Skip navigation.

#

#

### Night of the Cephalopods Preview [PC]

#### http://www.spookysquid.com/notc/

#### Previewed By R. O'Toole

"A promising survival game with full narrative done in an H.P. Lovecraft meets Metal Slug style" said the boss.

"Dibs" said I, and I'm glad of it. Night of the Cephalopods is a little masterpiece, and it's not even finished yet. It's like a serious-but-not-quite-serious take on Zombies Ate My Neighbours! or a sedate-yet-scary Chaos Engine.

Themed on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the 1920s horror author famed for his tales of insanity in the face of unearthly horrors, NotC pits the player against a rising tide of octopodic enemies summoned from Who Knows Where by the lead character's mistranslation of the 'Octinomicon', true to the Lovecraftian tradition of 'reading forbidden stuff makes you go mad and/or summons Really Bad Things'.

Controlling a slow moving guy with a shotgun, a finite amount of storage spaces for ammunition and a cool head for narration in the face of death, the only goal is survival until dawn.

It's the narration which pulls the game into a whole new level, with the game's protagonist talking to himself as he explores, fights, and takes beatings from the evil floating octopus-things, but even with the sound turned off the game works wonderfully. Tension mounts as you move through more areas of the map, and the Cephalopods come for you in greater numbers. Inspecting the scenery leads to more narration as your character explores his surroundings, going a little crazy in the process.

The graphics are just the right side of cartoony as to not lose the sense of urgency and impending doom, and the whole thing looks very polished already. Survival and defeat lead to alternate endings that make both winning and losing well worth it.

Pinning down the game's creator, Miguel Sternberg, he passed on to me the secret and hidden knowledge of this sanity-wracking game.

"The slow playing speed was an intentional choice" he begins "the game started with the concept for the dynamic narration and I then chose the survival horror genre with its deliberate pacing because I knew that would be a good fit. The slow pace gives the narration time to play. If I had gone with a fast action game the player would often be several actions ahead of the narration and the illusion would be broken."

When asked what he thought set the game apart from others in the genre he was quick to say: "Definitely the dynamic narration system. I don't know of any other action game that's tried doing that. Without the narration the game is fairly generic."

"Scott Moyle, who did the voice, is a friend of mine. I met him through these randomly scheduled Nintendo DS bar nights he throws in Toronto and I was already familiar with his work on Decoder Ring Theatre, a fantastic pulp radio drama podcast. I'm really happy with how it turned out."

On expanding the game for its full release, he laid out some of his plans: "One thing I want to stress in the final version is the idea that the gameplay and story are a sort of collaboration between the player and the procedural systems behind the game. I want to encourage the player to go through the game multiple times and try different play styles."

"To encourage replay and narrative exploration I want to add several endings to the game based on playing style. For instance if a player spends the whole game running and avoiding any confrontation they would get an ending where they survive the squids but run themselves to exhaustion. I'd also like to add several randomly chosen maps so the player will have different versions of the forest to explore each time they play."

Sadly, we may have to wait a while for the full version of the game to be released, as Miguel juggles several projects, along with his work as a freelance game artist - but with a demo as entertaining as this, the wait will certainly be worth it.