Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, PC
Release Date: March 23, 2021
Publisher: Asmodee Digital
Developer: LuckyHammers, Asmodee Digital
The article for Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace originally developed by LuckyHammer Games and completed by Asmodee Digital from the IP by Fantasy Flight Games nearly did not happen. I mean, it happened in that I started the article a number of times but found myself doubling back, deleting, editing, stopping, starting over, and just staring at a page for hours at a time with what might have been words or just strings or random letters. And probably browsing Reddit.
I am very close to this game, but only in terms of loving Mansions of Madness, the board game that Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace was originally based off on and that fact is very important to how I ended up approaching this article; not this article specifically, but Part II.
I kept going back and forth about how best to approach the Game EXP in terms of the video game and the board game. Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace (AHME) is not a strict translation of Mansions of Madness, but there are a lot of elements that were taken from that board game to help create the video game. There were times in the article where I found myself explaining how the board game played that came across like a poorly written instruction booklet, and the instruction booklet for Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition is only 20 pages long; it includes a lot of pictures so it is not just 20 pages of block text. This was not what I wanted when I set out to write about the video game.
So then I began writing without talking about the board game, but then I felt that a lot of my personal experience playing the video game was left out because I had so much background going into the game. To me, it would be like, well, talking about a story inspired by another story that I had read 20+ times and not mentioning anything about the original story, or only bringing it up tangentially. The point is, I found it nearly impossible to write about the video game without talking about the board game, and trying to find that balance is where I would often hit mental roadblocks and 37 minutes later, close down the three Reddit, two YouTube, and four Wikipedia tabs I had opened in the meantime.
I had even contemplated writing a version of this article stating how I would not be able to write a Game EXP article about AHME because I could not mentally separate the video game from my experience and expectations from Mansions of Madness. But then I saw what I had already written, did some editing, rearranging paragraphs, modified an existing outline for what I wanted to discuss, and wrote some more to come up with something that somewhat resembled an article. So that is what I aim to go with on Monday, June 14th, but only if I can get all of my other talking points covered.
I want to talk about this game. I was excited about it when it was first announced in 2018 as Mansions of Madness: Mother's Embrace and I even pre-ordered it a few weeks before it was released on the Switch (rather than on PC because I knew that I was going to be playing it at night in bed before going to sleep) which I do not regularly do for either digital or physical games. I have just found it difficult to talk about for all of the reasons above, and once I came to the conclusion that I should preface that article with this article, I felt a lot better about the article and myself.
So thank you for sticking with me through my self-therapy (it's not really self-therapy, seek out a board-certified therapist in your area for that) and rambling for a bit, have a good weekend, and I will be back here on Monday, June 14th with a Game EXP article for Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace on the Nintendo Switch.
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