The scariest thing about Cthulhu is that he's not the scariest thing in the Cthulhu Mythos. Nyarlathotep, the Colour Out of Space, and Azathoth are all arguably much scarier.

What bugs me in anything outside of Lovecraftian mythos is that everything from games, fan fiction, and tv/films make Cthulhu out to be the biggest bad guy, the end all be all of the mythos. Which is far from the truth, He's not even the main villain in his book. Hell he's basically a human when you compare him to the outer Gods.

I can see one of the "good" endings now. You take a boat and find R'lyeh, waking Cthulhu and as He rises from the ocean your screen blots and glitches and then He looks at you causing your character to begin screaming, then the screen blinks in and out as your character bashes his skull onto the rail of the boat, then black for a few seconds and you open your eyes once more to see a giant eye a few feet away, staring at you, then black and cut straight to the main menu, no "the end," no credits, not even music.

Fun physics fact: most of the universe is made up of vast reserves of unknowable substances and strange energies we creatures of baryonic matter can’t see or interact with in any meaningful way. Now imagine if that wasn’t necessarily true in reverse, and that things living on the other side of the matter gap might start taking notice of that tiny 5% of the universe that encompasses human understanding. You’d essentially have yourself a situation where modern physics has proven Lovecraft to be totally right, and we’d never know until it was too late. Sweet dreams~

Actually Cthulu is supposed to be a physical creature, one that defies out understanding and sanity, but it is still a creature nonetheless.

Well, Bloodborne handled being able to kill Cthulhoid beings fairly well. Probably because the point is that you can kill individual Great Ones, but you're still always playing by the rules of other, greater powers, never fully in control of where your character goes. So the powerlessness and sense of smallness in the universe that Cthulhu represents is still present, despite being able to kill Great Ones. Also, the majority of people in Yharnam are fully aware of the Great Ones and worship them, which is very unusual for Lovecraftian horror, but it ends up working rather well in Bloodborne.

People: is Cthulhu a metaphysical concept or a literal being Lovecraft: yes

So it's like micro-transactions or EA games; You know they it exists but there's nothing you can do because it's a part of the game.

Would be a fun joke to make a Cthulhu in some game so that pissing it off crashes the game and gives you an error message along the lines of "Cthulhu melted down reality"

Sadly I think it may be too late for Cthulhu, his image has already been taken down like many well known horror icons. But I'm sure there's room for a new original creature, or even an old one that has flew passed the radar. :)

C'thulu is invincible Except for against steamboats He doesn't take steamboats well

In my opinion, explanations ruin horror in general. For example: You have a horror movie with a scary creature. Is it a demon? An alien examining human anatomy? Welp, I see you are very curious, so here's the solution to the mystery - It's ghost avenging his own death after being executed for a crime he didn't commit! Now, almost anyone familiar with horror movies - can agree that this is the part where the film becomes much less scary.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth did this pretty well. In that game you never even SEE Cthulhu! The only Old Ones you see are Dagon and Mother Hydra, and most Lovecraft stories seem to imply that those two are really just particularly old and massive Deep Ones than actual Old Ones. The only time you encounter Cthulhu's power is in a room where a Cthulhu statue stands, and the longer you stay in the room with the statue, the quicker your sanity meter depletes. You never get to see him, but being in the presence of a mere image of him is enough to drive the character insane.

they literally ram a boat into Cthulhu 's face and it tore its head apart. it did have an effect. Thats how they were able to escape to be able to tell the tale in the first place. What happened is that Cthulhu regenerated from the damage.

"Now, at my end, I can fully see. My last case opened in me a fear, a real fear. A fear of myself; of what I am, and what I've always been. All that I was is now lost. Hope? Purpose? Pleasure? All meaningless. I now walk in the shadows between worlds, and it is there that I have finally glimpsed what lives in the dark corners of the earth..." No one seems to remember the amazing game "Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth" a survival horror game, the first to use the sanity loss concept before "Amnesia: The dark descent" and most times makes you genuinely feel not in control of the situation. I love how loyal to the mythos logic has, I mean, in the game you never get to fight nor even see Cthulhu, only Dagon, Hydra and its cultists, but even being influenced by Cthulhu's dreams is enough to turn the main character mad and make him kill himself eventually...

Terraria does this the best. Not seeing him directly, yet living in a world after his influence has set it.

There's only one way to accomplish "fighting Cthulhu" in a game and that is when the "self empowerment" aspects carries you completely outside the realm of humanity. Your character would need to progress to a point where they are no longer human and that the rest of humanity is beneath your notice as much as it is for Big C himself. You may have had companions along your journey, but they are a distant memory and whether they are alive or dead and, if dead, by your hand or something else's, is something about which you absolutely could not care less. If you want to have a slobber-knocker with an eldritch horror, you must become one yourself.

So basically, Cthullhu is just a bad trip on Acid. You have no control, everything is fucked and you philosophically shit your pants as all reality draws to a close and you face infinite nothingness. Actually, I think that sounds more like a hit of Salvia! "...am I back?"

Friend: YOU KILLED CUTHULU!!! Hero: No, I bored him to death

Last summer I played an amazing D&D campaign revolving around a cult trying to summon an ancient being. We were set inside a train going through a long period in its journey where we were to far from any towns to bring aid. The way the DM went through the story truly captured that the ancient being wasn’t a really supposed to be a being, but something that was happening to us, unpreventable. The only thing we had control over was trying to stop the cult from summoning the being, and that sense on desolation felt like we as the players, the force behind D&D, were utterly powerless. I completely agree with everything said in this video.

Cthulu could have a health bar, that when you decrease it to zero, it could just not die, and instead, the health bar could go the other way.

"Make it so your choices don't matter." So...like a Telltale game? :^)

Bloodborne breaks your three rules from 4:14 onwards, and yet it remains one of my favourite games and the most true Lovecraftian horror game I've played.

To "beat" cthulhu is to stay sane for one more moment

"S I N C E W H E N W E R E Y O U T H E O N E I N C O N T R O L ?"

Cthulhu doesn't resonate with people anymore because unlike in Lovecraft's time we aren't only now coming to realize how insignificant we are. We know full well how insignificant we are are. Our age is more defined by discovering how we ARE significant.

Bloodborne did it right

You say this about Cthulhu, but this actually is the description of nearlethotep, Cthulhu is a great old one, not a god like nearlethotep.

A good idea from my side: never let the player find out that the world is based on the Cthulhu mythos, only by some small chance would they stumble upon someone mentioning them. For example, what Bloodborne did with the Moon Presence. it had been there the entire time, giving the player directions, controlling them. It had been there even before the player, ever since it created the hunt, the Dream and trapped Gehrman within. Probably, not even Gehrman knows of it. I don't remember the game ever hinting at simple peasants - like Gehrman used to be - knowing at all of the Great Ones. For example, when the prostitute whose name I'm too lazy to google gives birth to a Great One, she sees it for what it is - a monstrosity - and does not react like would, for example, members of the Church. Gehrman doesn't know how many hundreds of years have passed outside and that Ludwig is dead and gone to the Nightmare and Willem - close to dying. he knows there is something, because he knows to channel energy from the Moon. But he doesn't know what it is and what are its intentions

How about a deconstruction? Have the player character set out to destroy an eldritch abomination- and fail? Of course, the game isn't that simple. Things never are. You're an eccentric. Deluded. Perhaps just a little mad. A world traveller. You stop one night outside of Resolute Bay, an arctic settlement in Nunavut. Your wealth affords you the option of ignoring practicality, so you decide that you'll sleep as an Eskimo in an igloo (ignoring that this practice has long since been abandoned). Your dreams are tormented. You toss and turn, talk in your sleep, and can't get the words out of your head. Ph'nglui. Mglw'nafh. Cthulhu. R'lyeh. Wgah'nagl. Fhtagn. You hear the chanting words (Chanting? Yes, they are chanting, but not in churchgoer's voices) approaching. You can't see anything. A light grows in the distance. It's getting closer. You can almost see the shape that brings the light. It's huge... A voice (YOUR voice) gasps. Run. You need to get away. You awake panting, grateful to have an anchor to reality again. You've been sweating all night, and a hole has melted through the igloo. You thank your God that there are no wolves or bears nearby, as you just barely manage to make it to town before the sweat that lines your parka freezes you into a sparkling trophy for your rescue team. You start telling people about your dreams. Initially, they blow you off as another rich kid who's had a bit too much to drink, but as you get more and more insistent, indifference is replaced by anger. Why anger? Why are they... angry? Afraid? You wisely decide to reamin quiet and return home to the Louisiana bayou. You talk about your dreams again. Back home, everyone knows you and they know better than to risk incurring the wrath of your lawyers. But they don't know what you saw. That almost-perceived shape takes up every moment of your time. It's getting closer. You keep having the dreams. You want to know, you need to know, you DESERVE to know! But every time you cross that threshold we call sleep, a voice holds you back. Conscience, maybe. Sanity? No matter. The voice is getting weaker. You decide to pursue that object. You comb through libraries, you sift through scrolls and books that could very well have once inhabited Alexandria. At last, you find the words: Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh Wgah'nagl Fhtagn. There is a warning with those words. They translate from an unknown and nigh-unspeakable tongue into "In his house of R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming", and whomever hears these words slowly descends into feverish madness. Mere pages further, you read that this house, R'lyeh, is lost beneath the shifting waters of the South Pacific. At last, a location. You have funnelled untold riches into this expedition, and have managed to turn a fortune that rivalled Mansa Musa's into a debt to rival countries. It will be worth it, you tell yourself, for I and I alone shall rid the world of this monstrosity. You've read up on the mythos. Most dismiss the writings of Howard Philip Lovecraft as fiction, but your years of research have found accounts of his characters in mad scrawlings contemporary to most of recorded human history. It appears that since the Epic Of Gilgamesh, whispers of the Great Old Ones have occupied the margins of human writing. They all foretell our doom. The 'Call of Cthulhu' ends with the monster intact, and you know that it's a folly to try to kill it. And yet, you rationalize, all that the protagonist did was try to ram the beast with a ship constructed of mere wood. Decades of military advances separate you and the protagonist. Where force has failed, nuclear fire will not. And if that fails? the voice wonders. Well then You'll have to engage it yourself. A mental domination of sorts. You brought along a psychic for a reason, after all. In retrospect, you should have seen the madness creeping in. Had you kept a journal, at the very least you would have seen your own hubris. Instead, you brought a crew of eight of the smartest, fastest, strongest, and all-around best specimens of humanity you could find. Heroes of this age, you call them. Your submarine has spent the better part of a year searching for the famed city, and the dreams have plagued you all the while. Your crew would have killed you had they not also succumbed to the dreams. They begin to worship the almost-visible image. WORSHIP! You'll need them, though. You are not the first to search for R'lyeh, and you suspect you shall run into more than a few of your precedents. You'll just have to face Cthulhu alone. Your predictions were correct. You found R'lyeh, and meet the crazed explorers there. Your crew is attacked, and they help you to fend off the cultists. You proceed through the tunnels. You see tentacles in the backgrounds. As you turn to inspect them, they vanish. This isn't good. You're going mad. Your crew begins to turn.The cultists are getting stronger. Your crewmates mutiny. You can't let them live. You strip down your party to just you and the psychic. You find the dormant form of Cthulhu. You call down your vessel to carry your trump card: A thermonuclear bomb. It never makes it that far. Cthulhu stirs and swats the ship. If not for the fact that Cthulhu ay between you and the bomb, you would surely have been atomized. And yet Cthulhu looks no worse for wear. You fire off six rounds from your sidearm. Futile, yes, but one can hope. You need to subjugate Cthulhu, to take control of him. This would drive any mortal mad, but you've already filled that criterion. You struggle to retain any sense of identity as the eldritch monstrosity begins to wake. Mercifully, the connection is cut off as your psychic is killed by an errant swipe from the hulking slumberer. You flee. Amid the wreckage of decades of submersibles and submarines, you manage to find one left intact. You make yourself scarce, praying that Cthulhu shall see no reason to pursue. The cultists will not let you leave, but their idol does not share their fervour. You spend years of your life in an asylum, in fear for your life and screaming at shadows. Your rehabilitation is achieved after ages upon ages of therapy, but you know the truth. There is something else out there, and only you know what it is. Cut to a shot of the phrase "When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky..." from Call of Cthulhu. The protagonist looks up to the skies, and sees that the cosmos have shifted greatly in his years of absence. Once-familiar constellations no longer form the desired patterns. Shadows cut across the sky, briefly blacking out stars or portions of the moon. You point this out to passers-by, but they take no notice. You and you alone can see the form of Lovecraft's celebrated Great Old Ones taking form, and you are powerless to do anything. You crouch, clutching your head, then release and weep at the now blotted-out moon. Fade to black. Roll credits.

There is literally a game coming out in like 28 days, it’s about Cthulhu and you literally can do nothing about it and even looking at it in the game causes insanity.

The loss of control makes me imagine a weird concept you enter the typical spooky maze dark hallways and a mysterious voice guiding you but without realizing it the game takes away things a bit at a time you start out with custom messages to the voice then preset then small uncontrollable noises like huh and what and then not talking at all,you start having less control over the game and getting more descriptions in the end you realize you were in a concrete cube and every texture every mystery was carefully drilled into your head not by complicated things like vr but just a simple voice hence showing how powerless the human mind is

The real horror is that humanity has not even a hope of holding out against things like this. Cthulhu might not be the biggest threat out there, but no matter what we have no hope of ever withstanding him or the other elder things if they ever decide to squash us out. We're as consequential to them as a gnat is to us, something they wouldn't even think of for more than a few seconds after crushing into nothingness. All of humanity, all of life, all of the earth itself could be eradicated in an instant by the errant swipe of a terror from beyond the stars, and no amount of foresight or intervention could prevent it. The scary thing is, the real universe is like this. Life on earth has only managed to last so long in the universe because ultimately we are VERY lucky. The earth could have been bombarded with radiation and reduced to a lifeless husk eons ago, or destroyed in the planetary impact that created the moon. If we were too close or too far from the sun, we'd be a burnt out rock or a frozen ball of ice. We've faced several mass extinctions from huge meteors in the past, and even within the earth itself are things that could easily destroy us. Supervolcanoes, earthquakes, rare diseases (Ebola has NOTHING on naegleria fowleri), hell even the higgs boson could wipe us all out with little resistance. At the same time, the cosmic horror of cthulhu is a little dated because these days we don't think of our insignificance as a thing of horror, but rather something of wonder. It's amazing that the universe is so vast and exists on a scale we can't even fathom. It's fascinating that the earth has survived long enough for us to exist. That's perhaps the real reason why Cthulhu is becoming a killable enemy instead of the implacable horror he once was. In Lovecraft's time, going to the moon was inconceivable. Now it's practically a day trip for astronauts. We're preparing for commercial space flights, and readying for life among the stars. How can we fear that which we've come to know so much about? The answer is: we reveal that which we do not. Cthulhu and co. belongs there, lurking behind what scientists call "the black wall", the upper limit of our knowledge and comprehension as a whole. He is beyond space, beyond time, beyond any ability to quantify or define. To him, the universe is a plaything, and perhaps the time when we venture forth as a whole race to walk among the stars will be the time when he finally notices us, the little gnat buzzing in his ear. *swat*

If I had Cthulu as the big boss in a game, I would make the fight start with just a pitch black room that deals damage, but you can't see how. Every time you die, it gradually shows Cthulu as most people show it, but absolutely enormous. When it completely reveals itself, the controls completely randomize (would be pc only game) with all of the keys on the keyboard. Every time you die after that, it randomizes again and again. The only way to 'win' would be to quit and uninstall it. If you don't uninstall it after the fight, your computer will have faint traces of its presence in subtle sounds and by slowly darkening your screen or something. No idea how to do that, but it's the thought that counts :)

This was my first extra credits video! I came back to it a year later and it’s still as good as I remember!

I love this so much. I'm wanting to make a d&d one shot, and I want my players to lose. Lose horribly, but survive. And you bring up such good points that I'm going to try and use for said one shot.

I think that games could execute Cthulhu properly, but instead of an FPS game it should be along the lines of an "Amnesia" Game, a Horror/Mystery/Detective game. Where you basically are just learning and surviving, only to go mad in the end.

Hearing this and as a game designer I immediately think off creating a character where schizophrenia is the main focus and showing the world around them and how they react to it, mental illness is something that not alot pf people grasp or understand remotely so having a player deal with it throughout would give all of the senses you are talking about, disempowerment, to gain the feeling of lose of control and to asert that to the player I think showing a character across their life as schizophrenia really is something that stays with you and offers no real cure, only that things might not get worse faster. Just a quick thought.

I think Lovecraft's writing was so good becuase he understood that horror comes from the fear of the unknown, so he explains very little.

Thank you, dear mortals, for clearing this up.

The game "I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream" came pretty close to being the kind of game you are describing.

Then a year later, Bloodborne came out. Thanks From for listening!

Bloodborne: "Well, let me introduce my self"

why can't you play as him instead? id play that.

From what it seems, the only game that got Cthulhu done right is Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

Sunless Sea....I say no more. Bloodborne and all are good, but this...this would have made Lovecraft proud.

You venture under the sea in your vessel you see a ginourmous green squid like humanoid "Fire torpedoes" rolls a d20 "Nat 20!" They exclaim. "Miss" the Dm said

I wonder about the possibilities of doing a truly powerful-beyond-imagining Cthulu in your standard power fantasy game. Obviously the fear is a difficult (and maybe impossible) thing to instill there, but just imagine Cthulu as boss monster... whose model extends beyond the players' view distance. Perhaps the very surface you stand on is an awakening Elder horror, the temple crumbling around you as you flee. Does he have to have a health bar? Okay fine, you do 1 damage to it at a time. If you stick around long enough to deplete it, it just replaces itself with a new one.

So... Pacman then? It's unwinnable.

Sunless Sea and Fallen London do this really well as part of their extended lore. Despite not being part of Cthulhu mythos, it has a lot of cosmic horror built into the deeper story of the game that show how ultimately nothing you do matters. It's a reveal that's so deep in though that it would kind of be massive spoilers, even though it's freely explored in the newest game.

You make a great, compelling case, with the perspective of using games a another narrative medium that indeed has the potential to move us and take us by surprise. I hope that independent studios will take some of your awesome analysis and turn it into something real, even if it's improbable that major companies, usually more focused on giving us the commercial stuff that they know will sell, would do the same. Anyhow, great video. Both the original illustrations and the borrowed images went great with your exposition!

I guess I have to stop calling the Reapers "Giant Mecha Space Cthullus." But "Giant Mecha Space Cuttlefish" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

just imagine how yog sothoth and azathoth are even more powerful than cthulhu. human race is for cthulhu what cthulhu is to azathoth.

Hermaeus Mora seems pretty obviously inspired by Lovecraft’s aesthetic at least, and even though it’s very different, I think it works really well as a creepy eldritch monster. He is all knowing, not really an enemy or ally, and impossible to beat. Far far better than making such a thing the enemy.

The thing about cthulu is its sheer monstrosity. It's like "I have no mouth and must scream " you have no hope at all, it's existence is so other worldly, so uncomprehendingly powerful that everything you do means nothing and that the fact that you got this far is purely by eldritch design. You are there because they want you to be. And you will die because it is their design and you will fail. That is what cthulu is.

I think Alan Wake did a pretty good job on Cthulhu, the game feels like you're going more mad the deeper you go, and your victories don't matter much long term

How about in a game, if you DO fight Cthulhu, nothing works. You try shooting it, the bullets just bounce off. You try hitting it, but you end up hurting yourself. In the fight, Cthulhu would be bigger, stronger, more powerful in every way, so in the end, you just can't win.

What about Dark corners of the earth? You "defeat" the avatar of Dagon and Hydra in this dimension But You didn't even see Cthulhu you just know that HE is there And that HE is coming If we get pass the bugs and add some patchs Is the best adaptation of Cthulhu Mythos to videogames

I remember really liking Call of Cthulhu, the adrenaline when the guys are behind you in the hotel damn

my favorite way to do cathulu with a life bar is when that lifebar does not go down at all

This video reminds me of an old discussion I had, about "Why the Lady of Pain has no character sheet and why she should never have one" If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up Planescape and Planescape: Torment

0:45 That’s freaky.

Dude this is an awesome analysis, I love your work

I think Cthulhu doesn't and flat out can't work in a game in any form. I'm a heavy tabletop RPG gamer and I have a strong dislike for Cthulhu. Why? Because it goes against the very nature of RPGs, which is that no ending is written in stone. In virtually every game of Cthulhu I've ever heard of, by the end, every character is either dead or mad. So you can never win. Now it's not the lack of winnability that bothers me, it's the fact that the end is determined before you begin. I never want to play a tabletop RPG where that is true.

So darkest dungeon?

You make sense and all, but remember cthulhu doesn't have infinite power. He is still beatable. Some games ascend you to a strength as mighty as their own. Keep in mind, we don't have to understand anything. All we have to do is have the raw power to defeat him.

In a way doki doki literature club made a game where your actions meant nothing and you lacked control

It's a very good point, but I think Cthulhu isn't a great example from the mythos (aside from the fact his name is the most widely recognized). Cthulhu was a fairly "ordinary" entity. The Elder Things weren't much intimidated by him, and he got his head knocked in by a yacht, for pete's sake. He was basically Lovecraft's Godzilla, a warning that nature contains things that will mess mankind up, but not especially uncanny. Cthulhu NOTICED humans and antagonized them, quite unlike the way humans ignore eyelash mites. The time-travelling Great Race were much more of an existential threat, or Azatoth the primordial, relentless chaos. But always remember that Lovecraft's foremost terror was miscegenation. Race-mixing scared him more than anything, the old bigot.

MOON LORD IS DEAFETED FUCK YEAAAAHHHH

*[Terraria intensifies]*

I want to see Guillermo del toro direct Cthulu movie

To make it truly powerful would be to have a massive game to play, and that Cthulu could be encountered, but in a different way for every single copy of the game, or at least only one outcome from a wide pool available. That way, should a player encounter it and try to discuss what happened and what they did, no-one else would find it and call them insane. It wouldn't even be Cthulu as we know it, but maybe a force that, say, destroys a village, only for the village to return later, or something equally powerful, in a way that leaves no trace later. Or, to REALLY get in the player's head, it could detect if there's some kind of streaming device and, if it's at all possible, not show that to the people watching the video, only to that actual player, or to be invisible should the player try and print-screen what they see. Of course, I'm not entirely convinced that would work, but imagine watching someone online break down at a screen that, to the people watching, has nothing happening on it, or freak out at a cow that looks like it's doing nothing but the player sees it grow exponentially in size and have the game turn dark and the cow explodes as something quickly vanishes and the cow just looks like it was killed using the player's sword.

Good video, but then there's the concern of breaking the immersion. Some monsters in games are just something to run from, and nothing else. What I would love to see is a monster than I can fight back against, but will quickly realize that all my actions against it is meaningless, and realize that I absolutely HAVE to run from coming to that "o sh**" realization.

A interesting game concept and something incredibly difficult to sucessfully pull off. I would say cuthulu is what a lot of horror games try to pull off but mostlu fail.

The whole idea of the Cthulhu Mytos is that we as human race are unable to even comprehend the power of the Cthulhu, even less fight it.

Cthulu is probably the wrong figure in Lovecraft's mythos to use in this video, since as the comments mention, you can totally knock him out with a yacht to the face. Now Azathoth, on the other hand...

Except we have a surefire weapon against Cthulhu. Steampowered ships. You say its to no effect but Big C goes back to sleep afterwards.

Totally agree. But... In the book "montains of madness", there is a mention of a conflict between cthulu and the primordials. And they didn't win, but managed to spare some land and keep cthulu's forces at bay. Somehow...

Dude you have know idea what you’ve done you have opened my eyes so wide my friend the widest they’ve ever been

Peppers make me feel inconsequential.

I want to make a game now, and have Cthulhu as a boss. But, when you beat him, someone goes up to you and tells you, "That wasn't him." Main character: "Wha- What do you mean?" "That wasn't the real Cthulhu. Did you honestly think that you would just be able to waltz up to the lord of madness, look him dead in the eyes, shoot him in the face, and be done with it? No, if so much as saw a glimpse of him, you would instantly either die or go insane, as your mind would rip itself in pieces, shatter." Then, if you try to disagree with him and claim Cthulhu is weak or something, all of a sudden, the roof starts getting torn off. When you look to see what's happening, all *you* can see (as in you the player, not the main character) is a mass of black tendrils coming from the heavens. Then, either the game freezes, or the picture starts getting shaken with some sort of color effect changing the colors at random, before the picture simply shatters and the game crashes. You sign back in, and when you get back to the title screen, it shows a special message saying, *".negnin hsiloof, em gnitbuod rof teg uoy tahw s'taht"* And then you find a body next to your spawn point that looks exactly like your character, except they look like they were driven insane right before death, where you find a journal. It'd all be pure madness, with a few distinguishable lines. Things like, "It's all meaningless. Life is a lie. Reality is insanity. Mortality is the ultimate weakness not even the mightiest or most righteous can push past. The universe is only a drop in terms of knowledge. *He is real. He is coming. Never doubt. Lest ye end up lost in your own asylum that becomes of your mind.*"

My Amazon music randomly started playing, and I thought your background music was a song by Yes called The Ancient/Giants Under The Sun, and I thought that was perfect haha.

I would personally have the game take control of the human, giving the player the goal to try to escape from madness, just enough to let them kill themselves. Story writing for this would be hard and giving them the power to leave might be too much. Multiple endings, one in which you kill those you care about, and the other in which you can die first might be interesting to make? 🙂

I'd have it that the moment you see C'thulhu, you lost. Your character starts moving irradically, not responding to the controller

Too bad he didnt do this episode after bloodborne came out

I had a game idea wear you are a scuba diver and you find the temple of Cthulhu and you see a tentacle then you go back to the surface and when everyone you tell a about it says your insane.

I was thinking of something similar to that in the sense where your character tries to prove their control only to go mad at the end

This summed up what is wrong with horror games in general. The games will put you in a frightening situation, but then they'll give you some way to "beat" the horror, making you complacent. The fact of the matter is that I'm not scared of a zombie if I can shoot it in the head. Nor am I afraid of a monstrous boss if I can level up enough XP to kill it. Because that gives me a sense of empowerment, and empowerment isn't scary. *Disempowerment* is scary.

from what I've played of Dark Corners of the Earth, I feel that game did this quite well, as a player I always felt weak, I may have had weapons but they were generally ineffective and I felt should only be used as a last resort. I never had the feeling I was trying to win in that game, only that I was trying to survive, to escape the hell I had mistakenly tumbled into, as my character starts hallucinating, both audible and visible, and becomes some what harder to control, I feel less empowered and more afraid.

Buddy you are helping me figure out how to run an insanity dnd

I appreciate this. As a DM toying with the idea of introducing a GOO as an imposing presence in my over arching campaign, this ideology has helped me look at this in another light, and could push my campaign in an all new direction. Much thanks!

ya, i have no health-bar... deal with it

All of this is said, and I agree that this would make a really cool idea, but I hear lack of control and choice, and that gets me thinking: Would people understand the subtlety of this fear? Or would they simply get mad and call the game "linear", accusing the game of not having any meaningful choices? Would people understand that the whole idea of Cthulu is being so insignificant that anything and everything that you do is meaningless to the point that you'd be better off not doing it? It would definitely make hardcore H.P. Lovecraft fans happy, but what about everyone else? It's not even a matter of people buying the game, it's people respecting your decision to do this to a game revolving around Cthulu, and understanding why you chose this path instead of having choice in this game.

thanks for them links to the musics you used. very nice.

You say he is a non physical character and then you say he is, also they did damage him in the book, but his hp is to high, I would make it so they can “kill” Cthulhu but he just respawns, and with such high Hp that you can’t really damage him, so. By the way H.P. Lovecraft said that Cthulhu was a great old one, not a god, meaning he is a physical character, however nearlethotep is who you are really talking about, he is what you are saying, Cthulhu is very much mortal, he is just a great old one, he can be killed, he is the priest of the great old ones. Cthulhu has powerful regeneration ability, he can be killed or at minimum held off.

*At the Mountains of Madness spoilers* In "At the Mountains of Madness", there are clearly Cthulhu spawn referenced, so Cthulhu is indeed a creature, if not a race.

On the subject of questioning the characters' sanity, there's a brilliant moment in Silent Hill 3, where Heather mentions the monsters she's been killing, and the man she's talking to says "Monsters? They look like _monsters_ to you?" Turns out he's yanking her chain, but it was a real OMFG moment.

A good example would in Skyrim, the daedric prince Haermaeus Mora. When you search for knowledge, he gives it to you, but its pursuit makes you go insane. Also the futility at trying to keep him at bay or even keep knowledge from him as you fall deeper and deeper into despair or simply accept your fate.

thanks for part of a game idea!