Any ideas on which Lovecraft works this is inspired by?

[Bogart]

As above.

[Searanox]

At the Mountains of Madness and Dagon are just two. There's also references to people and objects such as Elder Signs, The King in Yellow, C'thulhu, and more. Being well-read in Lovecraft helps you spot more references throughout the game.

[Bogart]

Nguyên văn bởi Searanox:

At the Mountains of Madness and Dagon are just two. There's also references to people and objects such as Elder Signs, The King in Yellow, C'thulhu, and more. Being well-read in Lovecraft helps you spot more references throughout the game.

Thank you mate.

[Shufflecat]

The arctic city comes from "At The Mountains of Madness".

The Conarium device is strongly implied to be a derivative tech of the resonator device from "From Beyond", and appears to replicate the Yithians' time displacement ability from "Shadow out of Time".

The lizard men and their underground cities are from "The Nameless City". They don't physically match the description, but the general intent is pretty obvious.

Note that the arctic city and the lizard man cities were made by two different species in two different epochs, and are not connected/related. In the game I'm not sure how clear that would be to people unfamiliar with Lovecraft's stories.

IIRC there are some other big ones, but I'd have to replay it to refresh my memory.

[Bogart]

Nguyên văn bởi Shufflecat:

The arctic city comes from "At The Mountains of Madness".

The Conarium device is strongly implied to be a derivative tech of the resonator device from "From Beyond", and appears to replicate the Yithians' time displacement ability from "Shadow out of Time".

The lizard men and their underground cities are from "The Nameless City". They don't physically match the description, but the general intent is pretty obvious.

Note that the arctic city and the lizard man cities were made by two different species in two different epochs, and are not connected/related. In the game I'm not sure how clear that would be to people unfamiliar with Lovecraft's stories.

IIRC there are some other big ones, but I'd have to replay it to refresh my memory.

Thank you very much sir!

[Shufflecat]

Hokay, just got through replaying the game. I hadn't played it since the first time around a year ago, so my memory was fuzzy.

Here's the most I could get:

The Elder Things, the "lighthouse" parts of the arctic city, and the "guardian" that chases you out of the desert underground city later on come from "At The Mountains of Madness". The "lighthouse" mechanisms are not from the story, but those rooms are the game's depiction of "pure" Elder Thing architecture. The "Guardian" is the most text-accurate depiction of a shoggoth I've seen in a video game.

The lizard people and their cities are from "The Nameless City". The desert city in the flashback near the end might even be the exact city from that story. In the original stories, they have nothing to do with the Elder Things, but in the game they found the Elder Things' Antarctic city and came both revere the Elder things, and build their own city on/into the ruins of the Elder Things' city. It's actually really cool IMO how you can see the two different architecture styles interleave and transition as you go deeper. Kudos to the devs for that.

I also like the inference that the Lizard people originated the five-point Elder Sign as part of their worship of the Elder Things. Believe it or not, despite the name and the pentalateral symmetry thing, those two things have always been completely unrelated in pop-culture Cthulhu mythos.

A map in Prof. Faust's study indicates he thinks there might be an entryway to Agartha (non-Lovecraft mythical "hollow earth") in Antarctica. This squares with the lizard people, as "The Nameless City" implies a hollow earth connection with them.

There are Cthulhu statues in some parts of these cities. Most notably right after the submarine ride. Probably from the lizard folk, as Elder Things are (in ATMoM, at least, IIRC) secularist.

It's unclear what the Lizard people's relationship with the shoggoth "guardian" is, as ATMoM depicts shoggoths as having absolutely zero chill towards anyone they even suspect of being Elder Thing related/friendly.

The conarium is definitely a variation of the resonator from "From Beyond", however it's not directly derived from it in-story. Dr. Faust invented it himself based on his own research, so if the resonator also exists in the game world's continuity, it's a case of parallel tech evolution.

The conarium's function is definitely a "Shadow out of Time" reference, but in the continuity/world of the game it's the Elder Things that used it for cross-time body-swapping, not the Yithians. It also seems to be capable of some degree of physical time travel, unlike in the story, as demonstrated by the 90's style computer printer and other anachronistic items of technology being in Faust's possession during the 1940's.

The floating creatures with humanoid upper bodies and 4 tentacles instead of legs are part of the "From Beyond" reference. They themselves are not from the story, but the fact that they come from another dimension, and are made visible to us (and we to them) by the conarium/resonator is straight from that story.

The bit about Dr. Faust and the protagonist having used the conarium to resurrect long dead people from their corpses so they can be interrogated for secret/lost knowledge is a reference to "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", in which a colonial-era mad scientist uses alchemical necromancy to do exactly the same thing for exactly the same purpose.

Dr. Faust's artifact collection, which he admonishes the protagonist to not allow anyone to see B/C it would be scandalous, is a mild reference to "The Hound". Much less scandalous than the personal museum in the story, but the conceptual DNA is there.

Speaking of which: this sort of mentor/protege, leader/follower bromance between two men of similar strange interests is a reoccurring element in Lovecraft's stories. Yes, I know what you're wondering. No, you're not the first to wonder it.

When seeing the continent map in the desert city, the protagonist makes a reference to "secret passages beneath Kephre's pyramid", or something like that. This may be a reference to "Entombed with the Pharaohs".

The mysterious sapient animatronic head device in Dr. Fausts room in the Arctic base might be a reference to "The Whisperer in Darkness". It's not Mi-Go tech in the world of the game (I don't think), but there's some notable parallels to the brain-in-a-can interfaces described in the story, and the bit written on the notes found on the nearby corkboard about "feeding it from a living brain" or something like that leans further in that direction. I think it's supposed to be the Mi-Go brain cylinder interface re-imagined as a telepresence rig for "conariunauts".

The cat that magically appears in the arctic base may be a "Cats of Uthar"/"Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath" reference. This is maybe a bit of a stretch. In the Dreamlands stories, cats are sapient and powerful, and the creature the cat turns into resembles a "moon beast"; a major dreamlands bad guy faction and enemy of cats.

A tape recorder found in the desk drawer of the radio room in the Antarctic base is a "Zaan 8000". This is a reference to "The Music of Erich Zaan".

I did not spot any clear references to "Dagon".

Non-Lovecraft references of note:

The use of a strange drug to unlock the conarium's full effect feels more like an Arthur Machen thing than a Lovecraft thing. The whole conarium procedure and its effects reads as as a mash-up of "From Beyond", "Shadow out of Time", and "The Great God Pan"[www.gutenberg.org].

The game is peppered with loose pages from the Voynich Manuscript[en.wikipedia.org] in the various laboratory settings, implying the plant the drug comes from is one of the mystery plants illustrated in the Voynich manuscript. There is what appears to be a single fictitious Voynich manuscript page in the study of Faust's home, depicting the exact plant you find in the underground Antarctic lab. It appears the game devs made a fictitious page instead of just using one of the unreal plants already in the manuscript so they could insert Lovecraftian-looking symbols into the text bits of the page.

Robert Chalmers's "The King in Yellow" appears as one of the books you can find laying about in the game, but nothing in the game's story itself appears to reference anything in the book. Still worth a read if you like any of the stuff you end up reading from the above, as it was a major influence on Lovecraft's writing, and has since been retconned into the mythos by fans.