Back in 2021, developer Dragonis Games released the first of their deep dives into H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with the near photo-realistic first-person adventure game, The Shore. Now, onto their third game, the developers are continuing their exploration and re-imagining of the Cthulhu Mythos with the morbid and eerie Necrophosis: Full Consciousness release for Xbox and PlayStation owners. Originally released on PC last year, the game is making its jump to console in a complete edition that includes its Subconsciousness DLC, continuing its strange story at the end of the universe.
Set in an alternate timeline, billions of years after the demise of the universe, you take on the role of Consciousness itself. Now awoken well past the end of all things, you have to navigate a nightmarish landscape of broken beings in a bid to find your purpose in all of this madness.
Played from a first-person perspective, Necrophosis falls into the affectionately dubbed “walking simulator” category. It’s a game that’s less concerned with traditional gameplay than it is with mood, atmosphere, and narrative. As such, actual playability takes a bit of a step back in favour of creating an interactive painting of macabre visuals for you to explore.
And macabre it certainly is. Heavily inspired by the Gothic art of Zdislaw Bekskinski, Necrophosis is a poem in motion; a painting come to life; a Weird Tale of decay given to you to explore. It’s a decrepit world of bone and sinew, of creatures caught somewhere between full death and lingering decay, cast into surreal forms of fleshless muscle and yellowed, ossified bone. It’s a stunning attempt at bringing Bekskinski’s unique, apocalyptic and surreal art to interactive media and marrying it with the nihilism of Cosmic Horror at the hands of some of the Cthulhu Mythos most famous creations.
From the King in Yellow to Nyarlathotep, to that great hoary Old One himself, Cthulhu, Necrophosis cameos some of the big guns into a tale that’s aimed at exploring the metaphysical and philosophical connotations of choice and existence itself, while marrying those themes to one of the Cthulhu Mythos most unexplored aspects: it’s cyclical nature. As Lovecraft once wrote: “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.”
Choice, and whether or not you have any, is an important through-line throughout the experience. I feel as though the sense of player agency, or the lack thereof, ties into the game’s themes. This feels especially important when linked to the games rather simplistic gameplay. When you’re not speaking to woeful entities or reading the lore drops scattered across the environments, you’re dealing with some very basic puzzle solving that essentially amounts to taking an item to a specific place or giving it to a specific creature. There’s very little difficulty involved here, and the procedure doesn’t change throughout the game’s runtime, or that of its brisk expansion which, at the end of the game, left me with the impression that it was meant to highlight just how little agency Consciousness has in the unfolding of the story. Whether or not that was what the developer intended I can’t say, but it certainly fits in with the games overall themes and tone.
Of course, Necrophosis’ greatest strength is its atmosphere. Even when the actual gameplay didn’t quite light me on fire, I still found it hard to put the controller down as I always wanted to see what was just around the corner. How much more of this version of the Cthulhu Mythos would I uncover, what lurked in the shadows, what new tainted abominations would each cycle bring? Like a good arcane tome or portal to the unknown, the need to know more, to see more is the games driving focus.
That it’s tied to some striking visuals and creepy sound design just happens to be the icing on a malodorous cake.A walking simulator, a piece of performance art, a poem brought to life, a weird tale to read on a dark and lonely night, Necrophosis is all of these things. More than that, it’s a love letter to Cosmic Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos that is aimed squarely at fans of those genres, both of the literal and digital forms of entertainment. As such, it’s an acquired taste that fans of those genres will certainly appreciate. But as a take on what a game could be, anyone looking for something different in the indie gaming space should make the effort to check it out. You may just find something to love at the end of all things.
Pros:
- Superbly grotesque art design
- Compelling exploration that keeps pushing you forward
- Lots of lore to discover
Cons:
- Limited interactivity with very simple puzzle-based gameplay
Score: 7/10
Necrophosis: Full Consciousness was reviewed on Xbox Series S/X using a code provided by the publisher. It is also available on PS5 and PC.
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