More games need their own rooms full of blood

Here’s something magical and strange: a vast, perhaps endless world of glorious horrors, stuffed into a teeny tiny space.

To put it another way, I discovered, when re-downloading Eldritch last week, that it all fits into a file that’s just slightly larger than 40MB. It seems impossible really – the kind of infernal geometry that HP Lovecraft himself would have lost sleep over. But it’s the truth, all of Eldritch – all of Eldritch Reanimated – in a file so small it could have been an XBLA launch title.

Eldritch Reanimated is the reason why I was re-downloading Eldritch, as it happens. David Pittman’s blocky Lovecraftian roguelite has always been a generous delight, sending you out into caverns measureless to man to fight unthinkable star-heads and giant penguins, but Reanimated gives everything a quick updating entirely for free. There’s under-the-hood stuff and performance improvements, naturally. I would not understand the nature of these things even if I took a year of tech courses at Miskatonic University. But there’s also just stuff. A new power, new weapons and tools and monsters. And new rooms!

These rooms are what’s gotten me truly excited. On Twitter – I read about it on RPS – Pittman admitted to a strange conversation he’d had with an Eldritch player who had stumbled across a room fitted with a pool of blood. What did it do, the player wanted to know. Whatever it was, they couldn’t get it to work.

This is the thrilling bit. Rather than explain everything, Pittman admitted that it had been a while since he’d made the room, and he couldn’t actually remember what it did anymore. “I could look it up now,” he said, “but it’s more exciting that it’s a mystery to me too!”