If the short story, as John Updike argued, is a room upon whose walls a number of fake doors have been placed, then a videogame adaptation offers it the chance to be transformed into a series of rooms upon whose walls a number of locked doors have been placed. That’s certainly been the fate of H. P. Lovecraft’s famously ghoulish tale The Outsider.
I discovered the Flash reinvention of the story thanks to the excellent website JayisGames, and, if you’ve got a quarter of an hour, it’s definitely worth working your way through. The Outsider’s mutation into a point-and-click adventure hasn’t been particularly graceful, necessarily – interactive objects aren’t highlighted very well, navigation can be clumsy, way-pointers can appear before they’ve been activated, and it’s single number challenge has at least two correct answers, only one of which is accepted – but it’s atmospheric, pretty, and perfectly suited to a lunch hour’s simple exploration. Besides, as part of Newgrounds’ Game Jam 5, The Outsider was put together in just three days – seen in that light, it’s dazzlingly polished.
Above all else, this is yet another indicator that Flash games can be a surprisingly good vehicle for the retelling of simple narratives. If you’re a passionate fan of Lovecraft’s you might be faintly disappointed to see his existential prison transformed into a series of lock and key puzzles, but The Outsider uses its challenges to set an excellent rhythm, doling out new chunks of text every few minutes or so, and leading you through the spooky storyline in measured style. The twist ending still works, and the game’s designers have elegantly retained its gothic ambiguity, too. Despite the fact that the whole thing’s very easy to complete, The Outsider maintains an enviable sense of escalation as you move through its gloomy chambers looking for a way out.
Lovecraft’s feverish prose works well broken down into little pieces – at times, his writing can feel like the horror equivalent of tea with too much sugar in it – while art and sound design prod your imagination in the right direction, but ultimately give it enough room to do the hard work for itself. As with the recent NES translation of The Great Gatsby, then, literature and games have collided once more, and the results – while a little more earnest on this occasion – are still pretty fascinating to behold.