Someone’s Making An Open-World HP Lovecraft Video Game

Past conversations have led me to suspect that there's quite a bit of overlap between Lovecraft fans and gamers in the Birth.Movies.Death. readership, and if I'm correct about that, I think the following news is going to make a bunch of you very happy: Frogware Games - the company behind a whole bunch of Sherlock Holmes titles - is hard at work on an open-world investigation game based on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos.

I'll say that again: we're getting an open-world investigation game based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft. This is fantastic news.

As of now, there's little to go on beyond a description of the game and some concept art over at Frogware's website, but it all looks and sounds great to me. Here's how they're describing the game:

The Sinking City is a game of investigation genre taking place in a fictional open world inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. 

The player incarnates a private investigator in 1920s, who finds himself in a city of New England, Oakmont Massachusetts. It’s currently suffering from extensive waterflood, and its cause is clearly supernatural. The city trembles on the brink of madness. Can you investigate this beleaguered town and untangle the tragic extent of its failings or will you be driven beyond madness yourself?

And just look at this concept art. 

Creepy flooded basements!

Creepy flooded villages! Underwater tentacle...things!

Creepy flooded village streets with more tentacles! Old timey trucks!

Concept art that looks straight out of At The Mountains Of Madness!

The ability to shoot at Cthulhu with a Tommy Gun! Holy shit, you guys!

Of course, this is only concept art. And yes, an open-world game is infinitely more ambitious than anything Frogware's attempted in the past. But let's not worry about that right now. Instead, let's focus on celebrating the fact that someone's attempting to do this at all. I've spoken at length in the past on how woefully underrepresented Lovecraft's work is on film, and the same goes doubly for Lovecraft's representation in the video game world (shout-out to Bethesda's criminally-underrated Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners Of The Earth).

Frogware's bringing a demo of The Sinking City to next week's Game Developer's Conference, so we'll probably have more information soon. Who's excited?