H.P. Lovecraft Lives Inside Your Computer

Commenting all new AG videos until he talks about RTS
Comment # 2

Here is a radical notion... It is possible to make a video about Lovecraft or his work without mentioning that he was racist.
Shocking, I know.

Elden Ring sneaking in a PT-esque dungeon that seems to loop back on itself made me feel far more insane than most Lovecraft-inspired games.

uncanny reationship with technology? what are you talking about, thas just not knowing enough stuff, assembly for example isnt impossible to understand, but just extremly basic and annoying to actually use directly. Claiming that a Programmer cant understand assembly is ridiculus, no idea how it works? are you kidding me, maybe you should stop calling yourself the architect of games then

das unheimliche doesnt literally translate into the unhomely. unheimlich basicly just means scary in german

I think it's odd that you haven't mentioned Control in some places that would have fit well into what you're saying. The other one that seems like a glaring hole in a discussion of video game Lovecraft style presentation is Eternal Darkness on the GameCube.

"all computers are eldritch artefacts" as a programmer, I fully agree with every word here

Cosmic horror works when it screws with your sense of reality. The trouble is that it needs to screw with your sense of reality, not just the characters', and in games, the story is usually quite separate from the gameplay, and the gameplay is what you're really invested in. So messing with the character doesn't achieve much

I feel like most games that use lovecraftian elements are only using it to screw with the characters: if the player character's wife turns out to secretly be an octopus monster, then that'll really screw with the character, might even drive him insane, but it doesn't have much effect on gameplay so it doesn't mess with the player much

But if the healthbar disappears and the game seems to glitch? that's when you're gonna actually mess with the _player_'s sense of reality

Hey I just wanted to let you know that going through my subscriptions, I realised your videos haven't been recommended to me for a couple months now and I must admit I forgot about your channel till I stumbled upon it clearing my subscription list. Yes, bell was on.

zelda mm does this to

I’m not sure if I’m getting it right, but I got a similar feeling from Rain World, multiple times. The whole game feels odd for a survival Speculative Biology-based game, as the creatures and environment are very wrong in many ways. The birds are giant masked vultures width tentacles instead of wings, flying using gas jets. The environment is industrial and abandoned, getting more decayed the further east you go. A whole region is always dark, somehow. Finding out the truth is perhaps worse.

Even the animation and behaviors, while impressive, feels strange. Nothing moves like sprites should. It’s organic, tripping and walking far too realistically. Enemies will ignore you, attacking other enemies.

Everything he’s mentioned about the wonder flowers doing have been done in previous Mario games😂

It's very obvious that H.P. Lovecraft was a Gamer. He named his cat after the Gamer word.

"hates people" lovecraft

sonic being an "S tier racist" is something I thought I would never see from an Adam Millard video but here we are.

I would like to take this up and talk about the theater. Because everything is possible in the theater, EVERYTHING. You think theater is just a movie happening live then you've never been in a play where the person sitting next to you - watching the play suddenly fakes a heart attack - and that's part of the play which then becomes a detective story where people from the audience are interrogated even those who really paid for the tickets.

This is some 4th wall breaking.

I known it doesn't come off directly as a lovecraftian game (or even as a "true" horror game), but the way that Katana Zero handles its backstory and the drug Chronos really taps into the unnerving and uncanny in a way I haven't seen many games do.

this video was absolutely amazing!!! it expanded the way i look at art which is completely invaluable, thank you so much :)
ALSO if anyone has any music that utilizes this lovecraftian style of horror please let me know!!!! im really interested in pushing music in this direction

I had really hoped you would have used some of the electromagnetic static monsters from S.O.M.A. especially since you had already used one clip from the game in the start of the video.
I think the ultimate example of this Lovecraftian Horror in technology are the algorithms that control everything we see online.

I have often joked about this in the following way:
"The Faceless Judge decides what may be, and what may not.
Some utterings cross this mystical boundary.
For safety reasons it is encouraged not to openly utter these, or your voice may be undone."

the description of "My House" sounds like its inspired by the novel House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski and not so much HP lovecraft. Sounds super cool ill have to check it out

shadows over innsmouth was written in 1930, in a period where you could be mistaken into thinking Mr. H was a swell guy.
Plus swastika isn't exclusive to nazis, it's a religious and peace symbol in eastern countries.

Trying to "link" nazism as we know today on Lovecraft is not a fun fact, the guy was a paranoid racist... in 1930 america, Black people were treated better in Nazi Germany than they were in America at the time.

unhomely is NOT the proper translation of the word Unheimlich, the actual translation is "eerie" and/or "spooky".
also the word Unheimlich has not much to do with the word Heim (meaning home), they just look similar.

He mentioned Oneshot!!!

Lovecraft was a good writer and in later life regretted and recanted his earlier world views (these skewed values were most likely originally instilled by those around him and society at that time - context). Why even mention the second (and not looking into it further before making statements) and where did the first come from?

get him out of there

One of my favourite bits about cosmic/eldritch horror is that, before ramping up, it can be really subtle with how wrong something is, so only the observant and/or knowledgable will notice it
Here's an example from MyHouse.WAD (Which I learned from Power Pak): The house has two floors. A main floor, and a basement floor. While that might not sound weird to you or me, people who know a bit about Doom and its engine will know that that shouldn't be possible. Doom's engine takes a 2D map, and projects it to make a 3D space
You can't have a room on top of another room. The engine is incapable of doing that
It's such a small and subtle detail that really means nothing in the grand scheme of the whole map. But, if you've played a lot of Doom, it throws you off. Makes you uneasy. You know something's wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on what. And that's why it's so good. It's that little detail that says "That's not right", that fucks with you for the rest of the experience. I love it so

It looks like one of the strong points of My House is that it gives you the Doom arsenal to fight (or make you believe that you can fight) lovecraftian horrors. It's like how the main character of the Evil Dead series uses a shotgun and a chainsaw to fight demons who can possess and corrupt anything and anyone, even himself

You sound young my dude, how much of this were you taught and how much is “original research”? No judgement either way! Just curious where you got this expertise!

Interesting, but lots and lots of spoilers.

Lovecraft was a great writer.

I think Bioshock 2's little sister level was a great way to be both familiar and uncanny. For a few minutes, you play as a little sister, a child who is insane and views the world as beautiful and mansion-like. You literally can't see any of the threats or danger around you until it meets you head on, breaking the illusion and reminding you that you are still in a grimy, horrifying sinking city full of monsters. It's unsettling knowing the pretty world you see isn't real and is actively preventing you from defending yourself. (There never end up being any real threats but if there were, it would make for a cool level.)

Absolutely fantastic writing, as always!

Very interesting, and a lot of weird games I didn't know. I want to go check them all. Thanks for the video. 😁

glad to know Lovecraft is smiling upon me every time I say a racial slur on discord

huh is that what liminal means now?
I thought it meant a transitory space like a hallway or abandoned hospital.A place where you exist only for the purpose of travelling through or temporary place.
I thought the horror thing is just part of the backrooms lol spooky thing that people enjoyed. Seems like two different concepts?

Lost in vivo is good

This video should have featured golden light of rose

Next time turn off texture filtering pls

I know its GZDoom's default setting but its ugly as sin

Programmers fully understand assembly, I could write a program in assembly, its just very tedious. You probably meant Machine code, which isn't "human readable", but even that's decipherable.

If there's anything in software that we really don't get, its when a machine learning algorithm works really well on a data set but we don't have a great explanation for what patterns its picking up on. That feels like magic, that's doing something that's beyond our human perception of the world.

My first experience with the uncanny was Missingno in Pokemon blue/red. Really creeped me out as a kid lol

Axiom Verge 1 had a brilliant scripted scenario about halfway through the game that was pretty spooky. It culminated in a battle where you were no longer controlling the humanoid character with the gun. I actually didn't know how I was supposed to handle that fight, and still don't know if the outcome would be the same if I'd won instead!

You are conflating uncanny with lovecraftian, these are different things, you've gone way too broad with your interpretation of the concept, reducing Shadow Over Innsmouth to 'just paranoid & racist' shows you have no clue what lovecraftian is.

SUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUN

Last year I played a bunch of horror games and the biggest spook came from Road 96. It's a political satire and I dunno, one of the characters just spooked me, like actually spooked me and it was my frist in game death that wasn't scripted.