It’s 1932, there are rumblings about peculiar cults and ancient gods, and Detective Jack Foster finds a decapitated corpse in a locked room. With The Dark Rites of Arkham, we’re entering Lovecraft country.
José María Meléndez, under the name of Postmodern Adventures, has brought us a third splendid point-and-click game to add to his already enviable collection. 2022’s Nightmare Frames was a passionate tribute to the slasher horror movies of the 1980s. 2024’s An English Haunting took us to 1907 and reveled in the folk horror of the era, with heavy influences from M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft. Now The Dark Rites of Arkham dives fully into Lovecraft’s world, set in his fictional city of Arkham, Massachusetts, amidst a string of gruesome murders and the disappearance of a number of new-born babies.
You begin the game playing as Detective Jack Foster, who recently rejoined the police department after what appears to have been a concerning breakdown. He’s cleared for service once more, and now paired up with former psychologist Harvey Whitman, a cult expert assigned to Foster to aid in investigating what appears to have been a ritualistic murder. A man was found sans head, lying in the center of a large glyph, on the floor of a locked room. The other peculiarities in the room are what appears to be a large burn mark running up one of the walls, and a severed forearm, singed at the stump.
And so begins the absolute pleasure of a new point-n-click adventure, with lots of locations to visit, items to inspect, and inventory puzzles to solve. It very quickly becomes apparent this investigation is going to link up to the events of the Salem witch trials from 1692, as well as mystical cults intent on raising ancient gods. Because, you know, it’s Lovecraft stuff.
It’s always interesting to see how any Lovecraftian media is going to address, you know, the author’s whole massive racism thing. Recently there seems to have been a growing number of Lovecraft apologists, attempting to rationalize or reason away the man’s more abhorrent views, but good god, go read his writing, he’s not subtle. And while his views somewhat improved as he aged, it still leaves behind a tricky situation for those reinterpreting these works one hundred years later. Some just sort of write around it, while struggling to depict the fishy folk of Innsmouth without evoking it all anyway, and it feels a bit cheap. Meléndez has opted for a sometimes more nuanced approach, representing his characters with more progressive views in a world that does not share them.
This is clumsy in places, with a knuckle-chewingly bad scene in which a racist bus driver refuses to drive until a black woman gets off. But it’s far better handled when less sensationally depicted, acknowledging that people in the 1930s weren’t racist because it was so de rigueur, but rather because they were being wretched. And in doing so it usefully conveys Lovecraft’s wretchedness, too.
Something else I appreciate about Dark Rites is just how quickly it gets on with things. We don’t have to go through the usual scenes of people refusing to believe what they see with their own eyes, being defiantly skeptical against reason. Instead they immediately get on board with this weird world. In fact, it’s only a couple of hours before things have gone completely and utterly barmy.
I’ve yet to finish the game, but I’m having a thoroughly good time playing. Meléndez is a phenomenal pixel artist and a strong writer, and while I think Dark Rites lacks the more deft hand shown in An English Haunting, it’s still very engaging, and extremely well put-together. And at just $15 for a full-length adventure, it’s almost certainly worth a punt.
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