HPL: Nyarlathotep Rising

I came into HPL: Nyarlathotep Rising half-expecting another Lovecraft reskin dressed up in visual novel clothing, and what I found instead was something more patient and more personal than that. This is an interactive fiction RPG that plays closest to a tabletop narrative experience, more Call of Cthulhu session than action game, where you slip between three very different lives: Mark, a Great War veteran carrying wounds that never healed; Anna, an aspiring artist whose father's suspicious death opens the story; and Victor, a scholar of arcane lore already standing too close to the edge of knowledge that corrodes. The Wall Street crash of 1929 hums underneath everything, a world already on its knees before the Mythos even shows up. The mechanical skeleton is quietly clever. Four core attributes, body, mind, charisma, and insight, shift with every choice you make, and the game also tracks your relationships with secondary characters independently. Certain dialogue branches and story decisions are locked behind threshold levels in these stats, meaning a first playthrough as the impulsive Mark plays completely differently from a careful Victor run. The best choices are the ones where the effect is hidden, where you only realize three scenes later that you traded a relationship point for a piece of forbidden lore, and there is no clean way to feel good about that trade. Up to fifteen different endings per character suggests the branching is genuine rather than cosmetic, and the total runtime sits somewhere in the fifteen to eighteen hour range across a full playthrough, which feels right for the ambition. The atmosphere is where the game earns real affection. The soundtrack leans into distorted period jazz and unsettling ambient drones, and even the main menu carries an eerily warped quality that puts you off-balance before the first word of text appears. Sound balance has some roughness in menus, a real flaw worth noting, but in the body of the game the soundscape works hard to keep the dread consistent. Locations span New York, London, the Suffolk countryside, and stranger planes beyond those, and each carries its own visual tone built from contemporary illustrations rather than rendered 3D space. It is a specific aesthetic choice, quiet and slightly faded, and it fits. Where the game asks patience is in its opening act. Victor's introduction in particular moves slowly through grief and academia before the horror starts pressing in. That deliberateness is a feature to me, not a bug. The payoff when the three storylines begin pulling against each other is earned precisely because the groundwork was laid without hurry. What I would flag as a genuine weakness is community visibility: this is a French indie title with minimal English-language coverage and very few public user reviews, which means players have almost no peer signal to calibrate against. You are walking in somewhat blind. For some audiences that will be a turn-off. For the right reader, it will feel like finding something before anyone else did.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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