Eldritch (PC) review "A neat, though sometimes frustrating Lovecraftian roguelike that provides ample replayability. "

Released in 2013, Minor Key Games’ Eldritch offers a concise experience immersed in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, placing the player in a world of labyrinthine dungeons inspired by the stories from Lovecraft’s writing.

Instead of opting for the horror experience often adopted by many games focusing on the eldritch mythos, Eldritch instead offers a concise roguelike experience that leans into the weirdness of cosmic horror, but provides players with greater power within the world.

Eldritch’s gameplay loop involves exploring randomly generated dungeons, navigating their hazards and defeating their denizens to safely collect an eldritch soul in their depths. The core gameplay involves exploring each dungeon and collecting loot in the form of ‘artifacts’—the currency used throughout the game and the resource used to cast spells—or various tools and weapons.

Gameplay in Eldritch is generally well considered and neatly designed, offering deceptive scope for differing approaches and loadouts from a modest selection of tools and interactions. Deliberate limitations on players’ carrying capacity forces decision making, while a selection of spells provides potential for additional movement options or ways of navigating combat.

The flow of exploration and combat is quite tightly integrated, as enemies feel embedded in their landscape, so avoiding or overcoming them neatly interconnected with the process of exploring the dungeon.

Despite the general tightness of Eldritch’s gameplay and systems, cracks to sometimes appear. For example, the Lizard Statues—hard-hitting enemies that can only move when outside the player’s field of view—exist as a significant threat in Nyarlathotep’s dungeon, and are usually best avoided. This can generally be achieved by staying behind them, or out of their perception range.

However, despite the statues being grounded and implied to be heavy, these statues are still able to hit the player when they are in midair, when the statues would logically be unable to reach the player. This is pronounced when using the ‘lift’ spell which essentially enables short periods of flight, as the statues spawn behind the player, damaging them, then stay suspended in the air.

A similar issue of unpredictability occurs when enemies are seemingly unaffected by hazards in the dungeons that harm or otherwise hinder the player. This inconsistency means that strategies or approaches leveraging certain hazards are largely ineffective, which reduces the options of play.

While neither issue is particularly game-breaking, in a game that functions largely though exploration and experimentation, these inconsistencies drastically increase the risk of runs ending in frustration. When systemic inconsistency results in the end of a run, it can feel like being ‘cheated’ out of a run, rather than losing due to negligence or a lack of skill.

Most of the time, this is a minor grievance, but when a carefully planned approach, or playful experiment suddenly goes awry due to the system, it can dramatically undermine the experience.

As the sum of its parts, the gameplay loop of Eldritch is a satisfying and fun experience. By allowing for experimentation, the game present ample scope for replay and additional engagement, provided the limitations and inconsistencies of the system itself don’t undermine the wider sense of play.

As to be expected, Eldritch draws heavily on Lovecraft’s mythos, which provides some great atmosphere, but also leaves aspects of the narrative assuming familiarity with source texts.

For example, the enemies and locations all link with aspects of Lovecraft’s stories, ranging from most famous to more obscure. These references often assume player knowledge of their source texts, meaning that some aspects of the narrative atmosphere rely of players meeting those assumptions to make sense.

The vast majority of the game’s story is told through tomes scattered around the Endless Library (the game’s hubworld) and a few extra tomes that appear at the beginning of certain dungeons. This means that—beyond recognisable links to Lovecraft’s world and stories—Eldritch largely depends on exposition and textual narration to tell its story.

This approach to storytelling is possibly Eldritch’s biggest narrative weakness, as the heavy use of text in books as a storytelling device seems at odds with pacing of the gameplay, which often requires a balance of careful planning and snap decisions. The passivity of the storytelling seems at odds with this aspect, which can at times be jarring.

This is brough into sharp focus in Eldritch’s conclusion, which provides players with little more than a short section of text to summarise the events after the completion of the final dungeon. This offers little satisfaction following the often-arduous task of completing each dungeon to complete the game.

Somewhat frustratingly in light of this weakness, Eldritch occasionally excels with environmental storytelling that hints towards a far more adept narrative construction than the book entries would have you believe.

A keen example of this is the fishmen enemies, which are mobile in their home location of Dagon’s dungeon, but quickly lose their sanity in the madness of Cthulhu’s dungeon, and are reduced to passive entities repeatedly smacking their heads against solid blocks. This visually highlights an interesting aspect of game and narrative progression, as the once relatively dangerous enemies are rendered harmless in the context of the next, more challenging dungeon.

Additional storytelling takes place through the sound effects and fog atmospheres in each dungeon, which neatly convey the atmosphere and convey deceptively different experiences in each space. Dagon’s dungeon is audibly wet, with dripping and echoing sounds, while Nyarlathotep’s dungeon is notably drier and claustrophobic. Cthulhu’s dungeon’s lurid green fog similarly ads to the mystery and unease of the space, creating a deceptively immersive experience.

Consequently, while the narrative of Eldritch is perfectly adequate for what it sets out to do, aspects also hint at frustrating unrealised potential. The simplistic nature of the majority of storytelling is at odds with the more nuanced environmental storytelling that sometimes shines through, but all in all it’s a neat compliment to the largely enjoyable gameplay loop.

In terms of style, Eldritch utilises low poly models and low fidelity textures. This combines to offer a retro-inspired visual style that draws parallels with N64 and PSX graphical limitations, without fully leaning into either style specifically. The textures themselves lack filters, aligning with conventions of PSX-style graphics, while the stability of meshes and wider design sensibilities are reminiscent of N64-era adventure games.

Eldritch’s spaces do a neat job of emphasising the otherworldly nature of the library and dungeons the player finds themselves in, as the game’s procedurally generated playspaces present labyrinthine structures to explore. The design of these structures varies, ranging from uncanny structures that play off the space between familiar and weird, to oddly domestic spaces like shops being attended by passive version of enemy entities.

Some enemies—such as the mummies found in Nyarlathotep’s dungeon—succeed in being unsettling, as uncanny textures and lofty proportions depict them as heavily ‘outside’ creatures. Conversely other enemies, such as the lizardmen found in the same dungeon, the Elder Ones found in Cthulhu’s dungeon, and the cultists found throughout all locations instead draw similarities to the styling and atmosphere of enemies you would expect to find in retro adventure games, which risks undermining the atmosphere of the experience.

Ultimately, the stylised proportions of entities, coupled with the crisp (if low-resolution) textures results in many aspects of Eldritch feeling surreal and slightly ‘cartoonish’, while the stability of the game’s structures, and the readability of textures and spaces emphasises adventure and exploration. Rather than the sense of unease and horror often associated with Lovecraftian experiences, Eldritch appears to emphasise adventure. While this is an original take, the crawling dread and ‘horror’ is main appeal of cosmic horror, and so by de-emphasising this element, Eldritch sometimes risks feeling alienated from its genre.

Overall, the visual styling works well, with enemies and hazards generally being readable. That being said, a more intense atmosphere, and an additional sense of horror would enhance the experience. Implementing texture filtering or vertex jittering would have helped build a more consistent design language, while also providing some visual ambiguity that would have served well to add to the air of uncertainty that cosmic horror seeks to foster.

Community review by cjdh (September 29, 2025) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.