KickStarter Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones - a Lovecraftian Computer RPG

[Zombra]

Yeah, I guess Scrawled's previous comments after our initial reactions to the backer demo weren't very #informative. Did they truly hear what we said about too much combat?

Thanks a lot for the support, suggestions and comments ladies and gents!
We're going to release a public demo in the near future. We'll send the mad town crier to you when the time comes.
It is great to hear your discussions on the demo. We're here for any further questions!

 

[Roguey]

This looks far better than tranny.

Sure, but I'm going to try out the thing I actually had to pay money for first. That demo isn't going anywhere.

 

[Rahdulan]

I really wonder how Nihilism will stack up against other Belief choices in the final version. Inability to actually gain sanity through actions other than dialog choices, but having higher mental resistance from the get-go sounds like you might need to play a bit more carefully considering special enemy attacks can shave away at your sanity. Or you might actually have to not hoard those healing items.

 

[Sykar]

Ctulhu is not a giant octopus. The descriptions of Old Ones in the Lovecraftian mythos tend to be along the lines of the mind trying to make sense of something it can't grasp. Ctulhu is simply too alien to describe accurately.

If a film were to be made where Ctulhu arrived and they tried to nuke it, the right way to do it would be if it became apparent that the wrong coordinates had inexplicably been input and they'd just wiped New York off the map - besides, the people involved had been having nightmares lately etc.

Cthulhu or jew york doesn't matter,one evil less . Yeah i have read a little bit Lovecraft. Still if the don't have some supper mental power to delude people around the whole earth,they will be fucked with the modern weapons. People are pretty good at killing things,all the retarded film monsters will be fucked fast. You can fuck Godzilla really easy,most of its defences are because writers don't know shit about physics and do like plot armour.

All you have to do is make them sufficiently big. If any kind of space terror were as big as for example Mars nothing we could throw against it would seriously injure it.
You are vastly overestimating us. Heck most people do, considering certain morons spouting crap like "save the Earth!" when in reality we are not even fleas by comparison. Even if we detonate our entire global arsenal it would barely register with the planet.

 

[fantadomat]

Ctulhu is not a giant octopus. The descriptions of Old Ones in the Lovecraftian mythos tend to be along the lines of the mind trying to make sense of something it can't grasp. Ctulhu is simply too alien to describe accurately.

If a film were to be made where Ctulhu arrived and they tried to nuke it, the right way to do it would be if it became apparent that the wrong coordinates had inexplicably been input and they'd just wiped New York off the map - besides, the people involved had been having nightmares lately etc.

Cthulhu or jew york doesn't matter,one evil less . Yeah i have read a little bit Lovecraft. Still if the don't have some supper mental power to delude people around the whole earth,they will be fucked with the modern weapons. People are pretty good at killing things,all the retarded film monsters will be fucked fast. You can fuck Godzilla really easy,most of its defences are because writers don't know shit about physics and do like plot armour.

All you have to do is make them sufficiently big. If any kind of space terror were as big as for example Mars nothing we could throw against it would seriously injure it.
You are vastly overestimating us. Heck most people do, considering certain morons spouting crap like "save the Earth!" when in reality we are not even fleas by comparison. Even if we detonate our entire global arsenal it would barely register with the planet.

Yet we still exist and all the big animals are extinct or our food. There is nothing to save,those are creatures of our imagination.

 

[Sykar]

Ctulhu is not a giant octopus. The descriptions of Old Ones in the Lovecraftian mythos tend to be along the lines of the mind trying to make sense of something it can't grasp. Ctulhu is simply too alien to describe accurately.

If a film were to be made where Ctulhu arrived and they tried to nuke it, the right way to do it would be if it became apparent that the wrong coordinates had inexplicably been input and they'd just wiped New York off the map - besides, the people involved had been having nightmares lately etc.

Cthulhu or jew york doesn't matter,one evil less . Yeah i have read a little bit Lovecraft. Still if the don't have some supper mental power to delude people around the whole earth,they will be fucked with the modern weapons. People are pretty good at killing things,all the retarded film monsters will be fucked fast. You can fuck Godzilla really easy,most of its defences are because writers don't know shit about physics and do like plot armour.

All you have to do is make them sufficiently big. If any kind of space terror were as big as for example Mars nothing we could throw against it would seriously injure it.
You are vastly overestimating us. Heck most people do, considering certain morons spouting crap like "save the Earth!" when in reality we are not even fleas by comparison. Even if we detonate our entire global arsenal it would barely register with the planet.

Yet we still exist and all the big animals are extinct or our food. There is nothing to save,those are creatures of our imagination.

We have existed as homo sapiens for a mere 2 million years and our current civilization is barely a few millenia old. Compared to Earth's age of ~4.5 billion years it is next to nothing.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

If Cthulhu wakes up, the world ends. It is simple. No need to think about nuking anything.

Bullshit, he's just gonna close the alarm and go back to sleep.

 

[Cyberarmy]

If Cthulhu wakes up, the world ends. It is simple. No need to think about nuking anything.

Bullshit, he's just gonna close the alarm and go back to sleep.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

If Cthulhu wakes up, the world ends. It is simple. No need to think about nuking anything.

Bullshit, he's just gonna close the alarm and go back to sleep.

Any being dumb enough to use the snooze button is definitely inferior though.

 

[catfood]

Roguey

Hey Scrawled, any chance you're putting together a launch trailer for the demo? Or at least a launch Kickstarter update?

Does this suffice Infinitron:



Any "imminent" news concerning Stygian on the horizon?

Loved the demo, but could you please, please, PLEASE increase the font in game? Especially the one in the character, journal and inventory screens. My nose was almost stuck to the screen to read those descriptions. I'm sure I'm not the only player with bad eyesight.

 

[fantadomat]

Ctulhu is not a giant octopus. The descriptions of Old Ones in the Lovecraftian mythos tend to be along the lines of the mind trying to make sense of something it can't grasp. Ctulhu is simply too alien to describe accurately.

If a film were to be made where Ctulhu arrived and they tried to nuke it, the right way to do it would be if it became apparent that the wrong coordinates had inexplicably been input and they'd just wiped New York off the map - besides, the people involved had been having nightmares lately etc.

Cthulhu or jew york doesn't matter,one evil less . Yeah i have read a little bit Lovecraft. Still if the don't have some supper mental power to delude people around the whole earth,they will be fucked with the modern weapons. People are pretty good at killing things,all the retarded film monsters will be fucked fast. You can fuck Godzilla really easy,most of its defences are because writers don't know shit about physics and do like plot armour.

All you have to do is make them sufficiently big. If any kind of space terror were as big as for example Mars nothing we could throw against it would seriously injure it.
You are vastly overestimating us. Heck most people do, considering certain morons spouting crap like "save the Earth!" when in reality we are not even fleas by comparison. Even if we detonate our entire global arsenal it would barely register with the planet.

Yet we still exist and all the big animals are extinct or our food. There is nothing to save,those are creatures of our imagination.

We have existed as homo sapiens for a mere 2 million years and our current civilization is barely a few millenia old. Compared to Earth's age of ~4.5 billion years it is next to nothing.

And? There are flying rocks older than Terra. Doesn't change the fact that we are here and we are intelligent and there is the possibility that Terra is unique in sustaining life. There is possibility to be the first.

 

[Sykar]

Earth being unique in sustaining life? Among trillions of planets? Well you keep telling that to yourself.

 

[fantadomat]

Earth being unique in sustaining life? Among trillions of planets? Well you keep telling that to yourself.

I wrote "possibility" if you didn't read. And with all those trillions of planets can you show me another like Terra? There is a lot of people trying to fined such planets for decades and failing. Assuming that there is life out there is equal to the assumption that we are the only ones.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Roguey

Hey Scrawled, any chance you're putting together a launch trailer for the demo? Or at least a launch Kickstarter update?

Does this suffice Infinitron:



Any "imminent" news concerning Stygian on the horizon?

Loved the demo, but could you please, please, PLEASE increase the font in game? Especially the one in the character, journal and inventory screens. My nose was almost stuck to the screen to read those descriptions. I'm sure I'm not the only player with bad eyesight.

I must admit I'm not very fond of the art style.

I mean, the whole point in my opinion of Lovecraft is the progressive sense of creepiness. I don't understand indie devs who have a super-cartoonish art style with shades of black and grey, ruined and strange environments, and characters with disformed proportions. I think it's a shortcut for lack of skill, because they can't come up with clever elements that really make the game become progressively more unsettling. They have made "Lovecraft" into some sort of cartoonish indie meme that they resort to due to lacking original ideas.

I look at that video, and it screams EVERYTHING IS DARK AND TWISTED. It's kind of like Disciples 2. Everything in the environment, and every character only exists to scream how dark it is at me. Sure it's effective as an atmosphere, but I can't see myself become unsettled because I won't be surprised by anything I encounter. When you play a Cthulhu PnP game with friends and a game master, I'm sorry but things are not like that.

The 3D Call of Cthulhu game had it right in my opinion.

 

[SixDead]

Sold the key, game ended. Too hard for me

 

[Kaivokz]

The main graphical complaint I have is that the animations often look ridiculous. Arms and legs move like the characters are poorly controlled marionettes, or like a baby swinging its limbs about, exaggerating every motion. Is the character art like a ragdoll where the arms are dragged around to make animations, instead of having animations that are specifically drawn to include proportion, proper flow of motion, and so on? I actually think that's probably it--the arms just move up and down like a puppet.

Some of the 'creatures' do look a bit cartoony (the one who visits you at the end of the demo), but barring the animation issue, the characters all look fine to me.

 

[Beowulf]

Roguey

Hey Scrawled, any chance you're putting together a launch trailer for the demo? Or at least a launch Kickstarter update?

Does this suffice Infinitron:



Any "imminent" news concerning Stygian on the horizon?

Loved the demo, but could you please, please, PLEASE increase the font in game? Especially the one in the character, journal and inventory screens. My nose was almost stuck to the screen to read those descriptions. I'm sure I'm not the only player with bad eyesight.

I must admit I'm not very fond of the art style.

I mean, the whole point in my opinion of Lovecraft is the progressive sense of creepiness. I don't understand indie devs who have a super-cartoonish art style with shades of black and grey, ruined and strange environments, and characters with disformed proportions. I think it's a shortcut for lack of skill, because they can't come up with clever elements that really make the game become progressively more unsettling. They have made "Lovecraft" into some sort of cartoonish indie meme that they resort to due to lacking original ideas.

I look at that video, and it screams EVERYTHING IS DARK AND TWISTED. It's kind of like Disciples 2. Everything in the environment, and every character only exists to scream how dark it is at me. Sure it's effective as an atmosphere, but I can't see myself become unsettled because I won't be surprised by anything I encounter. When you play a Cthulhu PnP game with friends and a game master, I'm sorry but things are not like that.

The 3D Call of Cthulhu game had it right in my opinion.

Good point, and I would agree in general; if not for the fact, that the game takes place in a city already infested/captured by cosmic horrors.
So there's that.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Good point, and I would agree in general; if not for the fact, that the game takes place in a city already infested/captured by cosmic horrors.
So there's that.

I know, but when you look at the game, everything screams at you immediately that something sinister is going on. Maybe it wouldn't feel so trite, if indies hadn't use Cthulhu esque tropes so much in the last few years. Cthulhu games have become the new zombie games.



Look for instance at Dark Corners of the Earth's depiction of Innsmouth. You get this uneasy feeling, but the game still looks like a real place, populated by real people, and you have to dig really, really deep to discover true cosmic horrors.

I think that Chaosium itself described their Call of Cthulhu system as an "onion", where you have to progressively peel many layers to unmask the cosmic conspiracy laying underfoot.

I insist on this point because to me, although I know the devs have nothing but the best intentions, this is not really a Lovecraftian game, so much as a meme.

 

[Zombra]

That's it, time to reinstall DCotE.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Re: the idea of Lovecraft being about the unknowable. The Mythos' most iconic story, The Call of Cthulhu, is basically a kind of by-the-numbers detective procedural that methodically reviews the evidence for the Cthulhu cult. In fact pretty much all the most famous Lovecraftian stories are about investigators.

The stories that are thoroughly weird and unexplained, like The Music of Erich Zann or The Evil Clergyman - less famous.

The archetypal Lovecraft story involves an investigation into the occult that results in the investigator going mad from the revelations uncovered, which themselves are a mere glimpse into a cosmic vastness unknowable and unfathomable to the human mind. In "The Call of Cthulhu", both the narrator and his great-uncle have their lives cut short by what little they discover about the Cthulhu cults and Cthulhu himself. Moreover, the narrator concludes with the hope that his manuscript is suppressed after his death, which is typical for Lovecraftian stories in that whatever meager knowledge is gleaned from the investigations of the protagonists are nonetheless too dangerous to become known generally and must be concealed for the public good.

 

[MRY]

Look for instance at Dark Corners of the Earth's depiction of Innsmouth. You get this uneasy feeling, but the game still looks like a real place, populated by real people, and you have to dig really, really deep to discover true cosmic horrors.

Well, I share this view to some degree (and maybe even shared it earlier in this thread), but I have a certain respect for basically saying that at this point no player is for a moment going to think that bug-eyed people in Innsmouth are anything other than halfbreed fishmen, so you might as well jump straight to the halfbreed fishmen and go from there. Arguably, that's what V:TM:B does with vampire mythology -- there's no pussyfooting around whether maybe two mysterious pricks on a neck could come from a spider, and what kind of huge dog could have broken through the barn gate, etc. You just say that everyone relevant to the game knows that vampires, werewolves, etc. are real, and run with it.

 

[Jrpgfan]

Roguey

Hey Scrawled, any chance you're putting together a launch trailer for the demo? Or at least a launch Kickstarter update?

Does this suffice Infinitron:



Any "imminent" news concerning Stygian on the horizon?

Loved the demo, but could you please, please, PLEASE increase the font in game? Especially the one in the character, journal and inventory screens. My nose was almost stuck to the screen to read those descriptions. I'm sure I'm not the only player with bad eyesight.

I must admit I'm not very fond of the art style.

I mean, the whole point in my opinion of Lovecraft is the progressive sense of creepiness. I don't understand indie devs who have a super-cartoonish art style with shades of black and grey, ruined and strange environments, and characters with disformed proportions. I think it's a shortcut for lack of skill, because they can't come up with clever elements that really make the game become progressively more unsettling. They have made "Lovecraft" into some sort of cartoonish indie meme that they resort to due to lacking original ideas.

I look at that video, and it screams EVERYTHING IS DARK AND TWISTED. It's kind of like Disciples 2. Everything in the environment, and every character only exists to scream how dark it is at me. Sure it's effective as an atmosphere, but I can't see myself become unsettled because I won't be surprised by anything I encounter. When you play a Cthulhu PnP game with friends and a game master, I'm sorry but things are not like that.

The 3D Call of Cthulhu game had it right in my opinion.

They are using 20s horror pulp fiction cover artstyle as a basis for the game art . IMO it fits the theme really well.

Btw their artists are clearly very talented. The art in this game is fucking gourgeous, from the portraits to the character models and the enviroment, everything is masterfully hand drawn.

 

[MRY]

They are using 20s pulp fiction horror cover artstyle as a basis for the game art . IMO it fits the theme really well.

I like the art, but it doesn't look like 20s horror pulp covers to me at all. Those tended to have garishly bright colors and quite realistically rendered people (almost always including a pretty young woman in some kind of revealing outfit), at least as far as I recall and as far as a few minutes on Google indicates. This seems more like, I dunno, an Alan Moore comic or something. This is the only one I found even remotely like the game's style:

And very likely those colors are simply faded with time.

(Incidentally, it's very weird to see O. Henry and H.P. Lovecraft side by side.)

Or am I missing something obvious?

 

[Jrpgfan]

They claimed it themselves IIRC.

And on their kickstarter page they have a poster referencing to weird tales magazine

Stygian Tales covers are designed as loading screens for Stygian in respect to Weird Tales Magazine.

This poster, designed in the vein of pulp horror fiction icon Weird Tales Magazine will be a guaranteed eye-catcher on your wall. Cultic Games advises looking at the poster for short periods of time for your own mental health.

It's obviously not gonna be identical, for many reasons, but you can clearly see where they're coming from.

But I guess it does resemble Alan moore more. Which is also fine by me.

 

[MRY]

It's a cool poster, but I'm not sure it's the same style. Anyway, browsing old covers has been fun. There's a lot of hilarity to be had.