Note, links on this page are affiliate links
Ahhh, one of the reasons l like writing this blog is not so people can read it but so I can tell myself what great games I have played and 2022 had one of my all-time favourite games. Mother’s Love by THE Seth Skorkowsky, published by Stygian Fox in the Tales of the Miskatonic Valley Anthology
It is rare, after you play for a while, that a game can give you a good creepy chill. More often than not the horror is either good ol’ cosmic horror that you recognise from the creature description in the book or situational horror that makes me think more about the writer’s state of mind than the game itself. To illustrate a good scare, look at “The Haunting” which I first played too many years ago (It was 2nd Edition Coc!!). Now this is a low grade adventure and a bit of a rite of passage among players but for new players it can be entertainingly scary. No spoilers here of course but at one point an investigator can get trapped with the sound of rats in the walls that could break through at any moment. We were desperate to save our fellow investigator and this made the situation scary as we knew what was at stake but we didn’t know what to do to fix it. This wasn’t the main scare of the game either, but the moment enhanced our game play significantly!
To give you an idea of what that moment looks like, check out the movie “The Sum of All Fears”. The film revolves around a nuclear bomb smuggled into America and at one point, Morgan Freeman’s character know lots of people are going to die but he can’t do anything about it. A chilling moment bought to life by Morgan Freeman of course! To get that kind of reaction in a game is very rare. It can get tense via dice rolls and can be scary hoping to roll a specific result but how to get that naturally in game?
Welcome to Innsmouth
As you might have seen in this blog post, we played “Mother’s Love” with Keeper Hedge. Our characters were experienced Federal Agents and we knew our skills and our team so walking into Innsmouth shouldn’t have been a problem. And for the most part it wasn’t. Some function of normal life was held and there was cooperation to be had. But as we explored the town, the buildings and the slums, a moment happened that made us realise we were mice in a nest of vipers and not one of us knew what to do. All that gravitas that we’d read in the original story went through our minds right there and then! I think we all made that Morgan Freeman face as the imaginary camera moved around us in a 360 motion showing us the collective Innsmouth looking on from the shadows…
Mothers Love is great stuff with a killer combination of Seth’s writing prowess recapturing Innsmouth, Stygian Fox publishing the game for us to play and Keeper Hedge for bringing it all to life.
“Mother’s Love” is Roll4Sanity’s game of the year 2023!