Reviews
[Review] ‘Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure’ Blends Wit With Eldritch Horror, But Lacks an Edge
Unlike the unfathomable eldritch horror it namedrops in its subtitle, Gibbous: A Cthulhu Adventure is light, funny and (mostly) delightful. It also differentiates itself from the Great Old Ones by refusing to overstay its welcome.
Like another famously tentacle-centric point-and-click, Romanian developer Stuck in Attic’s Kickstarted Lovecraftian comedy game entrusts players with a roster of three distinct characters. Buzz Kerwan is a Transylvanian-American librarian, whose life is upended after a brush with murderous cultists. Don R. Ketype is the hard-boiled detective archetype (get it?) who accidentally leads those hooded zealots right to Buzz. And, Kitteh is Buzz’s pet cat who gains the power of speech after a cultist-caused explosion uncovers a dark secret hidden within the library: the Necronomicon.
Kitteh isn’t happy about her predicament, and Buzz sets out to help turn her back into a regular, speechless cat, searching for clues around his apartment and the surrounding town of Darkham. Ketype, meanwhile, awakens in a cell at cultist HQ, and must attempt to escape. Buzz and Ketype each have special skills to assist in their pointing-and-clicking. Buzz can, essentially, use Kitteh as an item, combining her with objects in his inventory or clicking a black cat icon to ask her to assist with a task. Ketype gains the ability to see flashes of the past early in the game, allowing him to dig up information on people or objects in the environment.
Like a tadpole slowly maturing into a Kraken, Gibbous’ story gradually balloons until it’s a globetrotting quest with the fate of the world hanging in the balance. And, for the most part, that works. Each of Gibbous’ seven chapters are mostly confined to a single location. Early on, you’ll explore Darkham before venturing to neighbouring Fishmouth and then beyond, and each setting has its own cast of characters and distinct feeling of place.
I was drawn in by the game’s ‘90s cartoon aesthetic, which updates the old school point-and-click look in a way that’s similar to what Double Fine accomplished with the remastered versions of Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle. It’s great! However, Gibbous suffers in comparison to those Tim Schafer-penned classics when the gorgeous, hand-painted character models open their mouths. Ketype is the most consistently successful of the main cast (working within an established genre trope certainly helps), but Buzz’s personality — is this guy smart? is this guy really clueless? is this guy somehow both smart and really clueless? — remained hard to pin down throughout the game’s 12-hour runtime.
The dialogue is sometimes similarly awkward. Multiple moments made me laugh out loud, but many of the jokes don’t fully land or are poorly worded. Generally, the script feels like it could have used a punch-up. But, the mood — established by that fantastic art and some excellent violin music — more than makes up for any failings of the script. Additionally, the puzzles manage to walk the fine line between brain teaser and bullshit surprisingly well. Much of the gameplay follows the old point-and-click formula — talk to everyone, collect items, combine items, and, if all else fails, click on everything — but the puzzle logic is impressively sound. The big set-piece puzzles — which could have easily sent players hunting for a walkthrough — require some critical thinking, but rarely moon logic. Gibbous manages to avoid being too easy and too frustrating. It’s challenging at times, but mostly succeeds at keeping the player within a state of flow.
Unfortunately, Gibbous doesn’t accept the challenge of reckoning with the troubling aspects of H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy. The famous Rhode Islander’s racism influenced the themes that color his work. Fear of the other, fear of the horrifying results of combining man and monster — these are ideas that grow out of Lovecraft’s hatred of people of color (check out the “Race” section of his Wikipedia entry if you want receipts, but be warned: the dude wrote some vile stuff).
Most Lovecraftian games seek to ignore this aspect of Lovecraft’s work, keeping the imagery and themes, but omitting the author’s views. But, Gibbous seems to acknowledge Lovecraft’s racism, to some extent. Kitteh (a black cat, like the Lovecraft family’s black cat with a notoriously racist name) being front and center in marketing materials seemed like an indicator that the game would attempt to say something about that aspect of its inspiration’s legacy. But, no. Gibbous never rises to that particular challenge. It isn’t unique in that regard, but I want to see games, as a whole, do better.
That said, Gibbous skirting that particular conversation helps ensure that it’s a fun, breezy ride from beginning to end. Last year, Unavowed pointed the way forward for an old school genre, introducing a BioWare-like party system and unique puzzles that were specific to certain team compositions. One critic remarked that Wadjet Eye’s game raised “the bar so much I expect most others will just pretend Wadjet Eye didn’t do it.” Gibbous doesn’t do any of that. It doesn’t have any radical ideas (or much to say about the radical idea of its inspiration). But, fans of old LucasArts adventure games will find a lot to love (and laugh at) in Stuck in Attic’s debut.
Gibbous: A Lovecraft Adventure review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Gibbous: A Lovecraft Adventure is out now on PC.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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