Game EXP: Dagon: by H.P. Lovecraft (VSD)

 

Dagon: by H.P. Lovecraft
Systems: Windows, Linux, HTC Vive*
Release Date: September 24, 2021
Publisher: Bit Golem
Developer: Bit Golem
Time Spent: 1 Hour

Games based on stories and mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft are notoriously challenging to get right, for several reasons, although it really depends if the devs are going for a direct adaptation of a specific work or simply using it as reference material.  First, from a narrative perspective, characters in Lovecraft's stories don't always have the best outcomes; even those who aren't racist or bigots.  Sure, they might survive the initial encounter with whatever unnamable horror they come across, but they are often forever afflicted with some form of fictionalized psychosis or break from reality that might lead them to a premature end.  Being able to convey that in a way that makes sense to the player can be difficult, which often leads to 4th wall-breaking effects like in Eternal Darkness and Dead Space (Mobile).  Secondly, video games are somewhat unique in that they give the observer/player some level of agency in the story being told.  If you take away the player's illusion of choice with the promise of a traditional video game, then you can run the risk of alienating the player when they begin to feel that what they are doing has little to no effect on the story.  Lastly, a conventional video game where you kill enemies runs the risk of minimizing the whole feeling of helplessness against an unknowable cosmic entity that is pervasive in a lot of weird horror literature.  William Dyer doesn't unload a clip from a Savage 1907 into the formless mass of a Shoggoth as he flees the city along with Danforth.  Olmstead doesn't fire off rounds from his Colt 1911A1 into the group of Deep One Hybrids as they break into his hotel room.  Often, their only option is to run.

Where this leaves us is with the visual novel format, which upfront tells us that we are essentially reading a book and that we are only passive observers, at least to some extent.  Bit Golem has gone just a little step beyond a typical graphic novel where you read text, press a button to proceed to the next text, and repeat until the end of the story, but only just.  Here, you do just that, dialogue and descriptions are read to you from the perspective of the narrator, but you are also able to look around your environment, primarily to take in your surroundings.  The secondary reason is that there are little nuggets of historical context hidden throughout many of the scenes delving into trivia about H.P. Lovecraft, the story of "Dagon," elements of the Cthulhu mythos, and other interesting bits of knowledge that are not necessary to complete or understand the story.  It would be like if a video game had annotated footnotes that were partially hidden.

[EDIT]** There are going to be people who are both more and less familiar with "Dagon" that will not like its presentation here, and to those people, I can only say that that is your prerogative and you lost zero money and at most, 30 minutes of your life.  I did play through a second time to re-experience the story and to look for the additional trivia I missed the first time around.

I really enjoyed what Bit Golem has done with their vision of Dagon and I think that playing it in VR would be equally amazing, although it appears to only be available through Steam VR and is not (yet??) available on either of the available Meta Quest headsets through their respective storefronts.  If it does become available, I can assure you that I will buy it and experience one of my favorite Lovecraft stories all over again.  In the meantime though, there are several other stories/visual novels from Bit Golem that I will be picking up by year's end.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Your Mind Rots With Every Year

*I used "HTC Vive" as a catchall when I should probably clarify with "Steam VR" since there are several VR headsets, not just the HTC Vive that are compatible with Steam VR. And since my laptop is not strong enough to run my Oculus Quest 2 headset through to play games with Steam VR, I will still need to wait for either a port or until after I upgrade to a more powerful system.

**I edited the original article which had originally said that the narration from the game was an abridged version of the story, forgetting that the entirety of the text is "only" 2,216 words. I had thought that the story was longer, being a while since I had reread it. Thank you to Bit Golem for the clarification and pointing out my error.