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Been thinking about how Lovecraft epitomises a tendency with otherworldly horror that is doomed to be ruined by derivative work
I remember reading that porn suffered horribly from hi definition film, realism being fundamentally undesirable in what ultimately sought to illustrate a fantasy
Seeing Alyx footage I'm struck by the highly stylised soft pastel bright colours and cartoonish shapes of surfaces, objects and creatures, and we see that Victor Antonovs artistic direction is more important than the ludic physics continuum of HL2; Dishonored; Alyx
In Half Life 1 & 2, headcrabs are viscerally harrowing, the Citadel awe inspiring in its impossible texture and dimensions. Technical limitations at the time made those renditions state of the art while still leaving a crucial gap of the imagination for incomprehension, terror
HL2 strived for realism and was hampered only by technical limitations of representation. In Alyx those limits have been surpassed to the Nth degree. Where does that essential gap that pushes the imagination to the unbearable now reside? Headcrabs & The Vault are cute & cool now
Similarly, Quake 1 dripped and shuddered with the glory of flesh that was not flesh in Eldritch halls — an aesthetic that has disappeared from iDs lexicon to be replaced by cartoonish day-glo LOL
Quake 4 really hit the uncanny valley for me. Is this meant to be realism or is that contrived style? That skin stretched on to metal has definite edges. It even reflects the light differently. It's not viscerally horrifying or prosaicly well realised, it's just absurd & naff
People say Lovecrafts prose was technically rubbish, and inasmuch as that's true, it's essential to the whole edifice of the indescribability of the impression of cosmic horror. "The angles were all wrong" he wimpered and my mind went into paroxysms
Enter August Derleth: let's get those angles sorted out! How many? Where? Acute or obtuse? Thanks for your contribution to The Mythos, you intolerable nerd.
This is effectively what's happened between HL2s Citadel and Alyxs Vault: The Angles Were All Wrong but given infinite budget and technical capability that was clearly a failure, so they sent it back until they got the angles Right.
