Recently I deep dived into the cosmic horror genre while I was researching for my current video game project. I’m in the middle of the wordlbuilding phase and, more specifically, dealing with pantheons and gods and cosmogony.
The first draft of the pantheon was lazily based off H. P. Lovecraft and its tentacular abominations. You know the drill: they came from the sky, they lived in dark waters, they were a mix of octopus and human.
During our weekly call with my buddy and partner on the project (hi Nicola!), he politely pointed out how derivative and unsurprising the gods felt to him. He read Lovecraft, knows Cthulhu, and isn’t impressed anymore by the classic “A mountain walked or stumbled. […] After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.” (Hi Howard!)
I wasn’t surprised. What Nicola expressed to me, we could easily apply to the larger gaming community: we all know Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and the rest of the crew. They’re not scary anymore; they’re familiar. Soon after my call with Nicola, I stumbled upon this poignant article by 2018 Luke Gearing. A sign from God; not the eldritch one, mind you.
In the back of my brain, I knew that I was plowing an arid field when I conceived my first draft pantheon as Lovecraftian deities. After all, it is not always bad to have something easily recognisable in your story. If we decide that our deities are not the focus of the game, then we can make them as cliché as we want, given that the rest of our story subverts expectations and surprises the player.
Still, I felt obliged to do at least some research and experiment a little with our small gods before marking them with the seal of approval. That brought me to Fear & Hunger.
The God of Cosmic and Horror
I knew Fear & Hunger from conversations with Nicola and other friends. They enthusiastically told me about the brutal game loop, the adult themes, and the lore: dark, twisted, corrupted. I saw a screenshot of the Sulfur God a couple of months ago, felt sick, quit the browser, lighted a candle to All-Mer for protection, never looked back.
So, I watched a lot of gameplays and endings, studied the lore, tried the game. I can easily say Funger (as reddit renamed the game) is one of the freshest take on cosmic horror I’ve seen in a videogame^[I am aware that there is a huge literary scene in the US and other countries producing amazing stories of cosmic horror which move the genre forward from the groundwork established by Lovecraft and his peers of the time. However, I believe we can agree that the video game medium itself hasn’t produced much in that vein, instead being stuck in a cycle of reskinning The Call of Cthulhu as many times as possible.].
Cosmic horror is that niche in speculative fiction which ruminate on the role of humanity in the greater scheme of things; that’s the cosmic part, at least. The horror stems from the realisation that humanity stands in a shitty position in said greater scheme. Lovecraft believed humanity to be irrelevant compared to the other dwellers of the cosmos, which was utterly hostile and alien. He conveyed said alien nature by inventing horrible creatures that had nothing to do with anything on Earth. That was his take.
But that was the 20s. What can we say almost one century later? Miro Haverin, the developer of Fear & Hunger, had something to say. Mixing his Lovecraft influence with Berserk and roleplaying games cliches, Miro ventured into cosmic horror to reflect on the history of humanity.
Gods in Funger are metaphors for what the author believes drove human civilization towards progress through history.
- The Old Gods are a polytheistic pantheon where every god represents a basic human emotion: Gro-goroth is violence and strength; Sylvian is love and lust; Vinushka is nature. They ruled the infancy of humanity, when humans were dominated by their own primal drives and strived for simple survival.
- Then, we have All-Mer. A man ascended to godhood, he represents humanity imposing an human-made order upon themselves and nature. It is not nature or violence or lust to guide the people anymore, but an order devised by them. This brings humanity to the dark middle age we see in the first Funger. I interpreted this as the beginning act of civilization as we intend it. Much like the birth of the polis in Ancient Greece.
- At the end of Funger, we participate in the birth of the God of Fear and Hunger. An entity embodying these two principles, this God represents the further progress humanity made to overcome the fear derived from chaos and the hunger born out of poverty. While All-Mer represented the simple aspiration for a human-ruled order, the God of Fear and Hunger is the strive for improvement that stems out of becoming aware of your miserable condition. This brought humanity from the middle age to the contemporary age we see in Fear and Hunger: Termina.
As a side note, the Machine God in Termina is basically the World Wide Web; namely, an artificial consciousness merging the individualities of the entire humanity into a single entity. Which is basically the World Wide Web, isn’t it? I expect Funger 3 to takes place in the very contemporary age, or even later.
Conclusion
Funger entertains us with the recreation of the history of humanity while it comments on the inner desires that drove that same history forward. It has no intention of being historically accurate, nor of matching exactly gods and history periods. What it does, instead, is reflecting on the role of humanity in the greater scheme of time (sounds cosmically horrific, doesn’t it?).
What I find brilliant is that, in a way, there is an hidden form of optimism behind the gruesome stories of Funger: progress happens anyway, and humanity is somehow able to stand on its own feet without much help from distant deities. Progress, however, seems to be powered by the blood of those who never returned form the dungeon of fear and hunger.
All of this, Funger did without using Lovecratian visuals (octopusses, dark water, etc…) nor going back to the same message of hopelessness and irrelevancy that Lovecraft built his stories around.
That was it! Funger showed me that you can tell a lot of things on humanity without relying on the same tropes, and that cosmic horror as a genre can express a variety of nuanced concepts while being truthful to its core pillars.
I didn’t even talk about Funger’s brilliant cast of characters or mechanics. That will be for another time.
© Cover image credit: Miro Haverin
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