You can never go wrong making a Lovecraft-themed game, right? It has one of the most dedicated fanbase and pretty much everybody likes it, if not loves it. So here comes the Conarium, admittedly, it did a great job appealing to those die-hard Lovecraft fans, but saying so is not really a compliment, ‘cos you know, devoted fans are easily turned on even by the slightest reference to the original, which is exactly what Conarium was focusing on: being “seemingly” faithful to the original. But other than that, for audience not that “dedicated” to it, Conarium is a disappointing overreach.

It doesn’t take long for one to realize that Conarium is a low-budget project, from the size of the developing team to the lack of details and the repetitiveness of filler props, it is written everywhere. That said, does it really require a great deal of budget to make a decent Lovecraft-themed game? Not necessarily. The Last Door (The Game Kitchen, 2014) served a great example, by choosing a rather budget-saving art style, they successfully avoided the budget issue and fabricated a convincing world through the maximum utilization of limited resources. However, it is a completely different story in Conarium’s case, in which the budget thing did become a critical issue ever since the devs decided to do it in a photorealistic 3d way.

Environmental storytelling is commonly used in story-driven games these days, and I fairly believe that Lovecraftian horror makes a perfect testing field for environmental storytelling, since its unique type of cosmic horror is best shown instead of told. Unfortunately, Conarium missed the mark severely. Due to the aforementioned budget issue, it seems that they were in great shortage of environmental props, hence they just had to keep reusing those finite resources over and over to fill up all the space, which leads to the fact that most scenes in Conarium seem extremely repetitive and undistinguished, almost feel like unfinished.

Taking the crew quarters of the research facility as an example, although all personals were missing at the time the story took place, a good environmental design could still provide you enough cues to deduce what kind of person used to live there and what was going on before their vanishing. But in Conarium’s case, all the crew cabins look identically tidy and empty with exactly the same room layout, you can hardly feel any human presence in them, nor the absence of human. They are just like some brand-new prefabricated cabins on a trade fair ready to be sold. In my opinion, the charm of Lovecraftian horror resides in haunting details, although Conarium did a great modelling job on all the “Lovecraft-themed major attractions”, you’ll soon realize that there are no details to haunt you with at all if you ever move your eyes away from those “main attractions”, let alone environmental storytelling.

Scattered documents and audio-logs is another crucial element in story-driven video games, which fill up holes between story segments, as well as providing backstory info et cetera. It’s certainly not the most elegant method, even cumbersome at times, but it is proven to be effective and budget-saving. So of course it played its part in Conarium, only did it totally wrong. A good use of such feature, requires a lot of effort to be put into the content, the positioning, and the timing of each document. Good examples can be seen at Bioshock franchise and Alan Wake. Back to Conarium, there are 25 documents plus about 10 audio-logs in the whole playthrough, the problem is, all of them are per se rephrasing the same thing:
“Expedition went wrong! Scientists went crazy! I regret it but there’s nothing we can do to undo it! We are doomed!”
Yet it rarely mentioned any cause to all these chaos, so what’s the point of repeating it so many times without revealing any tangible information?

Without the documents giving me any meaningful revelation at all, the storyline itself is also quite static in its presentation, so narrative-wise, the combined result is a complete absence of progression. You just keep marching through indistinguishable corridors, or caverns, or hallucinations or whatever to the next hotspot to trigger another scripted cutscene with lackluster animation and voice acting in order to push the progress of the game forward. But it barely made any observable progress on the narrative, you start confused and you end equally confused. Well, one might argue that isn’t this the very nature of all Lovecraftian horror? Yes, it is correct, but a proper Lovecraftian story could at least provide you enough details to complete your own headcanon. But details, is another thing Conarium is greatly short of. This pretty much nailed the last nail on its coffin.


Now imagining a once Alien or spelunking theme park has recently been renovated into a Lovecraft theme park. All the owner did was toss away some unusable old stuff, get the remaining props rearranged, put in a bunch of Lovecraft-themed sculptures along with some fake decorative books with titles from the classical Lovecraft book list, then officially declare it as a “Lovecraft Theme Park”. The experience of playing Conarium, is basically like a guided tour within such theme park.

You can never go wrong making a Lovecraft-themed game, right? It has one of the most dedicated fanbase and pretty much everybody likes it, if not loves it. So here comes the [i]Conarium[/i], admittedly, it did a great job appealing to those die-hard Lovecraft fans, but saying so is not really a compliment, ‘cos you know, devoted fans are easily turned on even by the slightest reference to the original, which is exactly what [i]Conarium[/i] was focusing on: being “seemingly” faithful to the original. But other than that, for audience not that “dedicated” to it, [i]Conarium[/i] is a disappointing overreach. It doesn’t take long for one to realize that [i]Conarium[/i] is a low-budget project, from the size of the developing team to the lack of details and the repetitiveness of filler props, it is written everywhere. That said, does it really require a great deal of budget to make a decent Lovecraft-themed game? Not necessarily. [i]The Last Door (The Game Kitchen, 2014)[/i] served a great example, by choosing a rather budget-saving art style, they successfully avoided the budget issue and fabricated a convincing world through the maximum utilization of limited resources. However, it is a completely different story in [i]Conarium[/i]’s case, in which the budget thing did become a critical issue ever since the devs decided to do it in a photorealistic 3d way. Environmental storytelling is commonly used in story-driven games these days, and I fairly believe that Lovecraftian horror makes a perfect testing field for environmental storytelling, since its unique type of cosmic horror is best shown instead of told. Unfortunately, [i]Conarium[/i] missed the mark severely. Due to the aforementioned budget issue, it seems that they were in great shortage of environmental props, hence they just had to keep reusing those finite resources over and over to fill up all the space, which leads to the fact that most scenes in [i]Conarium[/i] seem extremely repetitive and undistinguished, almost feel like unfinished. Taking the crew quarters of the research facility as an example, although all personals were missing at the time the story took place, a good environmental design could still provide you enough cues to deduce what kind of person used to live there and what was going on before their vanishing. But in [i]Conarium[/i]’s case, all the crew cabins look identically tidy and empty with exactly the same room layout, you can hardly feel any human presence in them, nor the absence of human. They are just like some brand-new prefabricated cabins on a trade fair ready to be sold. In my opinion, the charm of Lovecraftian horror resides in haunting details, although [i]Conarium[/i] did a great modelling job on all the “Lovecraft-themed major attractions”, you’ll soon realize that there are no details to haunt you with at all if you ever move your eyes away from those “main attractions”, let alone environmental storytelling. Scattered documents and audio-logs is another crucial element in story-driven video games, which fill up holes between story segments, as well as providing backstory info et cetera. It’s certainly not the most elegant method, even cumbersome at times, but it is proven to be effective and budget-saving. So of course it played its part in [i]Conarium[/i], only did it totally wrong. A good use of such feature, requires a lot of effort to be put into the content, the positioning, and the timing of each document. Good examples can be seen at [i]Bioshock[/i] franchise and [i]Alan Wake[/i]. Back to [i]Conarium[/i], there are 25 documents plus about 10 audio-logs in the whole playthrough, the problem is, all of them are per se rephrasing the same thing: [i] “Expedition went wrong! Scientists went crazy! I regret it but there’s nothing we can do to undo it! We are doomed!” [/i] Yet it rarely mentioned any cause to all these chaos, so what’s the point of repeating it so many times without revealing any tangible information? Without the documents giving me any meaningful revelation at all, the storyline itself is also quite static in its presentation, so narrative-wise, the combined result is a complete absence of progression. You just keep marching through indistinguishable corridors, or caverns, or hallucinations or whatever to the next hotspot to trigger another scripted cutscene with lackluster animation and voice acting in order to push the progress of the game forward. But it barely made any observable progress on the narrative, you start confused and you end equally confused. Well, one might argue that isn’t this the very nature of all Lovecraftian horror? Yes, it is correct, but a proper Lovecraftian story could at least provide you enough details to complete your own headcanon. But details, is another thing [i]Conarium[/i] is greatly short of. This pretty much nailed the last nail on its coffin. [b]Now imagining a once Alien or spelunking theme park has recently been renovated into a Lovecraft theme park. All the owner did was toss away some unusable old stuff, get the remaining props rearranged, put in a bunch of Lovecraft-themed sculptures along with some fake decorative books with titles from the classical Lovecraft book list, then officially declare it as a “Lovecraft Theme Park”. The experience of playing [i]Conarium[/i], is basically like a guided tour within such theme park.[/b]