SciFi and cosmic horror storytelling in games
Intro
Honestly this is just something i've been ruminating about recently with the new Marathon game on the horizon.
I've consumed a lot of sci fi compared to a normal person, and probably not that much compared to a serious fan. Wolfe, Asimov, Ellison, Sanderson, Card, Strugatsky, Crichton, etc for novels. Blame! jumps to mind for Manga, and I'm sure I could name shows and movies for quite some time even ignoring adaptations and re-tellings.
In general, I like novelty to some extent in my narrative media. Once you've seen enough, you see the patterns, and that can ruin some of the fun. You can have people who just execute a well known narrative perfectly, but it's nice when you stumble across something doing things you haven't seen before, or doing things you'd thought of but hadn't seen executed.
Video games have the potential to do some interesting things, but it's not a surprise that for FPS especially it gravitates to Power Fantasy. "OH GOD EVERYTHING IS WRONG! QUICK HERE'S A SHARP STICK INVADE HELL!" started with Doom (with 2016 actually having some great Pixaresque storytelling itself) and obviously does it well. Being the lone fighter vs hordes is at the bare minimum a fun gameplay loop.
The Games
However there are a shocking number of interesting or well executed plots in the genre as well. I think the big 3 that stand out to me are System Shock (which is sorta cheating as it's also an ImSim), Half-Life, and Marathon (but honorable mentions to both versions of Prey and E.Y.E. and I'm sure I'm forgetting others).
I'm going to skim over System Shock as "oh no the AI has gone crazy and evil" has been done before, and done better (in the same year...by another game on this list). Suffice it to say that Shodan is still a wonderful take on the whole concept. However System Shock does devolve into a larger power fantasy (save the day, stop the bad guy) despite starting as a small and helpless fool.
Half Life, in comparison, you spend most of the time running around doing your best to even figure out what the fuck is going on, and ultimately fail to accomplish much of anything meaningful. The Combine is so soul crushingly vast that even some super fighter like Freeman (which itself has always been odd) amounts to little more than a blip on a dashboard somewhere (as the 2017 spoiled HL3 ending showed...although I can find no working link to that as of right now).
Likewise Marathon, which has some fantastic storytelling in its use of terminals, has you as the objectively broken superhuman slaughtering enemies left right and sideways, and yet you're little more than a Rook or a Bishop for something SO much larger than you, only to find out that it's stumbled upon something even larger than it.
I won't dive into every detail (lots of good ways to do that. Mandalore, Emms, and the classic story website ) but Marathon takes the vastness of space, the standard "what if the AI went nuts/sentient", and so many other tropes and combines them into something quite unique. It's got the feelings of cosmic horror without falling back on "oh look its Lovecraft again" and I wish more games would take notes. Naturally Bungie even then was famous for connecting ALL their lore and that's probably part of it, but I also suspect any payoff for that is long gone after decades of riding the Halo and Destiny "what if heroes shot more bad guys" plan.
The End
With a new Marathon proper finally on the horizon, I'm more optimistic than I should be. Logically I know this is the company that made Destiny and they're still looking to just milk profit out of these things. That said I don't mind it being an extraction shooter or possibly a retelling (or alt telling...) of the Marathon story, and they even seem to understand the vibe that should be underpinning all of it. Either way it had me thinking about just how well the original Marathon and Half Life immersed you into the scale of what you were dealing with by letting you be the badass you are in just about every other game, and having it basically not matter. Either because your deeds accomplished nothing in the scheme of things or because your agency is utterly denied.
I think what really drew me to these games was finally seeing the idea of something like Lovecraft without the literally copy paste of the small port town and the tentacled cthulu monsters. I'd love to know what other games really stood out to people when it comes to SciFi and/or Cosmic Horror specifically. Or if you just agree/disagree on the ones I've rambled about.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I think both of my favourite sci-fi stories right now come from games that incorporate the genre with bits of cosmic horror -- Signalis with its overt King in Yellow references, Returnal with its use of Lovecraftian imagery (Honorable mention to 1000xResist and its Occupants as well). Have you played those? I think they both do a really good job of getting away from the power fantasy and using their mechanics and systems to reinforce the narrative. I can speak a bit more about them if you'd like. Very excited about the Returnal spiritual sequel coming this year which is literally set on a planet called Carcosa.
I've written a bit about my love for space-station games like Prey and Dead Space before on Tildes. Actually when I think about it this type of narrative about an isolated base getting overtaken by an incomprehensible force is something Western games do really well -- I'm thinking of Soma, too -- it's a setup that's really compatible with horror tropes from other mediums, while also lending itself to neat gameplay tropes like interconnected level design, a tight resource economy, managing environmental pressures.
I thought the Marathon trailer from yesterday's PS showcase was phenomenally directed but the writing did not give me a lot of hope. It felt very on-the-nose -- though of course, it's just a trailer. But it's impossible for an actor to read a line like "we're monsters, we're all monsters," and have it sound compelling.
Signalis I watched a playthrough/breakdown of once I decided I wasn't feeling the PS1 survival part of it and yeah I think it's fascinating.
Returnal totally went under my radar so i'll try that. I'm guessing that's because like the successor it's Playstation only on launch?
Soma's classic, and an interesting one since I think Marathon will be treading similar ground in the new game.
Yeah Returnal was PS exclusive and then they didn't market the PC port at all -- it barely sold which is a damn shame. If you're familiar with Signalis the presentation style is similarly cryptic but Returnal has the advantage of having just extremely refined modern gameplay. I struggled to get through Signalis, too; with Returnal, I struggled to stop playing it, and when I had to sleep, I dreamt in its imagery.
SOMA is definitely a game you should try out then, very thought provoking whilst also doing horror/creepiness quite well!
I'd also recommend Control, though that's a bit more on the creepy experiment side like Prey is.
Thirding SOMA! It's first-person stealth horror.
The more blind you go into its story, the better. However, here's a series of increasing spoilers, depending on how sure you might need to be about whether it's what you're looking for.
1. Initial Premise
You play as Simon, a man who is recovering from a car accident. The story begins with you going to the doctor for a deep brain scan. When you open your eyes after the scan, you find yourself in a diving suit, surrounded by the rusting walls of an under-sea laboratory that is falling into disrepair: Pathos-II. The only other person that seems to be alive down there is a woman over the radio, Catherine.
Any similarities to System/Bioshock begin to diverge here. This isn't a dream, and Catherine is not Fontaine or SHODAN. She's not really Alyx either, but nor are you Freeman. If you're at all willing to go in blind, I would recommend not reading ahead to see what this game does differently.
2. Developing Plot
When you meet up with Catherine, you discover that she is not really alive in the conventional sense. Catherine reveals that almost a century has passed since you had your brain scan done. Your real self has long since died, and the self you are experiencing is merely a digital copy which has been used as one of many templates in AI research for decades. (You signed the papers yourself to have your digital samples donated to medical research.)
A year prior to the now current events, a meteor hit the earth, killing off all life. The human race has already been exterminated. There are no living, breathing people left to save. Even the talking box before you, Catherine, is only a computer containing a brain scan of her own now dead self.
3. Main Objective
In their final days, the science team had constructed a hardened satellite within which they had uploaded as many human templates as they could, intending to launch it from the Pathos-II's railgun platform. Their hope was to send the last vestiges of humanity out among the stars in the hopes that they themselves, or some other miracle form of life, could solve the problem of this extinction. A desperate act, but the only option left given the pressure of their location beneath the ocean.
However, the science team was unable to launch it in time before the mixture of their deaths and the malfunction of the Pathos-II network and security system. As the last two echoes of autonomous humanity left, it's up to you and Catherine to upload yourselves into this ark and fire it into space before you or the research station collapses.
SOMA's a classic yeah, and I'm sloooooowly getting through control (as i've mentioned elsewhere I find the combat bleh) but I love the vibe.
I do worry that games/stories like control can get away with just throwing mystery boxes around and never delivering satisfying solutions beyond "Maaaaaagic" but I hear it's better than that.
Look Outside is another excellent cosmic horror game. It's one of the few that really captures the full experience and minutiae of eldritch entities.
I've heard about this a few times. I'll have to look into it. I know it's a RPG maker hit (like Fear and Hunger) but not much else.
Your mention of Half Life reminds me of how incredible it was to play Half Life 2 again, 20 years later, on VR. The mod is an incredible way to revisit the world, and it's no less stressful , chilling and hilarious the second time around.
Tunic plays with some common game tropes in a way I thought was unique. It literally has you collecting pieces of the game guide, on your way to help the person who resurrects you every time you die. The game starts off really cute, but there are definitely some horrifying moments later on. The story is vague, and has to be pieced together from drawings and the ruins you find, but it's clear something went terribly wrong.
Spoilers for post-belltowers
I had a slow realization that something was going on while searching for the keys to free the Heir to the Heir. I first went to the frog den to get the grappling hook, and then I explored each of the area unlocked by that. In order of how ominous they are:The East Forest was filled with cultists who were obviously doing something with the ancient technology. Once you activate all the obelisks, and enter the vault, you find the macguffin guarded by a giant robot. The robot was built by the ancients, but judging from all the ruins, they still lost against whatever they were at war with.
The Ruined Atoll seems pretty simple; all you have to do is walk around the map and activate the obelisks like in the East Forest. Unfortunately, some of the pipes connecting the obelisks together have broken, and are spilling poison everywhere. This poison cannot be healed from because it decreases your health bar, and the only way to get to full health again is to die and be respawned at a shrine. There are spider monsters that form out of the poison, and undead bird monsters, and they both deal permanent damage.
The game guide says nothing about any of this, and describes the birds as friendly. In fact you do meet a perfectly nice bird away from the ppoison. Once you finally get past this area, you fight the Libarian, a thieving scholar who's been luring heroes to the library so he can kill them and take their pieces of the game guide.
The Junkyard isn't a very nice place. Progression is difficult, due to poison being everywhere, and the enemies being hard to fight even with a functional health bar. The whole area has a completely different atmosphere than the rest of the game, with all of it being made of rusted metal, and salvaged components from the ancient technology. The Scrappers who live there have been dismantling the obelisks. In order to progress, you have to find and equip a gas mask.
After you get through the Junkyard, you end up in the Rooted Ziggurat. It's a facility built by the ancients, and is very high-tech. Once you enter, the elevator you used breaks, and you have no choice but to continue. After going deeper into the Rooted Ziggurat, you come to a maze of platforms over a sea of poison, and after getting past that, you find out how the obelisks are made. The process involves using living creatures as batteries. While approaching the boss of this area, you walk on a platform over hundreds, if not thousands of the obelisks. The Scrapper Boss has a very similar move set to the player, but also using a lot tech looted from the facility you fight her in.
There isn't much I can say about the last area without spoiling anything, but it is definitely a place that makes you think something horrible happened there.
Having also played tunic I think it’s something that almost everyone should play. Such a great game from so many angles. Especially the layered storytelling.