RED TIDE

The coldest wind felt aboard the deck of the Argus carries with it the warm embrace of nostalgia: a scrambling mountain river crackling with half-melted ice, low-hanging clouds thick to the touch, the taste of a fresh duduk reed, dried apricots, sumac, nuts, wheat bowing diligently to the autumn sun, homemade lavash steaming in the quickly-cooling air, ever-reaching Masis and its great cool shadow cast over the fields, the press of lips in the dark theater, warm tan hands like weathered clay. For a brief moment, Masour is home. He takes four full-bellied breaths of it all before the nostalgia fades and he is left cold and alone and vaguely embarrassed about the eldritch viscera on his boots, four thousand miles away from the first thirty-seven years of his life.

Two years had already passed since the discovery of the great diseased beasts in the Arctic Ocean when the Argus disembarked. It was an unsurprisingly frigid October morning, 1985. The crew cobbled together by Captain Dell MacTavish--motley and entirely composed of outcasts, laborers, and those desperate enough to take the job--spent the early hours of the morning before departure bonding over their inexperience, grasping at some form of humor to ease their shared horror over the complete lack of a reasonable wage, crew, and cargo. The binds of their contracts and debts and the demands of the industry leave them no way out. The hunt drags on. The crew knowingly enters an endless chase for creatures defying human comprehension with only makeshift harpoon guns and a presentiment of ruin, caught between the indifference of beasts and man, between forces they could not possibly understand nor control. Their weapons break, their bodies suffer, and the tide runs ever redder.

RED TIDE is a game concept I've been working on since last summer (read: thought about it a lot and did 0 actual work for). I mainly want to explore cosmic horror by applying it to not just the Lovecraftian-type monsters its associated with, but the perceived futility of trying to alter the cycles of violence driven by capitalism and colonialism. I've had that feeling of helplessness lately, largely due to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, so a big part of this project for me is affirming that change is possible. I love fucked up creatures and human solidarity!!!!

I'm steadily making progress on the story, so I'll try to update here as often as possible. Changes (hopefully) coming soon:

• Character art for crew
• Crew descriptions
• Title art
• Bestiary
• Embedded playlist
• Details/blueprints for the Argus page
• Alt "active" cursor
• Alt "hover" cursor
• Cursor that isn't pitch black
• Bibliography
• Non-dogshit quality background
• Backgrounds for other pages
• Guestbook
• New icon

Thank you to sadgrl.online for the layout builder!