anchorhead was fun but okay: my ambivalent thoughts on lovecraftian horror in the year 2023

[highimpactsex]

so i've finished Anchorhead, the 2017 edition of a classic lovecraftian tale which is regarded as one of the best works interactive fiction has to offer and i can totally see why. it's a thrilling ride from start to finish, the puzzles in the 2017 version are pretty fun, it understands the strengths and weaknesses of lovecraft, and the atmosphere is undeniably intoxicating.

my first session, i played it at 1am because i woke up in the middle of the night and i stayed up playing till 5am. i honestly think it's a very cool game and worth playing.

but i also wonder if this game is gonna be something i'll care about as time goes on.

in my view, Anchorhead is a bit too rehash-y of lovecraft's best stories. while i have to admit i got very involved in the story and i wanted to uncover all the mysteries, i also got the feeling that i've done this before.

part of it perhaps comes from me recently playing Necronomicon on the PC-98 with amelie doree like nine months ago. both Fairytale's Necronomicon and Mike Gentry's Anchorhead remix lovecraft stories to get something original out of it, just that this time Anchorhead makes you play the wife of a guy getting lovecraft'd. other than that, you're still crawling through the murky villages of some town in new england.

but even by the time i played Necronomicon, i already felt like i was doing the same routine. i've seen a lot of Call of Cthulhu scenarios, read literary criticisms on our favorite racist horror writer, and watched movies that invert and subvert expectations based on the guy. in this view, both Necronomicon and Anchorhead are somewhat straight mishmashes of lovecraft's stories, though they must've been revolutionary and incredible to experience when they came out in their respective years (Anchorhead was 1998, Necronomicon a 1994). of course, there's a lot of pc lovecraft titles out there like Alone in the Dark (1992), but i think these two titles are so connected to each other in terms of source and adaptation style that it really gave me a deja vu.

i can't shake off the idea that i'd enjoy these two titles if i played the games earlier... but honestly, i think there's something more to it.

i might just be getting tired of lovecraft settings done straight. don't get me wrong, Anchorhead is great since it's well-executed and it still gave me the thrills. but i really feel like i've done everything a straight adaptation of lovecraftian stories can ever do.

for example, while i liked Anchorhead more, i feel that Theatre (1995) had a more original setting just because it places the lovecraftian horror into a theater setting. while i think the title could've done more with the theater setting instead of going full lovecraft, it's fun to explore this world. the villages of Anchorhead and Necronomicon, on the other hand, blur into the same labyrinth of buildings and alleys to me. it's hard for me to make sense which comes from which. i still can vaguely remember Theatre's maps at least, but picturing Anchorhead gives me the same blank template that every lovecraftian village goes through. i bring Theatre up especially since one of its puzzles was used for an Anchorhead puzzle -- they're really parent and child respectively. while Theatre obviously pales in comparison to the majesty of its descendant, i still prefer what it does more.

so i think my love for lovecraftian settings has simply burnt out. i'm not even going Full SJW Kastel here (lmao at lovecraft always going "villages of minorities and working class people are scary"), but rather it's just kinda boring. and while i'm more inclined to give lenience to lovecraftian media of the 90s like Anchorhead for being pioneers, i can't say i am too enthused of titles that just do the same shtick.

i'm thinking of titles like Slouching Towards Bedlam, which -- to give it credit -- at least invokes some steampunk setting. but it's somewhat undercut by the invocation of lovecraftian deities through its (honestly corny) metafiction elements and keats's "Second Coming". i won't spoil what the game does, but it only works if you think the metafiction elements work in a lovecraftian context ... and i can't really suspend my disbelief at all. it's just Metacraft to me.

there's a lot of talk about how lovecraftian fiction can reject the racism and queerphobia. i'm thinking of hbomberguy's video on appropriating lovecraft for the 21st century, but even then, i feel lovecraftian-inspired horror elements to be quite quaint. they don't do anything different from lovecraft as much as they salvage what works from what doesn't -- and maybe give it a little queer reading.

and i don't know if i care about this style of lovecraft-ing.

i think horror works like Silent Hill 2 are unique and remain timeless because, well, they're doing something different. while the series is loaded with lovecraftian ideas, SH2 explores the somberness of misogyny and grief, just in a supernatural horror setting. it's one of the few titles that deserve to be called "psychological horror" because it is evaluating psychology through the lens of horror.

likewise, i find works playing with body horror to be just as engaging. cronenberg's Crimes of the Future (2022) is an interesting self-reflection on the appeal of his films, what they do to the audience and the artist, and the limits of body horror as an art form in the ecological wasteland of capitalism. the "gender horror" movement in the twine revolution is also worth bringing up: these take the already inherently queer ideas of body horror and turn up the notch to see how bodies and gender contort to make beautifully disgusting forms. i'm fond of Liz England's Her Pound of Flesh and Porpentine's Cyberqueen in this context.

the time loop horror of Lobotomy Corporation and Kawarazaki-ke no Ichizoku 2 are also fantastic too. the former puts you in the position of a manager where you must sacrifice your agents to SCPs while the latter incorporates erotica into its horror presentation. both titles are about getting out of a loop that never seems to end -- you're always trying to figure out if there is a way out of this hell and the answer that you come to is going to be messy as hell.

and who can't forget eroguro nonsense works like edogawa ranpo's Ningen Isu/Human Chair? what a kawaii work.

there is one particular lovecraftian work that sticks to me to this day and that is Tsui no Sora 2020, which unleashes the lovecraftian cosmos into the Tsui no Sora cycle (Subarashiki Hibi is a part of this). but there, the writer does something interesting with it: it connects the cosmic pessimism of lovecraft with the substance monism of spinoza. scadi clarifies spinoza's metaphysical philosophy of god/nature through the lens of lovecraft and reveals the beauty and horror of everything emanating from one substance/soul. there may be "outsiders" to this substance, but for us "insiders" we are all manifestations of this one soul. and try as we might, we may never be able to peer into this substance we all belong to. it's necessary for our education because it is important to know where we come from. but perhaps pure knowledge of it is impossible and might even be akin to the madness found in lovecraftian works.

[i'd also add the Steampunk series by Liarsoft, which uses lovecraft and steampunk (genres that, by themselves, say nothing to me) to make a really evocative world that explores gender and sexuality. i'm fond of how Sona-nyl for example plays with consent and Inganock just having sex with robots in a body horror kinda way. so why is this square bracketed and the above paragraph only mentioning "one particular example"? cuz woops, i forgot they existed until it was brought up in a random chat. it's a good example to edit it in, hence this awkward section.]

horror media is unbelievably interesting because it takes what we know about the world and turn it into a frightening thing. Get Out by jordan peele? what if white supremacy is a horror movie. the uncle who works for nintendo by michael lutz? what if the video games and the cultures they harbor are scary. Eraserhead by david lynch? what if my hair looks like an eraserhead. and so on.

reappropriating lovecraft just for the sake of it doesn't really make much sense. i still like to read lovecraft and joke about how awful he is, but the embers for pastiches are dead. i don't wanna see "different takes" on lovecraft -- that's treating lovecraftian works as a commodity/content and missing the point of what makes his stuff interesting. what i'd like to see is more things that we take for granted in the lens of horror and interrogate them that way.

we can look to elizabeth smyth's Bogeyman, a work riffing on the boogeyman legend but turning it into a story about how survivors may side with abusers to see another day. the work dramatizes what we know about abuse and it's important to face it. or my most recent favorite game that i really need to write about, Yuuyami Doori Tanteikai by the ex-developers of Twilight Syndrome: this series lets you simulate the lives of middle schoolers trying to investigate the many urban legends in their small dying suburb and you start to realize this is their effort to escape from the mundane cruelty of bullying and violence in their school. there's subtle discussions about what these urban legends mean, how they intersect with real social issues adults face, how they impact japanese societies, and how the kids see them as fun but scary fantasies that also bite them in the ass. god, i need to actually return to writing that, but i'm so lazy lmao. there's really so many things horror can do and i wanna see more of that exploration.

Anchorhead is still a great game and i really enjoyed the setting -- the art style chosen for the game is marvelous, the writing is more polished than i'll ever be able to type out, etc. -- but i'm getting tired of lovecraft pastiches. i can't criticize a 1998 work for not doing radical things to its sources when it def surprised people then, but i can criticize horror media trends today. i am unfairly taking out my frustrations on current horror media trends gravitating to jumpscares and none of that interesting exploration on this otherwise great classic. the game's simply a well-constructed, intoxicating thriller that's hard to put down.

but i get the feeling the game will slip from memory once in a while because it just feels like Another Well-Polished Lovecraftian Horror Story to me. writing this out made me realize what i really need is some dank horror works that interrogate reality as we know it. we're already living in a horror movie -- our current reality -- but we are so desensitized to them that we need to be reminded through dramatizations and exaggerations of the everyday violence.

if it means abandoning SS Lovecraft for better shores, i'd be happy to.