Obvious, when you think about it. There’s a new Lovecraftian Cooking Simulator. Make Lovecraftian horror-themed dishes, try to avoid summoning monsters … get a secret Easter egg. The small mini-game prototype seems to have been rustled up very quickly as part of a game jam, but I like the idea.

A real Lovecraftian Cooking Simulator would involve Lovecraft having to live frugally on $x per day, long periods of semi-starvation (“reducing”, as he politely called it), grocery trips to the local What Cheer in search of bargains and discounted dented cans, midnight meals in seedy dock-front cafes, secretly putting aside titbits for stray cats, immense ice-cream and coffee binges, connoisseurship of various forms of spicy cooked cheese, assiduous avoidance of fish-bars and fish-markets, and a lifelong shunning of booze. There’s quite a set of game mechanics in that lot, I’d suggest, especially if the goal is to fuel Lovecraft enough to produce a masterpiece… while also not allowing either him or his kitties to die, and preventing him from concocting a meal with the wrong sort of deadly left-over ingredients and thus summoning hallucinatory monsters. Possibly occasional visitors from New York would arrive, bearing exotic and unusual foods they had discovered, which could lead to dream-visions of far desert ruins and weird mountain-top water-gardens.

Possibly it could become partly a storytelling board-game, with picture-cards, rather than a fiddly RPG with stats. It could even have some small tabletop figures…