Already a while ago, I got myself a copy of Elegy for a Dead World, a game which is aimed towards animating the player to write a story about worlds they explore. All the worlds have one thing in common: They are home to ruins of dead or abandoned civilization.

Yesterday, I played the game and immediately found that my love for the Cthulhu Mythos crept into the story. I took the role of an interplanetary investigator and this is the story, my log, so to speak, that I cam eup with. If you play Elegy for a Dead World, you will be able to guess, which world I visited:

A palpable sense of burned decay. Everything here is tainted red. Hard, geometric forms seem to want to stab the viewer, the earth, the sky.

Curious symbols, like the once found in the dreaded Necronomicon mark bookshelves. I start to wonder if the colonists made contact with the forces of the mythos, before everybody vanished.
There is another symbol, a central, big circle, drawn with a thick stroke, and another, smaller and thinner one in the lower left corner of the plaque they share. Maybe it signifies a gate. This is the only symbol with no shelf underneath.
I look for a key or a portal in this gap between the shelves, but nothing moves. It is only a gap. Nothing hints of the dark powers, eldritch might or alien tech.

Another example of weird geometry. A tower with a floating ball, or sun, suspended over its apex. The distant mountains and clouds form an eery backdrop. The sun is glaring down despite the thick cloud-cover. DId the sun burn the colonists? It is so bright here.

I have entered a tower. There is a sound of someone breathing but noone is here. The light is ofter and candles are burning. It appears to be a place of worship. The room is dominated by a glowing orb of the sun with broken stone sculptures of the same sun on either side. This is not a triple system, why the broken suns or why three times the sun, then? Are the spheres in their combination symbolize Yog-Sothoth? Is this the answer? Did the colonists all vanish through a gate?There is another stairwell. leading up. I continue my search. The breathing noise has ceased, replaced by a dull hum, like heavy machinery or turbines are running somewhere in this tower.

I found a room one floor up, containing cryo-chambers. One seems to be occupied, but I cannot open it. The other is powered down and I cannot look inside.

The other room on this floor leads to an inner room reaching far down. The sculpture of a giant head of vaguely human outline is here. Of the face, there is only a nose and maybe a symbolic eye on the forehead? Nyarlathotep?

Someone (a child?) has created a snowman-astronaut here. It is almost madeningly mundaine and quaint in this hellish frozen wasteland under the eclipsed sun.What? I exited the top of the tower. The landscape is completely changed and the top is actually sticking out of the ground of some other place. It is an icy waste. Broken machinery and the carcasses of space ships are strewn about. A giant black moon permanently eclipses the sun. The rotation of this planet has ceased or never was. I am returning to the point where I started.

I can only recommend Elegy for a Dead World. If you like writing and are rather casual about it, as I am, you will love this game!