10 Video Games Inspired By H.P. Lovecraft

Something of a spiritual successor to From Software’s epic series of hardcore RPGs known as Dark Souls, Bloodborne takes the bleak, desperate atmosphere of the team’s previous games and capitalizes on them to create something at which Lovecraft himself may very well have blushed.

While the game’s lore isn’t even tangentially related to the Cthulhu mythos, the city of Yharnam and surrounding territories is clearly being plagued by foul and mysterious forces, and it’s up to the vastly-outmatched player to hunt down these demons and find the truth amidst a sea of misdirection and lies. Bloodborne’s plot is never directly spelled out, but most players will be able to glean that all of these atrocities occurred when humanity ran afoul of some not-to-be-disturbed elder gods—or “Great Ones,” as they are known in-game.

There’s also an underlying theme of unbearable knowledge and what comes of man’s desire to know things that he shouldn’t. What’s more, around the mid game point, the player comes across an ancient institution of higher learning which many have likened to Lovecraft’s Miskatonic University, a fictional institution which he frequently mentioned in his writings.