Lovecraftian Fisticuffs: Scratches VS Darkness Within

[Kim]

Addicted as I am to the horror genre, it’s pretty shitty. Most horror games aren’t really scary, and their attempts to create fear often result in nothing more than frustration.

Sometimes I love the shittiness. Poor voice acting can blend with terrible horror plots and self-important tone to result in a level of comedy that is hard to surpass. Other times, I don’t love it. It’s no secret that, like pretty much any genre of entertainment, horror is often wildly sexist, and bad horror games can be a real chore.

Even so, I still consider myself a fan of the genre, actively seek it out, and endure the punishment it gives me.

My twin addictions, punishment and horror, recently gave birth to a rather ‘FUCK IT’ attitude towards which horror games I play. I don’t really care if a horror game looks all that good. I’ll check it out regardless, because I’m in a horrible death spiral of playing them.

Thanks to this, I have recently gotten the opportunity to experience Scratches and Darkness Within. Both of them are PC horror games with point-and-click adventure mechanics, and both draw primarily from Lovecraft, who may as well be to horror as Tolkien is to fantasy. These similarities sharpen the contrast between the two games. One is a poor realization of both Lovecraft-inspired fiction and point-and-click mechanics, and the other is actually really damn good.

Scratches is the shit game, for those keeping score, and it’s so crap that some might wonder which part of it is the most fecal. The easy choice, of course, is the racism. Scratches pushes the idea of Africa as a dark, dangerous continent where strange creatures, vicious savages, and ancient gods hide in the shadows. It’s entire plot is built on that racism.

Lovecraft was a raging scumbag racist. As someone who has enjoyed his work, even I have to admit that this is the case. Worse yet, Lovecraft thought it fair game to squeeze his bigotry in wherever it would fit in his stories. Even some of the “good” Lovecraft stories are racist to the point that you’re embarrassed to be reading them. At least, you’d better be fucking embarrassed.

It’s no surprise that Lovecraft’s bigotry found its way into a Lovecraft-inspired game. It’s embarrassing, insulting, and disappointing, but it’s not surprising. However, one would hope that someone who takes from the worst parts of Lovecraft would get at least some of the good parts in the process. Scratches doesn’t.

Scratches is made with the mentality of a cook who thinks so long as they use most of the same ingredients as a skilled chef, the meal will be almost as good. There’s no consideration whatsoever for quantities of those ingredients, how those ingredients are used, or the weaknesses of the chef being poorly mimicked. It’s the performative aping of an animal that sees but does not understand.

It embraces Lovecraft’s racism by founding its story on a vicious lost tribe of South Africans who murder and cannibalize others in fearful worship of a giant mask. Then it forgets Lovecraft’s vision of mankind as weak and powerless in the face of uncaring alien gods.

It pushes the sort of ableist bigotry Lovecraft would have loved by making a physically handicapped son the punishment for a man who trifled with mystical African masks. Yet it ignores the themes of “teetering on the brink of madness” that Lovecraft used to such great effect in his best stories.

All of Lovecraft’s slow, careful build-up without any of the atmosphere and payoff that made that pacing work.

Lovecraft may be the Tolkien of horror, but his style is not for amateurs. Even his own writing is an inferior version of what his writing should have been, primarily due to him being human garbage.

I could of course tear into Scratches for other reasons. It’s unintuitive, tedious, too boring to even be worth mocking. It’s just shit. Its redeeming qualities are so few that I doubt they even exist. However, less important that Scratches is a shitty game than that it was a shitty Lovecraft game.

I told you about a shitty Lovecraft game so that I could tell you about a good one.

Darkness Within just gets Lovecraft. It’s slow, but it knows how to do that pacing justice. The slow pace works because it doesn’t interfere with the tense atmosphere that the game builds with all the skill of a master architect. Lovecraft was a wordy motherfucker who took his goddamn time to do anything in any story he told, but Lovecraft fans put up with it because he did it well.

It isn’t just slow pacing for its own sake. It’s methodical. Never rushing. Walking through the hallway in the middle of the night. Making your way down the steps, careful that you don’t underestimate just how many steps there are. Feeling your way through the darkness because even though you know your house, you don’t know it in the dark. A good Lovecraft story captures these feelings and many others. You know how a character feels lost in the middle of a part of town they’ve never been to before, because you got lost with them.

Darkness Within is just as wordy. It drops a fucking filing cabinet of legal briefs on you about religious hallucinogens, a man’s diary after moving into a new house, correspondences between cultists, and on the list goes. You don’t have to read it. It’s totally possible to skim these things for the important points and move on. In fact, if you play the game on Easy it will skim them for you. Yet I still felt compelled to read all these side-shows to the main story because they were genuinely interesting. I wanted to learn about the world the game had crafted within the “real” one.

Earlier I touched on Lovecraft’s whole “teetering on the brink of madness” schtick. Personally, I love the idea that the universe is so horrifying and fucked up that ignorance is the only thing keeping us from breaking. “Ignorance is bliss,” as they say. Even in a world without subterranean nightmare creatures, the less ignorant you are the harder it is to cope. There are a lot of fucked up things in the world and the more you know the harder it is to be both happy and decent in this world.

Lovecraft’s madness themes are a great translation of this fundamental truth into the world of horror, and Darkness Within embraces them completely, running three parallel possibilities for just what is going on with the protagonist’s mind at any given moment. The game’s conclusion is the most true to Lovecraft’s own writing that I’ve ever seen.

Best of all, Darkness Within is actually fun to play.

Of course, that’s not to say Darkness Within is a perfect experience. There are still a few moments of frustration with the puzzles on Normal difficulty and, much more concerning, the game doesn’t avoid its own flirtations with racism. While it never commits to the racism to the same degree almost any horror game that brings up Africa does, instead focusing on England based primitive cults, its few moments stand out and sour an otherwise amazing experience.

If you can tolerate Lovecraft’s shittiness for the stuff he does really fucking well, Darkness Within is still worth playing. It’s more than worth playing. If you can enjoy Lovecraft, you owe it to yourself to experience this game. It falls just short of being a masterpiece experience.

As for Scratches, fuck that game and fuck you if you like it.

[Premmy]

No lie, I fell asleep on a couple parts.