The Dark Truth Behind The Sinking City's Nightmarish Enemies

The idea of the uncanny springs to mind with this description, where a feeling of familiarity is set up but distorted ever so slightly so that it's not the same thing you know and are comfortable with. Human-based robots and dolls are the most explicit example of conjuring this creepy feeling, but creating people in a video game would also stretch to the uncanny by way of them being pixellated recreations of our every day that are then manipulated to fit a fantastical narrative.

This is important, as it's not just the enemies that get this treatment, with the inhabitants of Oakmont also succumbing to Frogwares' conception of the uncanny - from the fish-faced Innsmouthers to the hybrid ape family of the Throgmortons. Oganesyan explained:

"The idea was to normalise these kind of people. You see them in the game and they act like - it's the same idea probably as monsters - they act normal, and they are definitely part of this world. But you're not part of this world, and we wanted to bring this idea that it's natural for this society but it's not natural for you."

Of course, it's not as easy as deciding what would look a little weird and slapping it all together though, with the developers working through different avenues of their ideas as the game grew. The application of blood is always a big one in these types of games for how effective gore can be in terms of their enemies:

"There's a lot of variations of the monsters, we'll look at them and then examine if we feel any emotions when encountering the creatures in the game. We have different styles, we had ones with more gore, more violent creatures, but at the same time we decided that there's only so much violence we can implement in a Lovecraftian game."

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