Night of the Cephalopods

You've made a terrible mistake!  There was definitely something wrong with the translation of that passage from The Octinomicon (and you'd had all eight volumes translated!) Now you find yourself lost in the woods, surrounded by legions of preternatural octopi. No choice but to fight till dawn and hope to survive. You have only your shotgun and a handful of shells to protect you. Throughout you're playthrough your status, the actions you take and the locations you explore are narrated back to you in a classic horror style with full voice acting!

Night of the Cephalopods was originally created in 2008 during the third round of the Artsy Games Incubator, a six week event where Toronto artists help each other learn how to make their own games.

The title screen calls this a preview, and while there were plans for an expanded version at the time, creating They Bleed Pixels and other game projects kept us busy. Meanwhile the gaming landscape changed. When Night of the Cephalopods was created this sort of dynamic narration was pretty rare and experimental.  It's a lot more common now!

Created in 2008, uploaded to itch.io in 2024 to celebrate 15 years of Spooky Squid Games!


WHAT PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT NIGHT OF THE CEPHALOPODS

“Its success is based on both the quality of the writing and the unexpected timing of the narrative tidbits... ...If the breathless voice of the Lovecraftian scribe fills you with glee, then this is most certainly for you.” — Ross Rosenberg - Ectoplasmosis!

“...your actions are fully narrated by the protagonist’s voiceover. The poor fellow is, it seems, trapped in a Lovecraftian fiction, and he tells you all about it, from your failure to reload, to missing your shots. He’s going mad, and you have to hear about his plight. Well worth playing, if just for those bleak comedic utterances.” — Jim Rossignol - Rock Paper Shotgun

“NotC’s gameplay feels deliberately slow, and claustrophobic, which adds weight to the dreadful narrative.” — Derek Yu - TIGSource

“Nice title, but I’m sorry, it’s Windows only, so no way will I ever sully my gaming muscles to play it..” — Noted biologist P.Z. Myers - Pharyngula

INSTRUCTIONS

Keyboard Controls

• Spacebar to shoot/reload
• Arrow keys to move

Gamepad Controls

• A button to shoot/reload
• Left analog stick to move

Your goal is to explore the forest, shoot the evil squiddy things and survive till dawn.  

You have a limited amount of ammo. Pick up ammo boxes and remember to to reload when you run out.  If you get hit by a squiddy thing you will loose some sanity (as indicated by the portrait on the left bottom corner) however if you stand still for a short while without shooting or being hit you can regain your mental health.  You can also stand still near interesting objects to examine them. 

Play-tip:  While you can just play the game straight and concentrate on winning, the narration system also rewards experimentation: Try losing for an alternate ending. What happens if you stand still and refuse to move or forget to reload? Sometimes the narration for the same event will be different if there aren't any enemies on screen. 

CREDITS

Miguel Sternberg: Writing - Code - Art - Sound Design
Scott "Pirate" Moyle: Voice Acting

The sound effects and soundtrack use audio from freesounds.org and are used under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License. These sounds were created by the following people:

Music by: Dan Oberbauer, Connum
Various sound effects use samples by:
AaronGNP, Shades, Wolfsinger, vibe_crc, HardPCM, digifishmusic, sverga, tigersound, adcbicycle

Created using Game Maker 7.0 Pro

In addition the following 3rd party dlls were used for sound and Xbox 360 gamepad support:
GMXInput.dll by Yellowsix
supersound.dll by tsg1zzn

TROUBLESHOOTING/KNOWN ISSUES

Because this game was created over a decade ago in an older version of GameMaker you may experience some minor quirks running it on modern systems, particularly in Windows 11. Here are some known issues, with suggested workarounds:

The game doesn't quit when I hit Esc. 
Make sure the game has focus (Alt-Tab). If ESC still doesn't work after that try Alt+F4 to force quit. 

The screen is too small.
The game was designed before modern 4k screens, you can either play it small or drop your resolution down to something like 1080p before launching.

I'm getting an "XINPUT1_3.dll not found" error.
You may need to update your version of DirectX. This error will only occur on older versions of windows.