 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines for products and services .(June 2022) |
| The Well | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Yames |
| Designer(s) | Yames |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows macOS |
| Release | 20 September 2021 |
| Genre(s) | Graphic adventure [1] |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
The Well is a 2021 horror-themed adventure developed by Yames. The game was self-published and released on Itch.io on 20 September 2021. The Well is based on a poem by H. P. Lovecraft in Fungi from Yuggoth .
The Well is a short game, taking about 20 minutes to complete, [2] [3] and is played using only one button (Z). [2] [3] [4] Much of the game is taken up by a segment in which the player lowers and lifts a rope in the titular well. [3]
The Well takes place after a farmer, Seth Atwood, has gone mad after digging a well on his property. After this, Atwood's nephew also went mad, killed him, carved "godless signs" in his naked body, [5] and bricked up his body inside the well. [3] [4] The game follows two men who are sent to clear out Atwood's farmhouse. [3] [4] The player enters the well in search of "pagan gold",. [3] despite being specifically instructed not to, and finds various horrors down there. [4] These discoveries include a series of tokens, each more horrific than the last, eventually discovering a terrible growing presence at the well's bottom. [5]
The Well is based one of the poems by H. P. Lovecraft [2] in Fungi from Yuggoth . [3] The game is in addition to the rise of a monstrous entity also about the cost of creation. [5]
The game was released on Itch.io for Microsoft Windows and macOS on 20 September 2021 for $1.99. [2] The Well is intended to be the first in a series of small games titled Yames' Secret Games. [2]
The Well received a positive review in DREAD XP, which called the writing "fantastic" and praised the art style as "[leaving] just enough to the imagination". [4] The game also received praise by Daniel Simmonds of The Rotting Zombie, who gave it 7/10, finding it to be faithful to the original poem and having anxiety-inducing retro-style graphics and sound design. [3] The Well was also positively reviewed by Ian Walker of Kotaku, who found the game to be "grisly and beautiful" and that it "nestled somewhere so deep and dark in my mind that I’ve yet to divine how to flush it out".
Fungi from Yuggoth is a sequence of 36 sonnets by cosmic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Most of the sonnets were written between 27 December 1929 – 4 January 1930; thereafter individual sonnets appeared in Weird Tales and other genre magazines. The sequence was published complete in Beyond the Wall of Sleep and The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft. Ballantine Books’ mass paperback edition, Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems included other poetic works.
Lovecraftian horror, also called "cosmic horror", is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock. It is named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries, which are now associated with Lovecraftian horror as a subgenre. The cosmic themes of Lovecraftian horror can also be found in other media, notably horror films, horror games, and comics.
The Whisperer in Darkness is a 26,000-word novella by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written February–September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. Similar to The Colour Out of Space (1927), it is a blend of horror and science fiction. Although it makes numerous references to the Cthulhu Mythos, the story is not a central part of the mythos, but reflects a shift in Lovecraft's writing at this time towards science fiction. The story also introduces the Mi-Go, an extraterrestrial race of fungoid creatures.
Alan Moore's Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths is a three-issue comic book miniseries presenting work written by comics writer Alan Moore, based on the writings of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. It was published by Avatar Press in 2003.
The Whisperer in Darkness is a 2011 independent horror film directed and produced by Sean Branney, Andrew Leman, and David Robertson and distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Based on the H. P. Lovecraft short story of the same name, it was shot using Mythoscope, a blend of vintage and modern filming techniques intended to produce the look of a 1930s-era film. According to the film's website, the filmmakers intended to capture the look of "classic horror films of the 1930s like Dracula, Frankenstein and King Kong".
Dread Central is an American website founded in 2006 that is dedicated to horror news, interviews, and reviews. It covers horror films, comics, novels, and toys. Dread Central has won the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Website four times and was selected as AMC's Site of the Week in 2008.
The Backrooms are a fictional concept originating from a creepypasta posted on a 2019 4chan thread. One of the best-known examples of the Internet aesthetic of liminal spaces, which depicts usually busy locations as unnaturally empty, the Backrooms was first described as a maze of empty office rooms that can only be entered by "noclipping out of reality".
The Fungi from Yuggoth is a set of eight adventures published by Chaosium in 1984 for the horror role-playing game Call of Cthulhu, itself based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft.
Dujanah is an art video game developed and published by Jack King-Spooner, a Scottish indie game developer. It was released on September 19, 2017. The game follows Dujanah, a Muslim woman in a fictional country under the occupation of foreign powers in a stylized magic realist–style world as she tries to find out what happened to her husband and daughter. The game focuses on the theme of death, and explores it through the stories of people that Dujanah meets as she walks through her country. Reception to Dujanah was positive, with praise focused on its themes and storytelling.
Puppet Combo is an American independent video game development studio founded by Benedetto "Ben" Cocuzza in 2012 as Pig Farmer Games and based in Brooklyn. Puppet Combo's games, such as Nun Massacre (2018) and the critically acclaimed Murder House (2020), are mostly survival horror games developed solely by Cocuzza and modeled after early PlayStation games and VHS. They are also frequently inspired by 1980s horror films, specifically grindhouse and slasher films. Puppet Combo primarily releases their games through Patreon and Itch.io. Cocuzza launched Torture Star Video, a video game publisher for lo-fi horror games, in 2021. Such As Inspiration Game For Resident Evil/Silent Hill And Mortal Kombat.
No Players Online is a short horror game released on Itch.io, a website for distributing indie games. It was created by Belgian university students Adam Pype and Ward D'Heer and sound designer Viktor Kraus as part of the Haunted PS1 Jam in November 2019. Initially intended to be a twenty-minute horror game, the developers continued to expand the game into an alternate reality game (ARG) involving cryptic messages and secret passcodes. Players quickly solved the ARG on a dedicated Discord server.
Critters For Sale is a 2021 adventure video game by independent developer Sonoshee. Described as "a hybrid between (a) point and click adventure and visual novel", the game is an episodic collection of five short stories unified by themes including "time travel, black magic and immortality".
Dread Delusion is a video game under development by independent developer Lovely Hellplace and released for early access by DreadXP in June 2022. Described as an "open world" role-playing game brimming with strange places and dark perils," Dread Delusion encourages player exploration and discovery over the use of combat and grinding.
Sucker for Love: First Date is a parodic dating sim and horror-themed visual novel developed by indie developer Joseph "Akabaka" Hunter, and published by DreadXP. It was released on January 20, 2022, for Windows and December 19, 2022, for Nintendo Switch. The game revolves around a young man who obtains a pink version of the Necronomicon, and begins performing rituals to summon moe anthropomorphic beings from the Cthulhu Mythos, such as Ln'eta, a female version of Cthulhu, sacrificing his body parts and ultimately threatening the world with annihilation. The game received generally favorable reviews from critics, who praised its writing, voice acting and artwork, but criticized its short length, glitches, and low emphasis on romance for a dating sim. A sequel further exploring the Cthulhu Mythos, Sucker for Love: Date to Die For, was announced later in 2022.
The Catacombs of Solaris is a 2016 video game by Australian independent developer Ian MacLarty. Described as a "maze that plays with your perception of 3D space on a 2D screen", Catacombs is an art game that exploits the use of perspective to create an illusion of space. Praised for its experimental approach to perception and space, the game won the Freeplay Award at the 2018 Freeplay Independent Games Festival, and was showcased in several art and festival exhibits including by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. In 2021, a revised version of the game with additional features titled The Catacombs of Solaris Revisited was published by the developer.
Stef Pinto is a Canadian independent video game developer. His self-published works, including Exit Mask and Cookies, are surrealistic and experimental horror games. Outside of his independent games, Pinto works with the Minneapolis-based video game studio WALLRIDE on commercial projects.
Haunted PS1 is a series of video game compilations curated and published by Irish video game developer Breogán Hackett in collaboration with independent developers on the indie games website itch.io. The most notable releases, Demo Discs, are annual compilations of independent games from various genres influenced by the graphics and visual presentation of the PlayStation as well as menus inspired by actual PS1 demo discs or other PlayStation games such as Namco Museum releases on the platform. The Demo Discs series received praise from several websites for their niche theme, variety of titles and novel method of distribution, with a number of games from the releases receiving sufficient attention to lead to further development and commercial release on their own merit.
Heartworm is an upcoming 2023 independent horror video game by Vincent Adinolfi developed for Windows and MacOS. Described by the developer as a "lo-fi retro horror" game, the game integrates elements of survival horror and psychological horror set in an abandoned house rumored to be able to revive the dead. A demo of the game was published on January 30, 2020, with a revised demo released on the 2020 horror game compilation Haunted PS1 Demo Disc by Irish developer Breogán Hackett.
Filthbreed is a 2019 horror video game created by independent developer Borja Zorozo. Described by the developer as a "short horror first-person shooter developed as a student project", Filthbreed was included in the 2020 horror game compilation Haunted PS1 Demo Disc by Irish developer Breogán Hackett.
Lust from Beyond is a 2021 horror game developed by Movie Games Lunarium and published by Movie Games. It is the sequel to Lust for Darkness and, like the previous game, features an erotic horror story influenced by H. P. Lovecraft, H. R. Giger, and Zdzisław Beksiński.