"Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones" is a supernatural horror roleplaying video game which takes place in the strange worlds of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Stygian will draw the player into a bleak journey from a ruined Arkham to the very depths of the Abyss. The gameplay experience promises a mix of rich role-playing and turn based tactical combat in an authentic illustrative 2D graphical style. In Stygian, you'll be able to create your character from scratch with a robust selection of archetypal backgrounds with different origin stories, attributes, skills, traits and lastly belief systems which determine how your character replenishes lost sanity, also presenting unique dialog choices. The narrative of the game is strongly connected to the works of H. P. Lovecraft. In your quest, you'll use the haunted violin of Erich Zann to lure a fiendish deity and convince the poor wretched protagonist of "The Outsider" to join your party among many others. The heavy burden of fighting a desperate battle with forces beyond recognition will haunt you to the end of the game. Physical combat will be scarce and difficult, spellcasting will have deep and dangerous consequences, sanity loss will leave its marks on characters as mental illnesses and sometimes the best solution will be running away from the terrors that lurk in the night. Stygian embraces the original themes of pulp and weird fiction, incorporating them into the computer roleplaying genre, promising a fresh (or putrid from another perspective) breath of air for roleplaying fans.
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The visuals and sound have to do the heavy lifting here, and they manage. Especially the illustrations in the interface and loading screens. But you can only do so much with visulas in a Lovecraftian game. This whole brand of horror is about telling, not showing. And of course the lead writer has no ideas how to create horror. No subtlety. Just throw violence at the players with some dark ambient music. With this cartoony art style this is even worse than it would've been otherwise.
I really liked the character creation and class system, but I have an issue with Lovecraftian games gamifying insanity. When it's just a stat, it loses the essence of it as a literary concept. Lovecraft's parents were both committed to a lunatic asylum. Insanity was one of the largest themes in his stories, and served as a tool for the unreliable narration and to convey horrors beyond human comprehension. Here it's just a number.
The combat is very standard turn-based affair. But it does get kinda ridiculous here due to the nature of the setting. For example, I walked into a building and was ambushed by a few unarmed lunatics. I am a sane and experienced detective with a revolver. Who do you think won in this situation? That's right, the lunatics. Makes sense.
Anyway, a game like this is as good as its writing, and I am genuinely baffled how writers like this have jobs in this business. It's almost like the video game industry doesn't want to hire real writers, but instead look for guys who can dish out random content to fill the game world with. I heard Ubisoft is starting to use AI for their games, and many people are outraged. I'm not. Because guess what? Nothing's gonna change. This writing is already as lifeless as if it was generated by AI. Kinda can't wait for all major developers to embrace AI, so that these hacks would lose their jobs.