Conarium: A Chilling Walking into Lovecraftian Horror
Chorus of Carcosa is a psychological horror game developed by Chameleon 42 and released in 2025, inspired by the weird fiction The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. The game plunges players into a descent through a yellow madness. Set within a dilapidated apartment building, the experience follows a sculptor whose artistic creation becomes a conduit for something ancient and malevolent.
Drawing from Chambers’ 1895 collection of short stories, the game attempts to capture the essence of cosmic horror through environmental storytelling and atmospheric dread. Players navigate between the mundane horrors of a crumbling building and the otherworldly terrors of Carcosa itself. However, this ambition comes with significant challenges in execution, particularly in how the game balances narrative against gameplay repetition.
The Story of "Chorus of Carcosa"
A Dream Tinged in Yellow
The game begins as we’ve grown accustomed to: a dream set in an oneiric landscape bathed in yellow tones. Our character wakes before a book in his flat. Within his flat sits a studio housing a sculpture of a humanoid figure perched upon a throne. The piece not only sends shivers down one’s spine but has also haunted our protagonist’s dreams.
Whilst collecting his deliveries, he overhears one of his neighbours complaining about the statue he’s built in the studio. Apparently, it has caused some strange effect on people who’ve seen it. The building is a proper dive, full of rude neighbours. On the ground floor, he finds a parcel containing a copy of the book The King in Yellow. Someone keeps sending him this book. When he attempts to use the lift to return, it malfunctions and forces him to take the stairs instead. At this moment, he sees repeated mysterious apparitions. An hallucination transports him to an alternative flat littered with numerous copies of The Yellow King. In one of the bedrooms, a noose hangs from the ceiling.
The Evil Composer
Upon returning to his flat, he receives a knock at the door from a desperate woman. The woman is a composer and she’s bleeding. Moreover, she speaks in a strange manner and has no eyes. He rings the police, but the operator doesn’t seem normal either, claiming she’s standing right outside his door and demanding he open it for her. According to her: “everyone opened the door, except him.”
After hearing a noise in his workshop, he goes to investigate. The woman has entered his flat. Then he experiences another hallucination. This time, he sees several statues like the one in his workshop, and now they’re pursuing him. Our character comes to, locked outside the flat.
With the goal of escaping the flat, he sees the woman stabbing a body along the way. Back in the alternative flat, he enters a loop where he can observe some scenes of this woman through a crack. Back in the real world, he finds a walkie-talkie, allowing him to communicate with a somewhat mad bloke called Walter Tallmam. Walter knows something strange is happening and wants the protagonist’s help to stop it.
Baki on the Eighth Floor
The man tells him to go to a woman with superpowers called Baki, who lives on the eighth floor. According to him, Baki is evil. Our protagonist forces his way into Baki’s flat. Examining the place, he discovers that Baki had met with the composer. Upon returning, he falls through a hole in the corridor and, to make matters worse, the hallucinating composer is on his tail. He manages to reach the Composer’s flat, which is identical to the flat seen in his own hallucinations. The place is choked with copies of The King in Yellow.
The Composer’s Descent
Then we enter the Composer’s point of view before everything happened. She converses on the telephone about HIM who chose her. She’s involved in an art piece about The King in Yellow. Her sanity slips away whilst she tries to produce her masterpiece in tribute to HIM. The cockroaches on her flat irritate her, and she decides to go to the secret place where Baki is. She opens a secret passage in the building, leading to a sort of hidden flat. There she finds Baki, who’s also not quite right in the head. Finally, she removes her own eyes, considering them traitors.
Carcosa and the King
Our protagonist enters yet another hallucination of what appears to be Carcosa, the King’s city. After entering a trapdoor in his room, he returns to the real world. He follows the path to the secret place and finds Baki there. She seems mad, talking about her war against the cockroaches. Baki tells him to go to flat 408 to escape this madness. She grows curious about how the protagonist reached that place.
Our protagonist heads to the room, where he finds Walter Tallmam’s walkie-talkie and a trapdoor. This leads him to the other world, and it’s already evident that he’s going mad as well. However, he reaches a lift where he recites: “I am… A king.”
Mythos
The game draws heavily from Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 collection of short stories, The King in Yellow. This work introduced readers to a fictional play so disturbing that anyone who reads it descends into madness. The play itself centres on a mysterious figure known as the King in Yellow, a malevolent entity associated with the lost city of Carcosa. In Chambers’ stories, the play serves as a catalyst for psychological breakdown. Characters who encounter it find themselves unable to escape its influence, their minds gradually unravelling as the boundaries between reality and fiction dissolve. The entity known as Hastur first appeared in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “Haïta the Shepherd” before Chambers later adapted it for his own work.
Chambers transformed Hastur from Bierce’s relatively benign presence into something far more dark. Beyond this, the figure became one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favourite entities to reference in his cosmic horror tales.
Ambrose Bierce also created the city of Carcosa, describing it in its destroyed state. Like other mythological locations, Carcosa remains an enigma, never explored in a particularly clear or sufficiently intelligible manner. The city appears as a place dominated by gods, with Hastur as its possible king, though at some point, for unknown reasons, it fell into ruin. Descriptions portray Carcosa in dreamlike terms, surrounded by multiple celestial bodies, containing heavenly elements and vast towers that defy human logic: a place where conventional architecture and physics hold no meaning.
Familiar Foundations
The game doesn’t stray far from the typical model of first-person horror games lately. This type of game generally focuses on narrative with little emphasis on mechanics or more expressive gameplay. You spend most of your time wandering through corridors with little to interact with beyond notes that help establish the world’s atmosphere. The beginning tends to be slow, with objectives that simulate everyday tasks, and then horror elements sprinkle in here and there. Even so, the character must press forward. Typically, the game guides the player through sounds and through triggers that open doors or passages previously locked. For the most part, the character walks through a labyrinthine setting waiting for something to happen, searching for a key or solving a password puzzle.
Here, however, there’s also a well-known chase mechanic where the player must keep their gaze on the creature to prevent it from moving. There are also stealth moments where they must pass unnoticed. Another element we have here is the overused device: the loop scenario.
The narrative, which is the game’s focus, remains intriguing throughout its duration and serves as the experience’s main draw. However, I believe it suffers from “fetch quest” problems, and the ending doesn’t pay off the journey. The speed at which the story and action unfold – the “back and forth” – drags the pacing down. Even after all this, the finale doesn’t have as much to reveal as it promised.
The Design Flaw of Busywork
Chorus of Carcosa suffers from the typical problems of similar games. It relies heavily on repetition, particularly of scenery and puzzles that seem to exist merely to make the experience longer. You find yourself trapped in long walks through corridors and oneiric staircases with little to do beyond reading the notes scattered throughout the setting – that is, when the corridors aren’t the same ones. Between these moments, the character reaches a closed area demanding a key, password, or puzzle to pass and face more of these corridors.
Between hallucination sequences, the character returns to themselves in the real world, which is where the story actually progresses. Overall, the character must go back and forth through the same scenery without organic advancement, such as unlocking doors and collecting items. Passages open because the script determines it’s time to pass through there.
The excessive use of back-and-forth for “trivial” tasks reveals a fragility in the narrative design, where campaign length is prioritised over experience density. When the player is compelled to traverse the same scenery repeatedly just to collect isolated fragments of information, the game world ceases to be a space of exploration and becomes an obstacle. The space hasn’t changed, the challenge hasn’t changed; you’re simply crossing the same scenery through pure script bureaucracy.
This worsens when we’re dealing with horror. Horror depends on the unknown and environmental tension. When the game forces you to cross the same corridor for the fifth time, it commits the genre’s greatest sin: familiarity. What was once a shadowy and threatening corridor becomes merely “the path to place X”.
Wrapping Up
Chorus of Carcosa is a horror attempt to translate Robert W. Chambers’ weird fiction into interactive form. The game succeeds brilliantly in capturing the oppressive atmosphere and psychological deterioration central to the source material. Yet the game stumbles in its execution of the journey itself. The repetitive corridor traversal, the excessive backtracking, and the reliance on fetch quests undermine the horror of the narrative. The finale compounds these issues by failing to deliver a payoff proportionate to the journey’s length. After hours of cryptic visions and fragmented storytelling, players deserve revelations that justify the investment. The game may not be a masterpiece, but it proves that the King in Yellow still has stories to tell.
