Eresys and the Cults of the Lovecraft Mythos
Many Lovecraft games cast you as the investigator who stumbles onto a cult. Eresys, the co-op horror game Dragonis Games released in Early Access on 20 April 2023 and in full on 18 December 2023, hands you the robes instead. Up to four players take the roles of cultists. The question is what kind of cult, and what Lovecraft himself wrote about the people who worship his old gods.
What the Steam page says
Everything verified about the story of Eresys is on its store page, so it is worth reading closely. A member of the cult was expelled. Deranged, he opened a Void Portal on a secluded island, and the entities that came through have “already claimed the lives of many”. The players, his former brothers, must send the entities back and seal the portal.
The method is ritual. Players gather resources for offerings at altars, which the store page calls a manifestation from the necroworld summoned by the expelled cultist. They collect the blood of enchanted victims in vials. They hunt for the missing pages of the book of the order, carried by one player, which “can banish the ancient entity once it is complete”. The studio’s own one-line summary of the game is four cultists against one elder god. Neither the store page nor the studio names that god, and this article will not guess.
The cult in The Call of Cthulhu
Lovecraft’s best-known cult appears in The Call of Cthulhu, published in Weird Tales in 1928. In the story’s middle section, a police inspector named Legrasse leads a raid on a ritual in the swamps south of New Orleans in 1907. The worshippers are dancing around a monolith with a small idol on it. The prisoners, most of them unable to explain much, give one account through an old man named Castro:
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1928)
Lovecraft’s cult is patient. It is spread across the world, it chants in a language no one can pronounce, and its whole purpose is to wait for the day its god returns. The chant comes with a translation inside the story: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” The cultists are servants of something that does not know they exist.
The family in The Dunwich Horror
The Dunwich Horror, published in 1929, shrinks the cult to a single household. The Whateleys of Dunwich, a decaying Massachusetts village, light fires on the hilltops at May Eve and Hallowmass and deal with a being called Yog-Sothoth. Their sorcery depends on a book. Wilbur Whateley travels to the library of Miskatonic University to consult its copy of the Necronomicon, because his own copy is incomplete and the formula he needs is missing.
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror (1929)
Two ideas from this story will feel familiar to anyone who has played Eresys. One is the gate: a passage between our world and somewhere else, opened on purpose by a person who should have known better. The other is the incomplete book, whose missing pages decide who controls what comes through. These are readings, and the studio has not confirmed either one. They are hard to miss all the same.
Innsmouth and the Esoteric Order of Dagon
A third cult in Lovecraft is tied to a town. In The Shadow over Innsmouth (1936), a decaying fishing port has been taken over by the Esoteric Order of Dagon, a church that replaced the town’s old congregations and traded its people for gold from the sea. Here the cult is the civic order. Everyone belongs, whether they like it or not.
Eresys made that connection directly. The update that marked its full release on 18 December 2023 added a map named after Innsmouth. The studio has also released a trailer for another map, the Abyssal Temple.
Cultists on the wrong side of the gate
Set these stories next to the Eresys store page and the twist becomes clear. In Lovecraft, the cultists open the way and the outsiders try to close it. In Eresys, the cult’s rules are the only thing standing between the island and the entities. The store page says it directly: only by working together and “using the order of the occult” do the players stand a chance. The heretic, the one who opened the portal, has already been thrown out.
The achievement names on Steam follow the same line. “Devoted cultist”, “Forbidden knowledge” and “Sanguine ceremony” describe a group that takes its rituals seriously. The oil lamps fit too. The store page explains that the entities have spent eons in the void and are unfamiliar with light, so players keep at least two lamps lit and stay close. A cult that survives by keeping the dark away is a strange thing to find in Lovecraft’s shadow, and it is the most original idea in the game’s setting.
Eresys is on Steam for Windows, for one to four players in online or LAN co-op, or alone offline. The trailers and store link are on the Eresys page.
