Has the developer ever actually read an H.P. Lovecraft story?

[Mr. Lambert]

"You take on the role of Sanja, a young woman from the D'nyg race, as she explores a mysterious land in search for her sister, Dajana." NO, NO, NO, NO.

[DarthMagnolia]

"Has the developer ever actually read an H.P. Lovecraft story?"

Yes I have.

From the store page: "The Nightmare from Beyond is a cosmic-horror third person platformer inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft."

I actually covered this in a dev blog a long time ago. "Inspired" means I'm talking concepts and elements from different stories (with special interest in The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow over Innsmouth). "Inspired" also means an original story, rather than making the story of Lavinia Whateley, for example.

To be fair, what you said could be said about other games:
In The Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth you literally gun down Dagon on a boat.
In Bloodborne you play as a customizable hunter (you can even make it a purple female) and you can kill Outer Gods, and buy stuff with your insanity points.
In Amnesia, the insanity caused by looking at unnamable horrors is removed by taking a medicine or solving a puzzle.
In Darkest Dungeon the insanity can be lowered using various means.
In Cthulhu Saves The World, well... you get the idea...

In general, anything combat oriented would be a big NO-NO. It'd need to be something along the lines of Life Is Strange, Dreamfall, or Amnesia (without the insanity issue I mentioned). Comedy games are a NO as well.

So, to me, making the main character character not a scholar nor a man of science, but an alien female, is not a problem as long as I focus on other things: not being able to kill Outer Gods, permanent insanity effects, cults, etc.

[Mr. Lambert]

Lovecraft never once had a protagonist from a mystical race, not even remotely close (or even a human female protagonist come to think of it). The main character being an Elder Thing or Great Old One or Mi'Go or whatever the heck your protagonist is supposed to be just completely misses the point.

[DarthMagnolia]

Going back to my examples above. I can't recall a Lovecraft story where you gun down a Deep One, nor I can recall a Lovecraft story where the protagonist cures his insanity after solving a puzzle, drinking some medicine or going to a brothel.

So the protagonist not being human misses the point (or more specific, a human male), but the protagonist being a human hunter (male or female) that can kill Outer Gods is just fine? In general what are your thoughts on the games I mentioned? Are they good, or do they also miss the point completely? I'd assume they do miss the point, for the reasons I described.

The main character in this game is not an elder thing, is not "mystical" (whatever that even means to you), nor an old one. She's an alien. There's a big difference between being Yog-Sothoth's long lost sister and being a being from a planet that is not earth. A D'nyg is not an Old One, nor an Outer God, nor a Deep One, nor a Mi'Go. A D'nyg is an alien race just like any of the thousands (if not millions) of races that could be part of the cosmos.

Nowhere in the game description it is stated that the protagonist is a Great Old One.

And now that you mention the Mi'Go. They are colonizers, so to be colonizers there must be races other than human to be colonized. What is the purpose of having super-colonizers when humans are the only races to colonize?

If your problem is that the protagonist is not human, then I have to say that, to think that the protagonist ought to be a human, in a mythos where humans are only a part of the entire cosmos (aliens being also a part of it), is to give humans a more importance than they deserve, and that goes against cosmicism, because cosmicism is about humans being meaningless in the entire cosmos.

If your problem is that the protagonist is a female, well, she's female because I like female protagonists. Lovecraft made white male scholars as their protagonists for his own subjective reasons, not "to fit a point", just like I am making mine a female simply because I want to.

By the way, Wilbur and his brother exist because Lavinia, a female, had sex with Yog-Sothoth. Make Lavinia a man and you have no story.