Well done weaving The King in Yellow into THAT quest

[rane]

I understood the reference!

[Casus Belli]

I WEAR NO MASK

[rane]

No mask? No mask!

[IlluminaZero]

Honestly I hope that there is a deep dive analysis of the ending at some point since while I feel I could infer a lot of the themes I suspect there are many fine details that are just going over my head.

Doubly so with the fate of the companions. Like... Ebin is "why?"

Although to be real I tend to find this concept of "cosmic horrors that make you insane at a glance" to be a bit overstated. Doubly so when we can actually "see" it and go "cool bro, can I beat you up now?"

[Cahalith]

Originally posted by IlluminaZero:

Although to be real I tend to find this concept of "cosmic horrors that make you insane at a glance" to be a bit overstated. Doubly so when we can actually "see" it and go "cool bro, can I beat you up now?"

I feel the King in Yellow bit worked well as a cosmic horror reference precisely because we aren't shown the crucial bits and even the text describes how you can't recall most of the play.

I think you're right about the whole "turn insane as soon as you look at it" theme. It's just hard for us to imagine people having that reaction because we've already seen so much weird stuff visually represented in games, movies, comics, art etc. It's probably easier for early 20th century people like Lovecraft to believe that looking at Cthulhu rising from the waters would turn you insane immediately. People were still very unfamiliar with depictions of that, while for us, it's almost cliche at this point.

One thing that always stuck with me (from The Call of Cthulhu, I think) was the written description of impossible (non-Euclidian) geometries. That's something that I could believe might unhinge a human mind, but it's also impossible (?) to represent visually. Writing definitely has the upper hand as a medium here.

[rane]

Are you actually expecting the game to mind violate you, the player? Get real.

Cosmic Horror as a genre always worked best low-key, not with anything shown directly to you, the consumer, but with implications, suggestions, and understatements. Consider The Thing - on paper it's just a fleshy blob monster that gets blown up and burned down just fine, but it's also so much more.

Directly messing is more of a surreal horror staple. There is some overlap (In The Mouth of Madness for instance) but it's not really necessary for either to work well.

And ending not being very good for the protagonist? That's perfectly fine. It never is a happy ending type of story; if it were, it wouldn't be cosmic horror.