Hey all, I recently finished a side project that grew out of my fascination with Lovecraft’s way of using broken up sentences to signal cognitive/mental disintegration. Many of Lovecraft’s stories start with intact grammar, and indeed the grammar is intact through most of it… and then, at the end, it often breaks down. So language is something fragile and easily broken.

I think the effect is increased by Lovecraft’s long, winding, meticulously constructed sentences in the tradition of the nineteenth century and the contrast in comparison with the “modernist” fragmentary exclamations ending the stories.

Anyway, I made a game exploring this. The result is the short, minimalistic puzzler called The Stamp.

It’s centered around a childhood symbol game that gets “tainted” by introducing elements from the Pnakotic manuscripts, and involves mirroring sentences using esoteric or mundane symbols. As it’s a text-based game, there’s no combat or jump scares, just a slow descent into dissonance and seeking patterns in vain.

I really wanted the some of feel of stories like The Whisperer in Darkness and The Haunter of the Dark, where perception and language begin to slip.

If this sounds interesting, you can find it on Steam: 🔗 https://store.steampowered.com/app/3079840/The_Stamp/

Nothing could be more valuable for me than input from Lovecraft aficionados, so I’d love to hear what fellow fans think. I’ll of course be happy to send a free key (in a chat) so you can download the game for free (provided there’s some brutally honest feedback in return :)).