Reviews
[Review] ‘Conarium’ is a Respectable Take on a Classic Lovecraft Tale, But Lacks a Sense of Danger
Experience isolation and fear in the Antarctic. Bloody Disgusting gets lost in the snow for its Conarium review on PS4.
It’s easy to see why more and more modern horror games lean into H.P. Lovecraft‘s work for inspiration. It features a healthy checklist of cool and otherworldly things to stuff into a video game and let’s face it, Lovecraft’s work is in the public eye more than ever.
Take Conarium. It’s heavily inspired by Lovecraft’s In the Mountains of Madness. Set in the Antarctic at a research station, some sinister experiments have led to some equally sinister results. You play as what appears to be the only surviving research team member, trying to unravel the dark mystery of what happened to the rest of your crew. What follows is a mix of simple puzzles and note reading, with the occasional visual aid to help the story along.
Being based on a Lovecraft story, things obviously head into the realm of horror. Unfortunately, Conarium could do with remembering that a little more often.
This is a game that appears to be trying to drip-feed suspense and dread, and as such, it takes you along at a sedate pace. Thankfully, the visuals are worth taking in. Venturing out of the darkened cabins of the research station for the first time, you’re thrust into the cold windswept night, where a snowstorm reduced the already low visibility. It’s an arresting sight, and shows Conarium nails the atmosphere it’s aiming for, one of isolation and quiet dread. Its problem is that it doesn’t maintain it.
You see, Conarium almost never makes you feel like you’re actually any real peril. Sure, you feel like you’re alone and that something could happen, but rarely does anything happen that really delivers on the dread feel. In fact, the more Conarium gets in your face with a perceived threat, the less it works.
The upside is you’re free to dig into the story and the myriad puzzles without too much distraction and Conarium does tell a good story. Note reading may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but in a game like this, it’s enjoyable to get lost in the words and soak up the atmosphere, regardless of any shortcomings. This is a relatively small world, but the developer has filled it with a rich recent history.
Reading is fine and well in a video game, but you have to have something meaningful to back that up, otherwise, it’s pushing the limits of what constitutes being called a game. The wandering between places in this snowbound isolation is certainly an effective part of that. It’s difficult to emphasize how well Conarium evokes that feeling of solitude. There’s an unnerving peacefulness to the constant gloom of the station and the howling winds, and while the attempts at horror fall flat elsewhere, it’s here where it comes closest, and it’s hard to imagine anything but a video game capturing that in quite the same way. When the locale changes into something more Lovecraftian over time, it loses a little of that, but the visual design remains strong nonetheless.
When it comes to the more interactive side, the puzzles, in this case, Conarium feels like a bit of a letdown. There’s nothing truly bad about them, they just aren’t particularly inventive or challenging. This does keep the storytelling flow going smoothly, but if you trust your audience to be able to read copious amounts of text, you can probably trust them to solve a slightly complex puzzle now and again,
Remarkably then, even through disappointing attempts at horror and puzzling, Conarium is just about compelling enough to warrant seeing through to the end. It’s not particularly mind-blowing from a narrative perspective, but it is engrossing and satisfying. If only it pushed harder for a sense of dread and terror, or even simply provided more of a challenge, then we’d be talking about something that truly stands out as a thoughtful, engaging horror game.
Conarium review code for PS4 provided by the publisher
Conarium is out now on PS4, PC, and Xbox One
Books
‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ Book Review: Paul Tremblay’s Primal Scream Against the AI Push
Read enough Paul Tremblay novels and one word comes to dominate your thinking around his fiction: “Daring.”
Whether he’s playing with traditional novelistic forms, holding conversations with characters across time, or pushing his stories to their bleakest and strangest possible conclusions (if they have concrete conclusions at all, Tremblay is a daring novelist, never playing it safe for his audience or himself. The author of A Head Full of Ghosts, Horror Movie, and more is always pushing for something in his fiction, digging into the core of an issue until he finds its bloody, beating heart.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, Tremblay’s latest novel, is no different. From the title alone you might surmise certain things about the narrative, from its Philip K. Dick influence to its sci-fi-horror premise, and you’d be right. But Tremblay always pushes beyond those initial assumptions, and here we get not just a gripping sci-fi-horror showcase, but something much stranger and more profound: An exploration of what it means to be human, fragile bodies and all, in the age of AI.
Julia, Tremblay’s protagonist, is in a strange place when the novel begins. A former gaming streamer who’s retreated from her digital spotlight, she’s in search of a new direction in life, and she finds one in the last place she might expect. Julia’s mother, who runs a California tech behemoth, has a job offer for her daughter, an unprecedented one. It seems that the company has introduced proprietary new technology into the body of a brain-dead man, and now they need to see what this tech can do. Julia’s job? Using her gaming skills to take this human vegetable (Julia calls him “Bernie” because of Weekend at Bernie’s) from one side of the country to another, using a stealthy controller purpose-built for the experience.
This is a wonderfully ghoulish premise on which to build a novel, and Tremblay makes full use of its nightmare fuel. As Julia comes to grips with the implications of what she’s about to do, and what she might discover while doing it, the author punctuates her journey with trips into the mad mindscape of Bernie himself, a dark reflection of our own world populated with half-remembered moments and images and hallucinations. As simple exercises in writing craft, they recall Philip K. Dick at his best, building the same sense of overwhelm and wonder so present in his work, but Tremblay’s after something else as well, and it’s purpose-built for this moment.
The novel builds deliberate juxtapositions with Bernie’s half-remembered life and Julia’s ongoing one, sending them barreling at each other from opposite ends of consciousness. Julia’s brain functions as only her brain can, a mass of pop culture references and dreams and memories she both cherishes and would rather forget. Bernie’s world is one of shadows, but also one of constantly shifting perspective, as the tech in his head remakes him. He’s not just a passenger in his own body, but an unwilling participant in a Frankenstein-ing of human and machine. It’s not the first time an author has attempted such a thing, but through Tremblay’s evocative, visceral prose, it’s one of the most effective, and it hits on something vital that Tremblay says in a way that only he can.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a thumping sci-fi yarn, a journey into new frontiers through untested technology with vast implications for the future of the world, and if Tremblay had only explored that genre, he’d have done well. When the horror elements creep in, though, Tremblay’s work raises endless questions over what exactly we are sacrificing when we let machines get so close not just to our flesh, but to our consciousness, even when, medically speaking, that consciousness is gone.
Tremblay breaks this sacrifice down in terrifying detail, sometimes quite literally breaking down the basic flow of prose in Bernie’s head until he’s been hijacked by words and phrases and shapes that he doesn’t understand. Along the way, Tremblay gets almost metafictional with his probing of this hybrid consciousness, asking us to question not just where the story will go, but who gets to be in control when the narrative becomes a runaway train.
All of this makes Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep the most ambitious book of Paul Tremblay’s career, which is really saying something. His daring, his boldness, and his ability to mine the unspeakable are on full display, and they work together to deliver one of the year’s most unnerving genre books.
Tremblay’s at the peak of his powers with this one.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep hits shelves on June 30.
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