Designing the Lovecraftian horror of Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss

The draw of cosmic horror comes down to what you do and don’t show players; it's the tease of the unknown, something inexplicable lurking just out of view, set against the need to, at some point, show your horror hand. It's an approach Still Wakes the Deep nailed perfectly, and it's something Big Bad Wolf is leaning into for its own take, Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss.

With Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, developer Big Bad Wolf plays with the tension inherent in the genre, building a first-person investigation that withholds its monster while letting its influence seep into every texture, corridor, and sound cue – and it’s all realised in Unreal Engine 5, a platform usually reserved for bombast and open worlds. I've played an early version, and the developer is clearly building an impressively atmospheric world with some unique takes and surprises along the way.

Big Bad Wolf's take has some twists on the Cthulhu genre (we'll get to the Great Old One later), but first, the setting of 2053 rather than the Mythos’ well-worn 1930s opens up some playful tech and unique commentary on the world. The game casts players as Noah Williams, an agent of the occult bureau ANCILE, probing the disappearance of miners at a deep-sea Ocean-I station. The game focuses on investigation, using an AI companion called KEY to analyze clues, tune sonar frequencies, and interrogate objects from every angle. It's a fitting setup, recalling the pulp detective origins of the Cthulhu stories while veering towards something uniquely horrific.

When to reveal your horror

But as Creative Director Thomas Veauclin explains, the real design pillar for the game isn’t spectacle, despite UE5 being more than capable, but instead it’s about restraint within the knowledge that a light does, at some point, need to shine on the unknown. “From the very beginning of production, our mantra was: ‘Reveal The Unknown’. Working on an art direction, specifically on a visual medium, among other things, we wanted to confront players with a universe that was beyond them and unfathomable," he says.

That philosophy shaped what the team refused to show, and what it wanted to reveal, and when. As Veauclin explains: “We also set ourselves the constraint of not showing the threats concretely until it was too late (and not in their entirety). The first signs were only to show the consequences for others (a ravaged underwater station, the corpses of the expedition, heinous ancestral rites, etc.). The real threats were only to be presented at the last moment. At the fateful moment when it would be impossible for you to turn back.”

The opening crawl I play is drenched in torch-lit atmosphere as an abandoned house in a flood must be explored for clues. The same attention to detail extends to the Ocean-I station’s oppressive corridors, which rely on UE5's lighting tech to keep pools of visibility tight and edges falling away into black, while the team can layer in torn metal, clawed bulkheads, and organic 'corruption' without flattening performance.

A modern take on the Great Old One

Lovecraft’s influence on the game, its art, and design is explicit but not slavish. “For our creatures, we worked from several sources. Lovecraft's literary vision, as well as the extended fantasy developed by others. But above all, we did a lot of preliminary research to create our own vision.”

That thinking led to a striking reinterpretation of the Great Old One. “For Cthulhu, for example, we moved away somewhat from the often-used vision of a muscular titan. Locked away for centuries in the heart of R'lyeh, we imagined him emaciated, with asymmetrical, chaotic limbs, his skeletal structure visible in places, and pitted with numerous holes to play on trypophobia.”

Tapping into the paradox of teasing the unknown, the art team plays with anatomical proportions to deliberately jar the player. “The proportions of his limbs do not respect human canons. We deliberately chose to give him long arms, four fingers on his hands, and a rather stocky torso.” Early designs strayed even further: “It wasn't even bipedal. But madness was taking hold of us. In the end, we returned closer to Lovecraft’s image.”

The same inventive approach is taken to depict R'lyeh as a prison. “We imagined an ancestral city folded in on itself by the Elder Gods to punish Cthulhu and make this unholy place his eternal prison. Like an onion that you peel layer by layer, the player will arrive at R'lyeh and advance from layer to layer towards the heart,” reveals Veauclin

The human world is not heroic here, shares Veauclin, adding more context: “We presented the world of humans in decline, sick, torn between a mad race to answer everything with technological solutions and the climate and political emergency.” Setting the game in 2053 “to move away from the usual 1930s and get closer to the reality that players know” sharpens that critique.

The ravaged Ocean-I station “serves as a bridge between the normality of a known world and the entry into the impossible, R'lyeh. But it is also the symbol of an exacerbated capitalism that exploits the seabed. Man devouring his own world”.

Noah and his design embody that friction and how the world is moved within: a connected ocular prostheses, a cybernetic hand, and KEY wired into ANCILE’s database to cross-reference materials and unlock new sonar frequencies. Visually, the sonar becomes a graphic intervention, slicing through darkness to highlight forms and track blood trails by composition, creating a wireframe world to tease new clues from the darkness.

Against that stands “the world of Cthulhu, a kind of impossible reality. More raw, more primal, without artifice, and therefore, more violent, chaotic. With fluctuating volumes and distances.” In this place, as Veauclin puts it, “no technology can resist”.

Designing the 'corruption'

Now we’ve all played games that rely on cliché-insanity filters – swirling, warping textures, heck, even the brilliant Resident Evil Requiem dips into this technique – but the team behind Cthulhu: the Cosmic Abyss pursued something more bodily. “Our approach was intended to be physiological. We focused on the different human senses because it is partly through these senses that Man apprehends the world around him.”

That means “visual and auditory hallucinations, mutating matter, nauseating consumables, non-euclidean corridors that play with your proprioception and equilibrioception”, all geared to make you question the world, bending perspective just enough to make you question distances and the reality of the spaces you explore.

Veauclin adds, “Besides, the word ‘madness’ is never used in the game. But one of our systems is called ‘corruption’. It represents the nefarious influence that Cthulhu has on you. Even when not there physically, Cthulhu still gnaws at you from the inside, little by little”.

Visually, this 'corruption' seeps into the world. The closer you get to the heart of the city, the more a substance corrupts the environment, seeping into the smallest crack, and even here, the team avoids overdoing the design. “We didn't try to make beautiful, colourful images, but rather to create a distressing and enigmatic atmosphere. No ‘day-for-night’ shooting!” When corruption spikes, “the image becomes blurry, and we play with the image's chrominance to dissociate the red, green, and blue from the visible light spectrum.”

Colour, clues and the unseen

As an investigation, the game constantly feeds players information but never certainty. “Each chapter can be solved in different ways without the game telling you if you have found the solution. So technically, the game spends its time showing you things in the hope that you will deduce something.”

Colour becomes subconscious guidance. “Orange, in the game, represents safety and security. Uncertain, but impersonating a benevolent hope. Your aquatic suit is orange; the energy you use to analyze a clue is orange.” Even structural beams in the station carry that hue, marking it as “the last place in the world of Men before entering R'lyeh.”

And no, you won’t chart every corner of that sunken labyrinth. “Do you really think you can explore all of R'lyeh? No, let's be realistic,” laughs Veauclin. The goal was “to advance step by step into the unknown without ever revealing everything, to contrast the place of the human, tiny, against that which is beyond him.”

Perhaps the boldest decision is the simplest, as Veauclin reveals that some players may never even cross Cthulhu's path. “If you manage to control your corruption and make the ‘right’ choices, you will never meet him. His name may be in the title of the game, but you will have spent about fifteen hours looking for him, and you will never see him. Yet, he was omnipresent in your adventure.”

That’s a novel spin – make your Cthulhu horror so Cthulhu in its execution that players may never see it, but the sense of it, the impression it leaves on the game’s atmosphere, tension, and tease of something just out of reach, and world-building, is everywhere, and that feels like perfectly realised cosmic horror.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss releases on PS5, Steam, and Xbox Series X/S on 16 April. Visit the Nacon website for more details.