I am lost in a nightmarish limbo. Everywhere I turn, bizarre creatures stalk me, rending my flesh and chipping away at my sanity. There is only one hope for me in this place: talking cats.
The world of Cyclopean: The Dark Abyss is not a welcoming one. It's a monochromatic adaptation of HP Lovecraft's Dreamlands, so the bleakness is thematically appropriate, though that doesn't make dying over and over (with all progress reset) as you feel your way around any less punishing. But like a good Lovecraft story, it's uniquely strange and wonderfully atmospheric.
As you'd expect from the retro visuals, Cyclopean is a decidedly old school RPG. Out on the world map, your character (plucked from the real world 1920s to make their way in this dark fantasy realm, judging by the randomly-generated names) moves around as a tiny silhouette, controlled from a top-down perspective. Enter a dungeon, and your view shifts to first-person with grid-based movement—and chilling close-ups of the many weird creatures native to this place.
The core mechanics are pretty simple. Combat is turn-based, and most of the time you'll just be pressing "Attack" until the enemy is dead (or you are)—generally victory or defeat is more about picking the right fight rather than moment-to-moment tactical choices. There are only three stats—strength, skill, and mind—and levelling up lets you spread some points among those and your health. You can equip one weapon and one piece of armour, with more powerful items requiring higher stats.
The difficulty comes more in figuring out how to survive in Cyclopean's weird and hostile world. There's no breadcrumb trail here—you're simply dropped in and left to your own devices, and it can be a trial and error process working out where to go, what fights you can win, what items you need, and how to navigate the dungeons. Such lessons are often taught in brutal fashion—a few bad dice rolls in combat early on can quickly make your health vanish, and you're often deep into a dungeon before you realise you're missing something you desperately need (who knew cups of tea were so vital?). Oh, and don't be tempted by a peaceful walk along any of the beaches. There are… things in the water.
But one of the most interesting lessons to learn is that not everything out here is necessarily out to get you. Many of the monsters in the game are intelligent, forming their own species-based factions, and you can speak to them or trade with them instead of reaching straight for your blade.
The dialogue system is itself wonderfully Lovecraftian. You converse by asking about particular topics, but you can only select those topics once you've experienced them yourself or had them described to you. Fight a ghoul, for example, and you'll then be able to ask the next zoog you meet how its people feel about them. They might mention a location ghouls tend to congregate, which will allow you to ask others about that place. Knowledge begets knowledge, and you're incentivised to seek out more and more—no matter how dangerous to mind or body it may be.
Which of course means there are also forbidden tomes, and this is where things get really intriguing. Reading books you find—which requires a high enough mind stat to understand them—teaches you about the various factions, which opens up the ability to ally with them. Bring a creature an item that it likes, and you can convince it to join your party and fight for you in battle, like a sort of hellish version of Pokémon. Which is how I became obsessed with cats.
You see, in the Dreamlands, talking cats are just a thing. Take it up with Lovecraft, I guess. The important thing is that I was able to read up on them and make them my friends, before stumbling into one in a dank crypt. Not only did they turn out to be the hated enemies of the zoogs, who I'd been beating up for their stuff for the last half hour, but the item they demand for their loyalty is a saucer of cream, and I just happened to have one. Fate!
With this cat in my party, suddenly combat was a breeze—he took all the hits for me, and struck out with rather better stats than my own. And while most of the creatures you can fight alongside come with the cost of slowly draining your sanity (I get it, ghouls aren't great at conversation), cats have the opposite effect, gradually healing it. Sanity recovery's not easy to come by down in the depths, and my new best pal basically saved me from going mad before I could get back to the surface. As he fights for me, he even levels up, getting more and more effective.
But there's more than one slot in my party screen. Hell, there's a whole bunch of them. My quest became clear: build a cat army to carry me safely through the Dreamlands' worst horrors. I'll admit, progress has been slow so far—would anyone happen to know a good cream merchant based in the underworld?—but I'm determined. In fact, I think… oh, nevermind, a ghoul just ate him and then me. Time to start over again.
Cyclopean is definitely a bit of an oddity, with its share of rough edges. Some of those will likely be sanded down in the coming months—the game is currently in Early Access, with a 1.0 release planned for the summer—but some feel like just part of the game's unique identity. It won't be for everyone, but it's a really striking project, at the same time both pretty simple and completely baffling.
There's definitely some kind of dark magic to it—even as you curse your latest unfair death, you'll find yourself sucked back in for one more doomed attempt at conquering the Dreamlands. If that's not authentically Lovecraftian, I don't know what is. And if that's got you dangerously curious, there's a free demo available now.
