quest, capping off with an incredibly disappointing final boss that gets deus ex machina'd and then they fart out a sequel bait mid-credits scene. I know it's played out to say something "Sold out" 99% of the time, but I don't think I've seen a game sell out as hard to turn into a miserable youtube bait 'Hot thing' in a long while.
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Oct 28, 2018 17:23
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Ouch. Guess I ain't touching that series. I really hate weak-rear end endings like that.
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Oct 28, 2018 17:30
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Bendy and Hello Neighbor are the poster children of indie horror games that jumped the shark the moment they got a check put in front of them.
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Oct 28, 2018 17:44
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Cardiovorax posted:Ouch. Guess I ain't touching that series. I really hate weak-rear end endings like that. Gann Jerrod posted:Bendy and Hello Neighbor are the poster children of indie horror games that jumped the shark the moment they got a check put in front of them. It's a real shame too, because the one truly good thing about Bendy, throughout all the really stupid and bad design choices they kept making every new episode, the aesthetic never wavered, all the freaky visuals and ech sounds and stuff were on-point all the way through, but got so wasted on the bloated "experience" that Bendy eventually decided it wanted to be so they could hawk merch.
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Oct 28, 2018 17:53
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To be honest, until now, I didn't even realize it was supposed to be horror. "Bendy and the Ink Machine" sounds so much like a children's novel, I was expecting it to be something more like Mickey's Magic Castle type game. Funny what a difference names can make.
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Oct 28, 2018 18:42
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Gann Jerrod posted:Bendy and Hello Neighbor are the poster children of indie horror games that jumped the shark the moment they got a check put in front of them. Hello Neighbor is fascinating if for nothing else than the core setting becoming a twisted and overwrought metaphor of its own development.
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Oct 28, 2018 18:45
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That really sucks, the concept was just great. It sucks on another level because it reminds me of what was common with 90s summer blockbuster movies: a great concept gets wrecked because the focus was on merchandise and franchising instead of the script/actual experience. It's why the Marvel CU has been such a blessing: they focus on making each individual movie as good as it can be on its own, but sprinkle bits and pieces in they can exploit later; and even the lower-end of that franchise are still better as movies than some multimillion misfires (Thor 2 is a better experience than Wild Wild West or Emmerich's Godzilla). Hello Neighbor, meanwhile, is somehow getting an action figure line from Todd MacFarlane long after release so clearly this is a strategy that has yet to peak!
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Oct 28, 2018 18:49
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It will eventually. I'm sure a lot of us remember all the many merchandising lines associated with the various Power Ranger etc. knockoffs of the 90s that died quick and ignoble deaths because every last one of them was obvious garbage even when you were a kid. Gamers have notoriously awful taste and fiscal sensibility, but that kind of trend can't last forever and will just predictably result in a lot of merchandise ending up in tomorrow's attics' Cardboard Box of Shame again.
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Oct 28, 2018 18:52
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But now you can play the new and 'improved' Hello Neighbor that's an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game cause that seems to be a cool thing to do.
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Oct 28, 2018 18:54
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