Transcript: Conarium is a game directly based on At the Mountains of Madness. There is even a direct reference to the novella when the player is exploring and finds a copy of the book itself. The protagonist is named Frank Gilman, who wakes up in an abandoned Antarctic Expedition base with a strange device in the room with him. Notably, he is an anthropologist, which ties him very closely to archaeology already. Immediately players can find the Expedition Leader’s notes detailing they that were looking for an ancient source, something related to Elder beings.

The game leads you through the Expedition base, where you find the former experiments, and, even further below, an ancient tomb that is connected to a larger network of ancient civilizations. These ancient cities are directly linked to At the Mountains of Madness. It is like the developers used the back end of the novella as a blueprint, although it is not like-for-like. While the creatures in the novella are a little more bird-like, the creatures Frank encounters and dreams about are more reptilian. The link to the conarium device, the one the player first encounters, is a mind-altering device that, when mixed with a serum the doctor is using to experiment on all of them, can slowly transform you into a reptilian creature yourself.

The ending of the game either has Frank restart back at the beginning before the expedition took place, or he has transformed into a reptilian creature himself. So the game has some unique features and a slightly different plot line, but the setting is built directly from the novella. With Frank being an anthropologist, there are some interesting connotations about studying the ancient culture and the creatures they are doing experiments on.

Mind-play grabs the player throughout Conarium as well, as Frank does not remember the events that led to the rest of the team going missing. This lends to the Lovecraftian horror, and allows players to feel the eerie, not-right feeling without the game resorting to outright shock value. It plays with your mind, with your perceptions of what might be real or not, and even the ending can feel ambiguous and like you are beginning to descend into madness. As far as that goes, it is an extremely effective game for what it’s trying to do.

The game feels like a loveletter to Lovecraft, with more references than just the ones I named here. However, there is more to Conarium and it does not fall into a lot of the more dangerous stereotypes that could be here. The presence of archaeological stereotypes does exist, with the researchers going a little too far for the knowledge they seek. Altogether, however, it makes for a fun and intriguing game without too many issues.