The writing is absolutely splendid, excellently lyrical as it delivers its silly situations in a serious tone. It’s played for laughs rather than scares, and that’s very welcome. That’s the joy here: modern-day notions in a town otherwise trapped in early 20th century America. I chose the latter, because who doesn’t want to get settled on arrival, and ended up on a very unsettling coach journey to a so-called “wellness” event. Do you immediately investigate? Do you head to the harbour? Or check into the hotel? These aren’t fake decisions – they lead to long chains of events of their own. So off to the seaside town you head, on a bus filled with deeply peculiar people, and start choosing your own adventure from the off. She seems oddly unaware of the specific details, like what her daughter might look like, but is also very impassioned about her safe return. You are a private investigator, in the modern day, asked to visit Innsmouth to help a rather suspicious vampish lady find her supposedly missing 8-year-old daughter. Working like an extremely pretty Twine game (I suspect it’s running Ink), you choose from two or three different responses to any given situation, as the text vividly and amusingly describes the tale. To which I, once again, just think: so write about something a bit like it then? But they didn’t, and none of them is Lovecraft, so let’s carry on by just seeing what the game itself is like. In mostly-text adventure The Innsmouth Case, it’s a rather woolly statement that appears when you begin playing. In Lovecraft Country it was a conversation between two characters to acknowledge that one can try to enjoy the creations of a bigot, but never ultimately escape them. It, as all Lovecraft-based fiction now must, began with a disclaimer of sorts. Of course, we’ve just had the completely splendid/silly Lovecraft Country, that simultaneously provided a crushing portrayal of American 20th century racism alongside a lot of very daft ghost/monster stories. Which always puts me in the position of wondering: why not just think up your own seaside monsters? What is it about Lovecraft’s work that people feel so beholden to it, so determined to directly reference his universe? Or why not pick Poe? Or Irving? Or Loudon, Le Fanu, or James? Heck, rip off someone who’s not out of copyright, but change all the names. Then again, I’ve never read a word he’s written, and as such have no investment whatsoever in Innsmouth and its various betentacled antics.
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