Working off a different computer to write this header due to inexplicable technical mishaps, happy Monday, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
The latest game I’m reviewing is Menace of the Depths, a roguelike deckbuilder. It is, like many modern games, very enamored with the work of H.P. Lovecraft, the most prominent of America’s weird fiction writers. Now, I enjoy the aesthetics of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods well enough—I find his actual prose as long-winded as it is racist, which is to say it’s extraordinarily and frighteningly long-winded—but my appreciation for Cthulhu is dwarfed by that of seemingly every other indie game developer.
Now, there are a lot of kinds of weird fiction; Lovecraft wasn’t even the only person working in the genre in his time. And there are also a lot of kinds of what we’ve come to collectively call “Lovecraftian,” even stuff that isn’t actually part of the Lovecraft canon. Eldritch doesn’t only need monsters from the sea. But today, we’re focusing on the specifics. I don’t want anything that can be called “eldritch,” anything that’s just unknowably evil, anything that fits in the genre, any kind of weird fiction that has the temerity to do something unrelated to a fossilized racist. No. Today, I want to hear your favorite, explicit, maybe even name dropped Lovecraft references. Because if I’m gonna be honest, I want to enjoy it more. I want to engage with it more. Some recommendations would not be bad.
And, of course, what did you play this weekend?