You can now play an old-timey computer game based on a H.P. Lovecraft story. Because, why not?

If you're reading H.P. Lovecraft stories, odds are you're an insomniac bored late at night with nothing else to do. Video game playing operates the same way.

Late at night is when nostalgia often kicks in, too. This explains why there's now a a computer game based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story that channels everything unimpressive about video games from the 1980s.

"The Rats in the Walls" is one of the better known horror stories Lovecraft made, which was published in 1924. The website itch.io celebrates various forms of art as it comes into the public domain every year, allowing people to use previously popular works of art freely in new forms. This is how we get an old-timey looking computer game, made by Alex Blechman.

In it, you don't play the protagonist Delapore (an American who buys a tired ancestral home in England), you play the rats in the walls that are slowly driving him insane.

The game (and story) is about as action-packed as an assisted-living community after 10pm on a Tuesday. If you loved playing The Legend of Zelda thirty years ago, then you'll probably hyperventilate playing this.

But what else are you going to do when insomnia kicks in?

Henry David Thoreau's 'Walden' is now a video game.

In our modern, chaotic world, nothing reminds you of pulse-pounding action and adventure like the frantic stylings of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. The tiny cabin, the ruminations on passing birds, the reflections on the weather, the introspection while chopping wood--if anything was made to be a video game, it's this.





Look at all that serene canoeing action! Look at all that passive water fowl! And don't get me started on the hammering action!

I haven't been taken aback by this much commotion and frenzy since that time I ate some plain rice cakes for lunch.

"When it's time to thrown down, Jane is ready to destroy you."

So says some video game developer about a Jane Austen video game. Yeah, that Jane Austen, who is always the first person I imagine with Ivan Drago tendencies.

The game will be like the illegitimate lovechild of Scrabble and Street Fighter, with you living vicariously through a variety of literary individuals--like Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe--as they spell and fight their way to supremacy.

According to the developer, "Simply put, Jane is a princess who doesn't need saving. She's beautiful, and she can also kick your ass."

Pssh, obviously. And don't even ask what Agatha Christie might be capable of. It probably involves brass knuckles and the ability to kill a man just by throwing a verb at him.

Personally, I always thought The Grapes of Wrath would've been a great video game.

Just think of it: An old jalopy of a truck overburdened with passengers has to careen down a dirty highway in the American southwest, veering past tumbleweeds, scurrying varmints, and unscrupulous land owners. The object of the game is to quickly drive across the landscape and find an honest farming business that'll pay you a fair wage, or your family will die of starvation--or, worse, kill themselves or someone else in an act of desperation.

Sound fun?? Get the kids!

Well, someone else has created a Great Gatsby video game. You, too, can live the life of a flapper and a playboy, minus the whole downer of being killed. It looks like Super Mario, circa 1982, and plays pretty much the same way, too. Except with more gangsters and random gentlemen doing The Charleston.