“No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of bad video games,” is something horror writer and nerd culture icon Howard Phillips Lovecraft may well have said had he lived to see the invention of the modern computer. Though he met his bleak end before the Second World War began, he had quite a few morbid ideas concerning the human condition which are still prevalent in media to this day.
His influence has been felt in all artistic realms, but perhaps most prevalently in the world of video gaming. His unique brand of cosmic horror is difficult to convey on anything save for the page, but some developers have managed to accurately translate the essence of his existential, eldritch terror to a digital format to great effect.
There aren’t all that many games based explicitly on the Lovecraftian mythology, but there are plenty of titles out there which seek to capture his signature motif of cosmic dread and the horror of the infinite. It is true that many have misused or misunderstood his ideas in the past—Cthulhu was never meant to be a plushie—but these ten games definitely get it right.
