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

[Iluvcheezcake]

Talk to the bald dude with The visitor

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Whats your best companions?
Also, where do companions go when you tell the to leave?

War veteran is probably the best overall, though I dismissed him, thinking I could get him back, the dog the Explorer gets is pretty good, 10 ap, 2 ap attacks, benefits from artifacts

Aristocrat butler is cool as well, carried my useless ass for a good portion of the game

 

[Doma]

Talk to the bald dude with The visitor

Where is this he? This is for the necronomicon yeah?

 

[V_K]

Talk to the bald dude with The visitor

Where is this he? This is for the necronomicon yeah?

He's the spell vendor, behind the pharmacy.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Ye, door next to the hooker

 

[V_K]

Anybody figure out the utility of the Flesh Devourer's Heart? It says "used for enhancing spells" but I'm not clear what is meant by that. Is it an auto-equip which makes spells more powerful just by virtue of being in your inventory like the Ringing Electronic Sensor?

Open your grimoire, and click on the leftmost icon on the upper right corner of a spell. If you have the corresponding essence to enhance the spell, it will show up.

The more I learn about the magic system, the more I like it. Granted, there aren't many spells, but they are versatile and creative, and the drawback/enhancement system seems to be quite well thought out. Together with all the situational occult checks, playing a mage really feels like playing a mage, not a reskinned archer.
The game does need a shitload of documentation though.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Anybody figure out the utility of the Flesh Devourer's Heart? It says "used for enhancing spells" but I'm not clear what is meant by that. Is it an auto-equip which makes spells more powerful just by virtue of being in your inventory like the Ringing Electronic Sensor?

Open your grimoire, and click on the leftmost icon on the upper right corner of a spell. If you have the corresponding essence to enhance the spell, it will show up.

The more I learn about the magic system, the more I like it. Granted, there aren't many spells, but they are versatile and creative, and the drawback/enhancement system seems to be quite well thought out. Together with all the situational occult checks, playing a mage really feels like playing a mage, not a reskinned archer.
The game does need a shitload of documentation though.

Agreed.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Seems game went into mixed review rating on steam. Good portion of negative reviews gave em thumbs down for bugs n glitches while praising everything else.
Hope tomorrows patch (and more of them) fixes worst offenders

 

[fantadomat]

Really don't care about your obsession with this boradgame knock off..

Ashton Smith was far more talented than Lovecraft. Find a new hero. Learn how to use commas. And learn the difference between RPGs and boradgames (sic). You drooling, mentally-straining dumbfuck.

Meh,as i said i don't care about your boardgame fetish mate. Smith is better writer when it comes down to spelling and shit,but he is clearly inferior to the imagination and the soulful writing. Lovecraft is an author that makes you read the whole thing at once. So Smith is just a poor imitation in the end. Also i am not big fan of Lovecraft,still it doesn't stop me from appreciating his writing skills and imagination.

I have all the items for Stanley but no line of dialogue to continue the quest

It is not a bug,most likely you don't have the conductor,maybe sold it by mistake or used it in crafting. You could buy one from the hobo next to stenley's house or from the radio guy.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Open your grimoire, and click on the leftmost icon on the upper right corner of a spell. If you have the corresponding essence to enhance the spell, it will show up.

I noticed that button but haven't encountered "essence" yet. Where do you obtain this?

It is not a bug,most likely you don't have the conductor,maybe sold it by mistake or used it in crafting. You could buy one from the hobo next to stenley's house or from the radio guy.

I already addressed this in a subsequent post you twit. Also, do you not know what an RPG is? Because this site...

Also: "Spelling and shit". Yes, clearly I'm speaking with a literary scholar here. Lovecraft is nothing more than an incredibly creative man who was brilliant at aping the men he admired. Machen, Blackwood, Poe, Ashton Smith, MR James, Dunsany, etc. Heck...even HPL's best names are bastardizations of names from men who've written before him.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

Whats your best companions?
Also, where do companions go when you tell the to leave?

War veteran is probably the best overall, though I dismissed him, thinking I could get him back, the dog the Explorer gets is pretty good, 10 ap, 2 ap attacks, benefits from artifacts

Explorer? Like that woman? Or is there another one?
I've only meet outsider, girl and veteran.
I really like vetaran.
Outsider seems interesting but a little weak in combat (until I upgrade spit to do aoe).
The girl probably would've been a better option from combat perspective.

 

[V_K]

Open your grimoire, and click on the leftmost icon on the upper right corner of a spell. If you have the corresponding essence to enhance the spell, it will show up.

I noticed that button but haven't encountered "essence" yet. Where do you obtain this?

I already addressed this in a subsequent post you twit. Also, do you not know what an RPG is? Because this site...

Many places. Different spells require different essences. The ones I have are:

Spoiler

Ectoplasm - got from using tongue of the dead on some non-critical corpses; ghoul meat and ghoul heart - from defeating the king of ghouls; Stanley's brain - from finishing his questline and denying to kill him. I suspect the jadestone and human skull you can buy from the former cultist also serve that function.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Many places. Different spells require different essences. The ones I have are:

Oh goddammit. I know exactly what you're talking about. I've been selling that shit not realizing that's what it was.

 

[Alienman]

Everyone who says you need combat skills is full of shit, companions are op, and even with 0 melee skill my character was competent with it throughout the whole game, crafting allows you to make absurdly powerful bombs and vendors restock pretty much as soon as you leave

Kiting is especially useful in this game

Problem isn't that much that it is totally nonviable, it's that is too damn much of it. Feels really boring to roll an academic, only to use his skill to create bombs and healing stims. And those bombs never worked for me anyway. For some reason the enemies I used the bombs on dodged the attack every time.

Playing a melee soldier now, beating the shit out of everything, and so far I can't say that the playthrough is that much different from playing a man of science...

 

[Starwars]

As a little sidenote, if we get more Lovecraftian games in the future (which I'm starting to hope we won't given that they all end up being disappointing), I really hope that we will get a game that is not just a collection of Lovecraft stories. In my mind, you can be Lovecraftian without referencing Innsmouth in every goddamn game for example.

Write something that has similar sensibilities, unlocking the mysteries of the world, dealing with sanity and horror, all that shit. But do it without referencing Cthulhu or Dagon or all the other well known stuff that's been done to death. Keep the atmosphere but come up with new stuff. Getting a Cthulhu statuette is not interesting or mysterious, seeing the Marsh family referenced in every Lovecraft game ever made is not interesting or mysterious, having a quest essentially be The Whisperer in Darkness gives away the fact that yes, I will be meeting and probably fighting one of those flying Yuggoth cunts at some point. It goes on and on and on and it's not scary, it's not mysterious, it's not interesting. It's just "hey guys I get that reference, that's so cool!" and it's shitty.
Lovecraft is well known pop culture at this point. I have a Christmas Cthulhu plushie in my sofa. Cthulhu is nostalgic. It's not scary or interesting any more. It's been sucked dry of mystery.

Fuck the stories and come up with something new and have the "oooh it's a Lovecraftian game!" come from the atmosphere instead.

 

[luj1]

We were talking about what makes a game "Lovecraftian". It's not name dropping, it's not tentacles and it's not fainting from seeing a dead horse. Wanna know a game that's "Lovecraftian"? Clive Barker's Undying. And it accomplishes that without making everything banal and dropping Lovecraftian terminology at every corner. That's cheap. It's unfortunate that most people are too shallow to understand this.

Isn't it clear that this isn't exactly a standard Lovecraft setting? It's right there in the title - the game is set in an "End Times"-type scenario where the Old Ones are Reigning. Subtlety has already gone out the window.

I don't know what you mean by standard, but it sure as hell isn't a *good* Lovecraftian setting. Lack of measure devalues the intellectual property, it trivializes it. But in case you're suggesting they deliberately went for an over the top, naivete Lovecraftian setting, almost a parody, then let me attest to that as apologetic shillary of the highest order. Like w/ most modern development, it was a case of poor judgment.

 

[luj1]

As a little sidenote, if we get more Lovecraftian games in the future (which I'm starting to hope we won't given that they all end up being disappointing), I really hope that we will get a game that is not just a collection of Lovecraft stories. In my mind, you can be Lovecraftian without referencing Innsmouth in every goddamn game for example.

Write something that has similar sensibilities, unlocking the mysteries of the world, dealing with sanity and horror, all that shit. But do it without referencing Cthulhu or Dagon or all the other well known shit. Keep the atmosphere but come up with new stuff. Getting a Cthulhu statuette is not interesting or mysterious, seeing the Marsh family referenced in every Lovecraft game ever made is not interesting, having a quest essentially be The Whisperer in Darkness gives away the fact that yes, I will be meeting and probably fighting one of those flying Yuggoth cunts at some point. It goes on and on and on and it's not scary, it's not mysterious, it's not interesting. It's just "hey guys I get that reference, that's so cool!" and it's shitty.

Fuck the stories and come up with something new and have the "oooh it's a Lovecraftian game!" come from the atmosphere instead.

Well at least someone gets it.

 

[RNGsus]

 

[Jenkem]

hit game breaking bug in the warehouse where it has the level up icon on all three of our portraits, but am only able to select stats/perks for my main character, which makes it impossible to open up the inventory or do anything else because the game keeps insisting I level up my companions, but it won't let me. It also says they have 2xp less than the level. I've reloaded andn done the fight (the one to the right of the transmitter w/ a loot crate) three times and the same result happens every time... so who knows where the problem is and I'm not about to reload a save from an hour ago on teh hope that it will work once I get there...

 

[Silva]

As a little sidenote, if we get more Lovecraftian games in the future (which I'm starting to hope we won't given that they all end up being disappointing), I really hope that we will get a game that is not just a collection of Lovecraft stories. In my mind, you can be Lovecraftian without referencing Innsmouth in every goddamn game for example.

Write something that has similar sensibilities, unlocking the mysteries of the world, dealing with sanity and horror, all that shit. But do it without referencing Cthulhu or Dagon or all the other well known stuff that's been done to death. Keep the atmosphere but come up with new stuff. Getting a Cthulhu statuette is not interesting or mysterious, seeing the Marsh family referenced in every Lovecraft game ever made is not interesting or mysterious, having a quest essentially be The Whisperer in Darkness gives away the fact that yes, I will be meeting and probably fighting one of those flying Yuggoth cunts at some point. It goes on and on and on and it's not scary, it's not mysterious, it's not interesting. It's just "hey guys I get that reference, that's so cool!" and it's shitty.
Lovecraft is well known pop culture at this point. I have a Christmas Cthulhu plushie in my sofa. Cthulhu is nostalgic. It's not scary or interesting any more. It's been sucked dry of mystery.

Fuck the stories and come up with something new and have the "oooh it's a Lovecraftian game!" come from the atmosphere instead.

Already exists.

It's called Bloodborne.

 

[RNGsus]

As a little sidenote, if we get more Lovecraftian games in the future (which I'm starting to hope we won't given that they all end up being disappointing), I really hope that we will get a game that is not just a collection of Lovecraft stories. In my mind, you can be Lovecraftian without referencing Innsmouth in every goddamn game for example.

References to the material don't imply familiarity. There are plenty of Lovecraftian games, burdened by references to his stories, none of them really get it right. He had a gallows sense of humor that never shows up in these games, and of course his racism never makes it into the setting either. If developers of these games remained true to his stories and mythos, they would have something few crpgs have succeeded.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Is the Blasted Street the final area?

Also encountered a really cool new bug where after saving Edemavvah's "son" I can't access my inventory or any other tab beyond the character tab. Neat.

and of course his racism never makes it into the setting either.

Did you somehow miss the dude in blackface?

 

[fantadomat]

I'll pay for it! I swear on me mum!

 

[PEACH]

As a little sidenote, if we get more Lovecraftian games in the future (which I'm starting to hope we won't given that they all end up being disappointing), I really hope that we will get a game that is not just a collection of Lovecraft stories. In my mind, you can be Lovecraftian without referencing Innsmouth in every goddamn game for example.

Write something that has similar sensibilities, unlocking the mysteries of the world, dealing with sanity and horror, all that shit. But do it without referencing Cthulhu or Dagon or all the other well known stuff that's been done to death. Keep the atmosphere but come up with new stuff. Getting a Cthulhu statuette is not interesting or mysterious, seeing the Marsh family referenced in every Lovecraft game ever made is not interesting or mysterious, having a quest essentially be The Whisperer in Darkness gives away the fact that yes, I will be meeting and probably fighting one of those flying Yuggoth cunts at some point. It goes on and on and on and it's not scary, it's not mysterious, it's not interesting. It's just "hey guys I get that reference, that's so cool!" and it's shitty.
Lovecraft is well known pop culture at this point. I have a Christmas Cthulhu plushie in my sofa. Cthulhu is nostalgic. It's not scary or interesting any more. It's been sucked dry of mystery.

Fuck the stories and come up with something new and have the "oooh it's a Lovecraftian game!" come from the atmosphere instead.

This sums up my major criticism of the game really well.

It's effectively a Lovecraft theme park which makes it, ironically, antithetical to his work by regurgitating the familiar rather than conjuring the unknown. I still enjoy it, but I'm disappointed that they took the most literal approach to the term Lovecraftian as possible, treating it like a Greatest Hits or something and piling every inch of the game in derivative or referential content.

 

[Jenkem]

somehow managed to fix my issue by reloading a save just before that, which is odd because I tried that last night and it didn't work.. this time when I loaded up the save it put me in a fight (which I dont remember happening when I tried to load last night) and after grabbing the thing I needed leveled up and was able to level everyone and continue..

FUCK BUGS