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SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR SPIDER-MAN ON PS4.
An old racist white man had an outsized influence on pop culture at large in 2018. No, not the one in the White House; the one from Providence, Rhode Island with a face like an anemic basset hound, and a penchant for penning stories where madness, tentacles and fear of the unknown boil and bubble together like a cauldron of New England Cthulhu Chowder.
Images from H.P. Lovecraft’s work have populated video games for years, but explicitly borrowing from his oeuvre became especially common in 2018. Cyanide brought their take on the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG to PC and consoles. Auroch Digital gave Eldritch powers to the Axis and Allies in Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics. And Frogware’s The Sinking City looms on the horizon for early 2019.
These titles vary in their willingness to engage with Lovecraft’s themes and beliefs beyond the superficial “Wouldn’t it be spooky if a monster but with tentacles?” level. But, 2018 sure brought us some good tentacles.
Most surprisingly, Insomniac took a page from Lovecraft’s rune-covered book in this year’s Spider-Man for PS4. After the Scorpion stings our spandex-clad hero, infecting him with a hallucinogenic toxin, Spider-Man must swing through New York in search of an antidote. All the while, a poisonous green sea froths below him. If the webslinger swings too low, dipping any part of his body into the water will result in a swiftly draining health bar.
It’s a trippy sequence, and one of the most memorable in the game. As Doctor Octavius appears before Spider-Man, placing the blame for his turn toward evil squarely on Peter Parker’s shoulders, players and Peter are left to wonder what’s real and what only exists in Spidey’s neurotoxin-addled brain.
However, as it progresses, the mission moves fully into Lovecraftian territory —visually, at least. As Spidey bounds over buildings en route to NYU to pick an antidotal plant from the school’s greenhouses, massive scorpion tails rise from the poison depths, lunging at Peter with lethal intent. Of course, in canon, these are scorpion tails. But, when they aren’t attached to a scorpion, scorpion tails look and act an awful lot like tentacles.
Throughout the level, Peter repeatedly falls out of the venomous New York and into Dr. Octavius’s lab. When he enters the lab for the final time, he’s transported to a nightmarish dreamscape where Otto floats on meteoric slabs of rock, hurling verbal venom at Peter. As this encounter plays out, giant versions of Doc Ock’s tentacles slowly twist across the ashen sky.
Suddenly, the Scorpion appears, Spider-Man takes him out, and the webslinger comes to in Octavius’ lab, having synthesized the cure, wearing his mask, tightie whities and nothing else. Peter Parker’s descent into madness was brief (pun intended), to be sure. But while he was there he experienced not one, but TWO tentacle sightings.
Now, it’s important to state that the addition of tentacles don’t make a work Lovecraftian. It’s more like Lovecraft-appropriation; a reference to the distinctive visuals of the subgenre, without any willingness to engage with the themes that bring the visuals to horrific, writhing life. That being said, Spider-Man’s Scorpion encounter does skirt a fundamental theme of Lovecraft’s work: the insignificance of scientific knowledge in the face of the vast horror of the universe.
Spider-Man skirts this theme, but comes to a different conclusion. In Insomniac’s world, the war between good and evil is a battle of competing sciences. Peter’s powers are the result of a nip from a genetically-modified spider. The Scorpion infects him with a synthetic neurotoxin. Peter restores his sanity by whipping up a cure in the lab.
Spider-Man, then, fundamentally rejects Lovecraft’s conclusions about progress. Scientific progress can accomplish all — ends both helpful and horrific. Peter doesn’t experience madness because his knowledge is insufficient. His madness is the result of someone actually managing to temporarily out-science him. He overcomes the unknowable through that which he knows well.
Progress is always a safe bet, Spider-Man promises. Nice tentacles, though.
