The story of Arkham and the inhabitants goes places I didn’t expect and while it does suffer from the usual pacing issues of role-playing games that its abundanct quests are often plagued with, it was never enough to prevent me from pressing forward to try and solve the next mystery that would hopefully explain what the Hell was actually going on. By extension, the writing in Stygian feels far more organic, not tempered or limited to sticking to a specific storyline, which has the added benefit of making the game’s events far more surprising. The game does the smart thing of not directly trying to adapt any specific Lovecraft story but rather meshing them all together and forming its own unique narrative. It’s on that front that Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones perhaps best adapts Lovecraft’s mythos, if you’re willing to be frustrated with just how pathetic you feel in the grand scheme of things.Ī traditional Role Playing Game ™ of sorts, Stygian allows players to either start with a predetermined character or build their own as they attempt to solve, or just survive amidst, the mystery of the town of Arkham which has been rudely trapped between two plains of existence. They should be small and weak, as insignificant as everyone else in comparison to the alien deities surrounding us. Players shouldn’t be able to hide from Cthulhu, they shouldn’t be able to whip out a revolver and kill the horrific monstrosities roaming around them. I’ve always thought it was difficult to really replicate the themes of the cosmic horror Lovecraft put forward in his stories because…well, how do you even approach that in a video game? Most games that deal with Lovecraftian themes give you some means to fight back or hide from the torrent of alien forces just existing in a world that was previously unseen, but that defeats the point. It’s been a heck of a year for Lovecraft games, huh? Given the (relatively) recent growth in the appreciation of that old racist codger’s fiction, I suppose it shouldn’t really come as a surprise that so many different developers are offering up their own takes on the Lovecraftian mythos, and it’s even less of surprise that many of them just don’t quite stick the landing.
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