First-person undersea scare-o-puzzler Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss launches April 16, 2026, as announced during last night’s Galaxies showcase of less than blockbustery videogame darlings. It kind of looks like a marginally more combative Soma with less philosophical subtext, which sounds like a solid Friday night to me. It’s also an opportunity for some hipfire scattergun commentary about the Lovecraftian premise of sights beyond comprehension, and how this gels with videogames, an artform that has “video” in the title.
As described on Steam, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss sees you and a sinister chatbot accomplice exploring Cthulhu’s prison, the ancient submerged city of R’lyeh, while resisting “the creeping madness caused by Cthulhu’s influence”. You’ve found your way there while investigating a lost mining station, deep beneath the Pacific.
There’s a secret at the heart of R’lyeh “that could shatter your understanding of reality”. All this talk of madness and shattering notwithstanding, the release date trailer deals in familiar Lovecraftian imagery. There are tentacles, fish monsters, mutated humans, and streets of snotty, graven stone that spiral upwards and downwards in frightful ways.
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I was going to do my usual routine of putting my hands on my hips and saying “well that doesn’t look very incomprehensibly cosmically horrible to me, it looks like a bunch of feisty trout people, upside-down windows and flagrant Orientalism”. But this kind of thing is perfectly in keeping with Lovecraft’s own descriptions of Cthulhu, which are nowhere near as fancy as I’d love them to be. “The Thing cannot be described,” he writes in The Call of Cthulhu. “There is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.” Then he proceeds to talk about Cthulhu being green and greasy with big “flabby” claws and a squid for a head.
I generally think that the better recent “Lovecraftian” cosmic horror seizes upon Lovecraft’s artier abstractions and twists them further. For example, I find R’lyeh itself a lot more intriguing than the depiction of absolute unit squidman Cthulhu. Lovecraft’s narrator in the story makes a loose connection to futurism, the Italian early 20th century art movement that dealt in worlds smashed and hastened by combustion engines and electricity, producing city paintings like this one.
“Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city,” Lovecraft’s awestruck voyager expounds, “for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces–surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs.”
I’d love to play a Lovecraftian game that runs with that analogy and puts Euclidean geometry under more artful stress, rather than just bending what could otherwise be Quake 3 maps in silly ways. I’m not sure you can pursue such ideas in Unreal Engine, much as The Cosmic Abyss may decorate its cavern roofs with inverted masonry – Unreal Engine games come with a certain built-in visual register and audience expectations. Still, perhaps that shattering secret at the heart of the game will surprise me. It looks like they have a black hole down there. Always keen on a black hole somewhere it shouldn’t be.
Speaking of black holes, I will tell you about my one moment in a videogame that compares to Lovecraft’s account of cracking the seal on R’lyeh and – in the seconds before Johnny Octochops emerges – encountering a “tenebrousness” that has an ambiguous “positive quality”, bursting forth “like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings”. It was while playing Relative Hell, which I’ve written about here and there. It’s a shmup that, to pack everything down, models ideas about spacetime I do indeed struggle to describe, inasmuch as my own subject-verb-object grammar is a product of ‘classical physics’.
In every game of Relative Hell I’ve played, I’ve slid off the surface of legible reality and found myself at large in a frictionless yet enveloping dark sphere with coloured gameplay props smeared around its profile. I cannot work out what it means to move in that sphere and it scares the shit out of me. The developer’s notes don’t help. Here is one: “in the pause mode, when you advance/revert the time, you can see a dark circle — this represents your “future”, that is, the area reached by the light you emit currently (you can theoretically affect this future), or “past”, the area you would have seen by now.” If the shadows parted and Cthulhu appeared, it would be a relief, frankly.
