dandelion

@dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Merging a western with eldritch horror, Blood West is awesome and now Steam Deck Verified⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  This reminds me of that Mythic Quest episode called “A Dark Quiet Death”, (spoilers ahead) about a fictional horror video game where users are vulnerable, have no way to fight the monsters, and only have a flashlight. After the video game is a surprise hit, the game studio increasingly crumbles to pressure to sell out, and subsequent sequels of the game increasingly cater to popular demands like that users can have a gun, then that users can actually kill monsters, and so on.

  Anyway, this video game claims to be an eldritch horror game, but it’s basically a FPS shoot-em-up with monsters in a western setting, the “eldritch” aspect is basically nothing more than superficial aesthetic at that point. Eldritch horror, like the video game in “A Dark Quiet Death”, is inspired by Lovecraft’s writing, which positions humans as defenseless insects relative to the horrors that are not only beyond human capacity to fight, but often even to comprehend. The role of a gun in a Lovecraftian context is mostly to show the hubris and futility of human attempts to overcome the horrors.

  All that said, this isn’t to suggest the game is wrong or bad, my thoughts are just about the deeper artistic ironies.