Review of Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace

Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace is a weird game to me.

In some ways, I get the impression that the mixed reaction in the broader gaming public is due in no small part to mismatched expectations, along with some of its genuine design and writing issues. Along with it, there's questions about adapting games, the Cthulhu Mythos and storytelling more broadly.

Understand this- I focus more on storytelling, not on game design, even if game design does matter with how a game is a game, and how that interplays with storytelling. Medium and message and all.

There's some fun stuff that I really liked, and I do want to talk about that. For one thing, Amelia Tyler, best known for her work in Hades 2 as Hecate, and the narrator in Baldur's Gate 3, is our narrator and, not really spoilers given that it's in the trailer and the inciting incident of the rest of the game, the murder victim whose murder we're investigating. Her commentary is interesting because of the implication that she's a ghost that is following us around as we investigate her death, along with giving various warnings (that the player's characters can't hear and don't heed since they don't react to her at all). I am tempted to replay the game intentionally to get a specific achievement and to see if my character, once they fully crack, can hear her.

I also like the music for what it's trying to be, including the main menu/trailer theme, though the soundtrack is pretty limited because it's clearly a smaller game done by a smaller team. That is a recurring thing- the models and the cutscenes are very clearly low-budget, though at least part of this is that it is a smaller game. I don't actually mind that, I'm just noting that it exists.

There's also some weirdness with the mechanics. Part of this is due to what it's adapting. Now, I haven't actually played Arkham Horror, though I know that there’s both a board game a spinoff of the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG and a card game, though I also have multiple Arkham Horror-published titles (such as Wrath of N'Kai and Litany of Dreams). And this does get into a critique I have with the mechanics.

Specifically, I think sanity is a messy mechanic all around. Your character loses sanity at various things, but this can, and does, lead to some weird ludo-narrative dissonance. The game is VERY combat heavy, which fits the pulpier vibe of some of Arkham Horror's stuff, along with the first companion character you get in the game (Roland Banks, part of the BOI, since this is set before the BOI became the FBI). But checking dead bodies near the end of the game causes a sanity check every time… even though you've been required to kill dozens of people by that point. And this strikes me as weird, since the Wikipedia article on the board game acknowledges that stealth is an option to avoid monsters.

In the midgame, you end up in the bayou and there's various shrines you can push over. Every last one leads to a sanity check. Meanwhile, the final boss… has one sanity check at the start of combat and, depending on how long the combat goes on, if the Mythos clock ticks enough times (which involves multiple rounds of combat).

It's turn-based and I'm okay with that. It works as intended, with characters who are good at some things using less resources per turn to do those things and characters who are bad at those things using more resources. Though, given how combat heavy it is, and how efficient guns are, Roland is basically a good idea to have all around in the combat-heavy sections. You eventually get three people in your party at any one time.

The amount of stuff you get, though, is also weird to me. The game is pretty generous with items, like guns and ammo, so I never really felt much danger over running out of stuff, even when there's a degradation system where using stuff too much will make it work poorer until it eventually breaks. This also makes the late game choice to give ammunition to some people not any particular dilemma.

I also am unsure of how to make of its 5 GB memory requirement. The original Oblivion with the main expansions were 5 GB, too, and that's a much bigger game with a lot more variables (like all the NPC schedules and all the random world objects. Again, I'm going to test to see if going very unhinged leads to changes, but it strikes me as possibly very inefficient coding or something, because the graphics are also nothing to write home about.

Spoiler time!

Oh, boy, there's some issues with this game with the causality of the story and how it ties into the Mythos more broadly.

Now, part of this ties into the broader milieu and how the Cthulhu Mythos has changed over the decades. Shub-Niggurath is the deity that the cult is trying to summon. Now, this gets into a larger discussion that I could also bring up in relation to the Alone in the Dark remake, and later works, too.

In the Mythos written by Lovecraft, Shub-Niggurath is a weird deity. She's never seen directly, despite clearly being commonly worshiped. But, importantly, characters who are frightened of the eldritch things in the Mythos still invoke her. Clarendon talks about going to shrines of her sons Nug and Yeb in ''The Last Test,'' Edward Derby calls out to her both after his breakdown and when Waite takes over his body the last time in ''The Thing on the Doorstep,'' and Abdul Alhazred also invokes her in the passage written out in 'The Dunwich Horror.'' In ''The Mound,'' she's considered a sophisticated Astarte, and Astarte is a positive deity in the religion she's from (however, because of how the Bible demonizes other religions' gods, Astarte is on that shitlist). In ''Out of the Aeons,'' she's also a positive deity, being one that her priest could call upon to deal with a tyrannical god who petrifies people into stone statues.

Over and over again, Shub-Niggurath is actually a positive deity, despite everything, in Lovecraft's works specifically.

Later Mythos works tend to flatten all of the deities out into being malicious, malevolent creatures. I lay that at Derleth's feet, along with other writers (Frank Belknap Long has a RPF that involves Lovecraft being killed by aliens and the sign of the cross is the thing that saves Frank himself, for example), as he was adamant about injecting Christianity into the setting, especially given her goatish imagery. And it probably sticks quite a bit, given the polytheism which is integral to the Mythos (which a Christian audience and writers tends to be leery of unless they make a bunch of Christianity-lites and Medieval claims about Satanism-lites, such as in D&D).

And I think this is important, because the situation with her cult is kind of muddled.

Our inciting incident is Tillinghast's murder at the hands of the cult, and it is revealed that she actually founded the Herd of Algedi (who are trying to bring Shub-Niggurath to Earth) and that she initially invited the player to possibly join her in relation to the cult. However, the whole thing seems muddled over whether or not this was the intended path. Because a lot of stuff just pushes the player to just kill and fight the cult and this ruins her plans entirely.

Like, if the goal is to summon Shub-Niggurath, everything the cult does actively makes the situation less likely- if Tillinghast needs to be dead to be revived as a method of summoning the Dark Young, they should wait until after she's had a chance to talk to the players to kill her and avoid the possibility of her burial, because that just leads to them investigating her murder and getting on a trail via the Asylum. The Herd of Algedi, instead of just hosting the player and letting them go with a cold trail (instead, they try to kill them). And it's not as though Tillinghast needs the player for the final ritual, either. Literally anyone could do it, and the cult would probably be inclined to do so to bring a Dark Young to Earth so Shub-Niggurath could be summoned.

And I know people tend to just go ''well it drives you crazy, being around eldritch things, so her going crazy is normal.'' But I frankly find that tedious. Most of Lovecraft's stories do talk about insanity, but it's importantly that the characters who crack at all mostly aren't joining the cults, they're frightened and the reason they're considered insane is the same reason the cultists are considered insane when captured. They are going on about ideas that are outside the society's Overton Window (where only Christianity, some forms of deism, or atheism are the reasonable religious views, along with hard materialistic sciences' views about the nature of life, consciousness, etc.). The Cthulhu Cult are deemed insane because they believe in alien gods and Cthulhu and all that, Edward Derby/Ephraim Waite is committed for having seizures and amnesia, as is the situation with Charles Dexter Ward/Curwin (amnesia and dark interests). Various characters who actually crack under the strain, such as Danforth in At The Mountains of Madness, aren't committed in the first place. (One could also digress about the power dynamics associated with what is societally considered insane, along with the flattening of cults, but that is a more metatextual discussion as well.

There isn't some irresistible compulsion to worship, either, with some of the exceptions in the story having an implication that a bunch of stuff the audience is not privy to is going on in the background (such as in The Haunter of the Dark). And characters who are straight up not insane do follow the alien gods (neither Ephraim Waite, despite his personal maliciousness, nor the mysterious Noyes, nor Curwen and his friends, nor the others are treated as insane). Those alien gods are textually real, and you get characters like Randolph Carter managing to meet both Yog-Sothoth (Through the Gates of the Silver Key) and Nyarlathotep (The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath) without his brain becoming mush like a lot of later writers tend to go with.

But Tillinghast's motives strike me as dubious in terms of storytelling, too. It's implied that she found out about Shub-Niggurath from her researches involving a specific comet that wasn't actually a comet and brought something which could open up contact between Earth and other places… but then there's stuff about her wanting to be a mother but not being able to (it's implied she was infertile in her younger days). But then some throwaway line near the end about a new race of being and stuff is a vaguely eugenics-thing about a new era of human evolution, which is just lazy. Of course, the idea of multiple motives could work, if each of them was given the proper focus, but the eugenics one is just thrown in at the very end. It reminds me of all the villains who are intended to be for social change, so the writer makes them kill random innocent people to tell the audience that the character is bad and that you should not sympathize with them. It feels a bit tacked on, going for something that the audience is presumably going to understand as evil.

There is also the matter of the pearl-clutching of the characters about Tillinghast performing human experimentation, as that was sadly a common thing at the time. Especially since her general victim pool are all groups who would be entirely acceptable for such actions in the first place. So the protagonist characters do feel somewhat anachronistic with how the historical situation was with things like mental hospitals.

Too, Tillinghast's narration after the fact implies a change of heart a la Lovecraft and de Castro's ''The Last Test,'' but ''The Last Test'' made more sense because that was because of Clarendon's realization that he failed in his endeavor (someone beat him to making an anti-fever serum and that the other researcher figured out that something was seriously fishy about what Clarendon was doing) and was about to kill his sister. There was an actual character thing going on there.

It just feels like they started with an interesting idea (of the ghost of the dead woman narrating the adventure) to wanting a twist about her being a mastermind. While she does show interest in the scientific ramifications of stuff from very early in, and her gost initially chastizes the player to do things that will keep them out of danger, it's only later that there's a shift at all and she goes full bloodthirsty science nutjob, so it feels very much like ether a shift in writing that wasn't cleaned up in editing, or something.