18 | LPM | THE DEPTHS OF MADNESS
18 | LPM | THE DEPTHS OF MADNESS
by: Jacic
Progress:
- I reached the end and replayed to check some of the other choices, spending about 8 minutes with this piece.
Engagement with Horror Genre:
- This is Lovecraftian horror, in a very direct sense given the inspiration, which overlaps with cosmic horror. The themes here focus on the danger of knowledge that has gone “too far,” its ability to corrode the spirit of those exposed to it. The dream-ocean is a powerful image here, the protagonist helpless but to descend further once they chose to open their mind to it. There’s also the sense of viral spread of the knowledge, that the doomed professor who wrote the manuscripts cannot help but pass it along to the next person, who can then spread it further.
Things I Appreciated:
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I really liked the visual presentation and atmosphere of the piece. I thought the descent through the ocean was especially vivid. I pulled out the line, “No, this is a sickly green; the colour of old mould and stagnant pools should foxfire dance upon it.” I haven’t read “The Call of Cthulhu” (how terribly un-literary of me, I know. EctoComp has really been exposing my literary knowledge gaps
) but I have played Bloodborne and it honestly brought me right back to the mood of entering the fishing hamlet through the clocktower for the first time. -
I enjoyed the buildup of the piece, with the earthquake aftershocks and the sudden slippage into a dream state, and the inexorable plunge downwards. I was drawn into the mood and stakes of the story quickly, and I definitely would’ve wanted to keep exploring this world further if the narrative had been longer.
Miscellaneous Comments/Recommendations:
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I have two central issues, both of which feel like the result of the 4-hour time limit. The first is that the choices do not appear to have an effect on the narrative at all. Even the very final choice as to whether to wake to sanity or madness seemed like it didn’t influence much. I played through first from the perspective of someone naively enthusiastic (I mean sure, those other people were cursed by forbidden knowledge, but I’m different—I can change Cthulhu!) and second from the perspective of someone who is actively trying to avoid it. Now, perhaps there is something thematically interesting about the choices not mattering—in a tale of cosmic horror, what, precisely does the individual will of one person matter in the face of infinite, seething knowledge? Does simply coming into contact with corruptive knowledge corrupt (the illusion of) agency as well? Even so, I think some more branch-specific flavor text would help flesh out the narrative a bit more.
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The second thing is just that I felt like it ended too quickly, like there was more narrative to tell here. The descent through the dream-ocean was really engaging to me so when it came to an end as it did, I was just like, wow, I wish they had more than four hours to work on this so I could’ve read more! Selfish, I know.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
- Encountering more ChoiceScript games (having never used it) is helping me indirectly learn more about it. For instance, all of those games that I’ve encountered have some sort of “stats” being tracked, whether it’s in the form of a meter, or here, where it descriptively tracks the state of your mind and body. It seems like this must be something built directly into the game engine. It does make me more curious about how that works. Something I think is interesting as a development note here is the decision to display the stats to the reader automatically (like Forevermore and YARRY did) vs. making them available to the reader if they click through, but otherwise not emphasize them, as happened here. In this case, I think it makes sense not to have the stats constantly on-screen as they aren’t important as a game mechanic and might be more distracting from the immersion of the piece, where the other two games seemed to use the meter’s responsiveness to choices a way of influencing player behavior. So it raises a few interrelated design questions: (1) should stats be included; (2) should stats be accessible to the player during and/or after the game; (3) should changes in stats be made visible and emphasized to the player.
Memorable Moment:
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Waking up on the raft was a big surprise, and it kind of represents the tipping point (I guess… literally, since the raft also tipped over
) where the “supernatural” overtakes the “natural” in the narrative.
By process of elimination, you could deduce that You Promise is the final game on my randomized list of the anglophone La Petite Mort entries. The end is in sight!