This is exactly it. This mindless, meme-tastic exploitation where they hollow out anything that actually made the source material interesting or unique and leave a boring shell. Lovecraft's stories and Nikola Tesla's life and work are both deep, interesting subjects, but in the example you gave it's reduced to "tentacle horror vs. steampunk". This "simplify, mashup and remix" style was kind of lame to begin with, and now it's just played out beyond belief.

"guts and blood"? Uh, exactly what kind of porn have you been watching???

At first I figured the banner of the front page for this game was showing its protagonists, and so that maybe it was broadening our culture's perspective of the capabilities of females or persons who identify as cephalopods.

From the description on the game page, I'm not sure how all this killing several "bosses" in randomly generated "levels" by means of improving stats of the main character, in untold stories, has anything to do with exploring stories of a writer who hasn't been personally consulted. Sounds like the same shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later filler for a collage of unexplored perspectives, like how authors use the theme of zombies as a metaphor for their own unchallenged misanthropy. How about making a rogue-like dungeon crawler from Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven instead? I can imagine the voice-over for that one already.

Okay, the silly action spoils the Lovecraftian feel. Would be so cool if they had at least gone for stealth instead of arcade action.

Still, for a roguelike, I think it this one has a great setting. Most roguelikes take place in a generic fantasy world, so this looks pretty fresh. It also has plenty of lore and story bits, something a lot of new roguelikes forgets.

This honestly might embody (on some level) why I've never got into Lovecraft's work. I've admittedly only ever read The Shadow Over Innsmouth and I guess it was okay. I can understand his work's original strength - in that it's just text that forces you to use your imagination but all that obnoxious "lol cthulhu" type stuff that I've seen in modern day nerd culture kind of detracted from the results of me using my imagination.

I think Lovecraft is a bit of a hard read. Very little actually happens on the pages. I might give him a second chance. I just downloaded the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft (it is something like 1114 pages long, which doesn't sounds like a lot for a life's work.)

Well he did die at the age of 47 and he never really did manage to make a living by writing. His appreciation came a long time after his death. Though Howard who was 30 at the time of his suicide did write closer to 5000 pages worth of stories, but then again he actually made a living by doing that.

But yes, Lovecraft is somewhat of a hard read, as his works were considered old fashioned even when he was alive. And as he often has people succumbing into madness because of undescriable horrors, his stories tend to be more about the state of mind rather than action.

Stick to audiobooks.

Youtube has few great ancient recordings.
From the times when audiobooks weren't called "audiobooks" and weren't made for lazy folk.

Freaking love "The Colour Out of Space" and "The Haunter Of The Dark".

Still don't get what exactly people find so good in "At the Mountains of Madness"
Amazing start. But rest... Sheer boredom imo.

A must read in my opinion.

Exactly this.

Lovecraft stories are not action adventure (that's why RPGs and most games, that require to be exactly that, as well as movies to some extent, fail to capture them). They are not high litterature (the heavy-handed use of adjectives is often self-defeating, and the story's obvious premise is often presented as the big unexpected dramatic last page twist). But they built a style of universe that, itself, has a very strong poetic power. So much that it strongly influences horror stories in movies, games, books, until now. It's defined cosmic horror like Tolkien defined heroic fantasy, even though it didn't come out of thin air for any of them. So, they are sweet to read for historical purposes (to see from where so many authors popularized some concepts), and for the strength of its world-building, succesfull at letting you believe, by accumulation, in a world where immemorial god-like beings beyond our comprehension stir behind a thin fragile veil of reality. It's a beautiful idea in itself, tapping in a radical need for escapism : the wish the believe that all is false and unimportant in our world, that all of people's common knowledge can be overturned in an instant by some world-redefining revelation. So haunting that, actually, many occultists believed in it (and, to them, Lovecraft is very seriously some sort of enlightened prophet who had access to hidden realities, while all his correspondance and in-jokes show that he was just having a lot of silly fun crafting this world and stories).

But what makes the very interest of his work is precisely the poetry of man's (man's mind and matter's) futility in front of these ancient forces and their cosmic scales. And this is defeated as soon as you include a winning protagonist of the kind that players and moviegoers usually need. So, yeah, most so-called "lovecraftian" stuff miss the point of this work, the sense of hopelessness, of despaired existential dread that made its strength and charm. This can be found in his books (despite their flaws, or sometimes even thanks to them : conservatism racism did probably contribute to Lovecraft's imagination and end-of-world dread sensitivity), it's a atmosphere behind the atmosphere. Something greater than the sum of his novellas.

It's not about plot or style. It's about dreams and the ideas behind them. Ideas that may be so re-used and popularized nowadays that the appeal of these sources may be limited for most people.

Numerous Lovecraft's stories have protagonist "winning" against cosmic monstrosities. Having hero winning against monsters does not make a story anything less part of the horror genre. Cosmic horror is simply just a horror on larger scale than the other types, while slasher genre is exploration of vulnerability of a single human being, cosmic horror is exploration of vulnerability of mankind as a species.

Lovecraft wrote something like 10,000 pages of correspondence with fans and other writers and editors. He was like the 1930s version of a guy spending too much time on social media instead of working.
Eh, it's overstated. I've seen much worse in other fiction of his era, and most of the worst (both prose and racism) was in his earliest stories (surprise, artists tend to change over time). By the time he died, he was actually pretty mild about racial stuff and spoke of regretting his "reactionary" youth. He really comes across to me as a guy who liked to vent about crap with his friends but was actually pretty nice when it came down to it.

You nailed it about social media, but he was actually writing constantly. Problem was, he believed that gentleman should not live from his art. He was lacking business sense to better promote his work. A shame really.

Now I am really curious, who are the peeps who managed to make old Howard look like BLM memeber in comparison? He was outspoken racist, and harsh one; I dread to see who was worse...

From what I've read of Edgar Allen Poe I think I like his stuff better.

The one video game I know of based on his work, The Dark Eye (the 1995 Inscape game, not the German RPG) is actually pretty faithful in it's whole Myst-inspired first person adventure approach, and creepy as all hell with the uncanny valley puppet characters.

Maybe someone should make a Lovecraft game in that style. Dark Corners of the Earth was almost like that in it's first few hours, but then it devolved into a shit first person shooter.

EDIT:

This might've been a bit before Lovecraft's time, but in America and Britain there were all sorts of shitty faux-intellectuals writing books that used pseudo-sciences like Phrenology (or misinterpretations of Darwin's theories on evolution) to explain how white people are better than everyone else - while also advocating the systematic murder/sterilization of poor people, mentally ill people, ugly people, disabled people (sound familiar?)

Lovecraft, to my knowledge, never published anything like that and instead casually sprinkled small sentiments of racism and xenophobia here and there into his stories. For instance, the whole plot element in Innsmouth about the Deep Ones crossbreeding with humans is often interpreted to be a negative statement about interracial marriage.