Doing an homage to Lovecraft is like covering Led Zeppelin. They're both super popular, endlessly emulated and almost no one gets it right. The reason is, for zeppelin, those 70s hard rock jams are packed to the brim with subtleties and complexity (a tad plagiarized but that's another conversation). Most bands will learn a song or two but can't combine all the pieces together into the real deal. No drummer sounds like Bonham, singers can't sniff Plant's range and the virtuosity of Page and JPJ are one of a kind.
Lovecraft is all about atmosphere, dread and the most cosmic of cosmic horrors suffocating your thoughts with every step into madness. What "In Vaulted Halls Entombed" tries, is a weak attempt at ripping off "Predator" where the predator is Cthulu. This doesn't work for a thousand reasons. So many faults any man would gouge their eyes out to avoid the horrific cosmic mediocrity.
All-American marines stumble into a cave somewhere in not-Afghanistan hunting not-terrorist and find little glowy bacteriophages that turn their battle brothers and sisters into purple soup. From there, deeper into the cave we find the ancient prison of a lovecraftian dark god who uses its cursed tongue to control the seargent forcing the lowly private to put her beloved CO in the ground before he unleashes an apocalyptic evil.
There's some tension and some brutal deaths but thats about it. With only 15 minutes its tough to set up the tone while slowly building dreaful atmosphere. But much like the marines, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Lovecraft is the opposite of a straight line. So we get carboard gun people getting killed with little regard and the only moment of fear is what might become of our world if this dark god is finally released. But thats quickly silenced and we're left with an almost comical conclusion of our "hero" self-blinded wandering the desert tripping over rocks.
What keeps this short from total failure is the use of the unreal engine. My god does this ever look good. Lighting effects, facial animation, atmosphere effects, dust, debris, liquids, solids. It really blows me away and excites me for what game developers are going to do with this technology.
Anyway, now you know why every cover you've heard of black dog sounds like trash.
Lovecraft is all about atmosphere, dread and the most cosmic of cosmic horrors suffocating your thoughts with every step into madness. What "In Vaulted Halls Entombed" tries, is a weak attempt at ripping off "Predator" where the predator is Cthulu. This doesn't work for a thousand reasons. So many faults any man would gouge their eyes out to avoid the horrific cosmic mediocrity.
All-American marines stumble into a cave somewhere in not-Afghanistan hunting not-terrorist and find little glowy bacteriophages that turn their battle brothers and sisters into purple soup. From there, deeper into the cave we find the ancient prison of a lovecraftian dark god who uses its cursed tongue to control the seargent forcing the lowly private to put her beloved CO in the ground before he unleashes an apocalyptic evil.
There's some tension and some brutal deaths but thats about it. With only 15 minutes its tough to set up the tone while slowly building dreaful atmosphere. But much like the marines, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Lovecraft is the opposite of a straight line. So we get carboard gun people getting killed with little regard and the only moment of fear is what might become of our world if this dark god is finally released. But thats quickly silenced and we're left with an almost comical conclusion of our "hero" self-blinded wandering the desert tripping over rocks.
What keeps this short from total failure is the use of the unreal engine. My god does this ever look good. Lighting effects, facial animation, atmosphere effects, dust, debris, liquids, solids. It really blows me away and excites me for what game developers are going to do with this technology.
Anyway, now you know why every cover you've heard of black dog sounds like trash.