The Cthulhu Mythos plays on two simultaneously opposed and interconnected
forces. First, there's the
insurmountable drive of human curiosity, the desire to explore the world around
us an uncover the mysteries that surround us.
The instinctive drive to explore that saturates our instincts, our social
values, and our professional motivations is a pretty essential part of existing
as a person. But Lovecraft plays that
off of the mounting, cumulative pressure of traumas we accumulate baggage from
these explorations, illustrating an exchange where as we uncover new aspects of
the world around us, we acquire scars, injuries, physical and emotional, that
weigh us down and keep us from engaging with the world. These injuries either force us inside ourselves,
turning us into isolated, hostile, gibbering madmen, or they undo us, resulting
in our literal destruction. This
relationship is fairly subtle and subtextual in its execution, not a pair of descriptors
I'd usually assign to Lovecraft's writing, and it's easy to miss amidst the
slough of unnecessary details packed into each and every story, or the
circuitous, oft interminable prose that Lovecraft uses as a method of
delivery. But underpinning Lovecraft's
writing, and as a result the fictional universe he generated, is a notion that
our drive to explore is equivalent to a drive towards self destruction, that
our journey towards knowledge will eventually undo us.
It's kind of a pity, then, that the video games that draw
from Lovecraftian inspiration tend to ignore this duality in their
practices. Rather than tempering the
drive to explore that nearly every genre of games instinctively foments in its
player base with serious consequences for exploration, most story-heavy
Lovecraft games make exploration absolutely necessary (as in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
and Alone in the Dark) or strongly
encouraged (as in the Alone in the Dark
franchise reboot). It's rare to see a
Lovecraftian game that gets the fundamental conflict between our drive to
explore and the psychic scarring knowledge and experience leaves upon its
seekers, and rightly so; the latter, on its face, discourages sustained play
and encourages players to get in, get out, and move on to the next game. That's generally not something you want when
you're making an object you want people to interact with for a sustained period
of time. You want them to mull it over a
while, figure out what's going on with this thing you've built, and do
something interesting with it.
Eldritch deftly
manages this duality without discouraging playability, or replayability for
that matter, in its execution. To the
uninitiated, Eldritch is an indie
darling, fresh off a rapid development cycle, released along with an insightful
narrative of its own creation by former 2K Marin designer David Pittman, combining
elements of survival-horror first person games with the difficulty curve and
feedback response framework of a rogue-a-like.
That strange miasmic creation was packaged in an engine reminiscent of Minecraft's blocky pixel reality and set
squarely in a faithfully re-created Lovecraftian worldscape, populated mostly
by creatures from the Lovecraft mythos, almost all of which can kill you very,
very quickly.
Given that frame, it might sound like Eldritch is an edgily precise game, but that couldn't be further
from the truth: Eldritch is loose,
not in the sense that it asks players to move quickly and act recklessly, but
rather in the sense that it prevents players from making slow, measured,
precise decisions: it's a game about identifying shifting conditions and
adapting to meet them as quickly as possible.
It's also a game about those adaptations failing, more often than not,
and you dying, quite terribly, as a result.
It is, fundamentally, a game about things going wrong as your ambition
grows.
See, Eldritch is a
parsimonious game. There are really only
four resources you need to keep track of: health (which occasionally increases
thanks to magic fountains found in the depths, and is sometimes restored by
eating delicious fruit and baked meats, and is constantly taken away by rampant
fish people), bullets (which are fired by guns and you'll never really have
enough of), keys (which open locked doors, duh), and artifacts, which can be
used to buy other resources, pieces of gear from the occasional stores you run
into, and cast spells, acquired at random from statues in the underground
dungeons. The aforementioned gear is
limited too: you have three slots for equipment, with very particular limits
and functions. You'll find this gear
mostly in shops, which means you'll be constantly asked to balance your
equipment needs with your ability to use magic.
This tightly interconnected economy of resources, where
everything comes back to the set resource of "artifacts," encourages
exploration. Without artifacts you're in
trouble. But, at the same time, as
potential dangers mount, it becomes less and less worthwhile to hunt down
artifacts. If you have to dump twelve
bullets and 20 artifacts of spells into some baddies in order to clear out a
treasure room with 15 artifact pieces in it, you're not making much headway,
but, with procedurally generated dungeons, there's really no way to know if
you'll end up finding 5 artifact pieces, 15, or 50 until you check an area out,
which almost always means dealing with the threats along the way, and in the
area as well.
The end result is possibly one of the most true-to-Lovecraft
gaming experiences I've ever had.
Exploration is necessary in order to progress. At first it's easy and consequence
light. During the first few levels, enemies
are a breeze to deal with, meat and fruit are everywhere, and treasure is a
regular occurrence. Sometimes you'll
find heaps and heaps of artifacts just lying around in rooms guarded by nothing
more than a locked door. But on the
bottom floor of the first dungeon, a meager three levels in, you'll probably find
yourself running for your life from an indestructible shoggoth while you
desperately try to find the Soul you need to unlock the book to get the fuck
out of the dungeon. That exploration,
made necessary in order to progress in the game, is tinged with the knowledge
that if you die (or, to frame that differently, if you deplete your precious
health resources) you'll lose all the progress you've gained: no more bullets,
no more super-destruco amulet, or springy boots, or invisibility spell. There
are some banking mechanisms for progress, but they barely mitigate the sting of
death. Exploration is always a tense,
necessary calculus, where you're forced to ask yourself: is it worth it to see
if something valuable is on the other side of this wall? Or should I just keep looking for a way
out? The deeper you descend, the less
you'll need fresh supplies, hopefully.
Unless you make a mistake, which you almost certainly will, leading to a
tense search through spike filled chambers as you pray that Star Spawn don't
wake up around you before you get a few extra globs of health so you can make
it to the bottom and grab that third soul before everything goes to shit and you
end up having to start the whole god damn shitfest over again.
It's a funny parallel: as you acquire more, exploration not
only becomes less worthwhile, but riskier.
The deeper you delve, the more you have to lose, and the more likely you
are to lose it. Tied to a combat system
that, while sloppy, deftly combines tension and adorability, Eldritch is a very lo-fi game with a
very well crafted feedback loop in place, and there's something unique about
the whole set of interlocking systems.
Normally, progress peaks and systems become basic or easy to manipulate,
but Eldritch remains a harsh
mistress, even after you've apparently mastered everything that's going on under
the hood. It's punishing, but in a way
that seems totally appropriate, fair, and compelling.
It's far from perfect, to be sure. I've found a combination of items that
effectively break the game: a medallion that lets me demolish walls with
bullets, a kit that lets me resurrect myself using a hefty sum of artifacts,
and a pair of boots that negate falling damage and keep nasty overhead spikes
from crashing down on me. With these
items even the nastiest situations can be resolved by pointing at the floor and
shooting my way down. But amassing this
combination of equipment is hit or miss, learning how to use it took time and
effort, and if I want to get "the best" ending, I've got to discard all
of it and fill my item slots with useless trinkets that literally just take up
space and make the game harder. And of course
I want the best ending. Because while
Eldritch is a complex dichotomy of a game, it is singularly compelling. It's always keeping me striving, learning its
systems, mastering them and then, eventually, learning that my assumption of
mastery was far from true as some horror from the deep rips me to shreds so I
can get back up, dust myself off, and descend again.
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