Stygian: Outer Gods | Daniel Upton's Notes: The Architecture of Madness

When we started working on Stygian: Outer Gods, one of our earliest and most daunting challenges was designing a town that would evoke the feelings of Lovecraft’s tales, as if it hovered on the edge of reality itself. Not merely a physical space, but a place where time had grown thin, where the present was an echo and the future a distant cry.

Eventually we designed Kingsport – an ancient coastal town in Massachusetts, seemingly caught in suspension between centuries. The past never truly passed. The future never arrived. Its crooked lanes twist between crumbling 17th-century houses, untouched by the passage of time.

The Architecture of Dread

We turned to Lovecraft’s own depictions of Kingsport, as seen in The Festival, and, in part, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Our Kingsport is a place steeped in forgotten centuries. A town preserved not by care, but by madness.

We drew visual inspiration from the abandoned fishing hamlets of New England, those coastal towns that seem to have turned their backs on the sea, unable to bear what they once glimpsed within it.

Dilapidated houses lean into one another, as if seeking support. The narrow streets show no sign of life – only a tense, lingering silence. Masonry is thick with moss and black mildew. Beams hang low, like soaked bones beneath rotting flesh. Old ropes still sag above the alleyways, once strung for drying fish, now they hang like silent nooses, long forgotten.

The farther you stray from the town center, the more it feels as though you're wandering not through the streets of Kingsport, but through someone else’s dream.

Color and Light

The color palette in Stygian: Outer Gods is sickly and tightly restrained. There is no true black, nor pristine white. At times, the colors feel unreal, soaked in dream logic.

Light in Kingsport doesn’t illuminate; it only reveals. It isn’t sunlight, but a dim glow, like the mist before a storm. It casts no shadows and offers no comfort.

The only living light comes from torches and the slow burn of candle flames.

We deliberately avoided pitch darkness in areas where gameplay doesn’t demand it. Instead, we embraced a pale, evasive radiance. Not to conceal horror, but to underline it.

Sea Hungers

The town doesn’t merely sit beside the sea – it is nearly consumed by it. The ocean is an ancient, hostile presence, slowly swallowing the streets.

Kingsport is covered with salt, shrouded in fog, and worn thin by the ceaseless wind. Each breath carries the bitter tang of rust. And with every dawn, the waters rise anew, creeping further, claiming more.

Key Landmarks of Kingsport

The Brasco Estate serves as our architectural guiding mark and the emotional core of Kingsport. We designed it to always haunt the player’s periphery. It stands somewhere between cathedral and crypt – a vessel for memories twisted beyond recognition.

The Lighthouse is a presence of its own. In Lovecraft’s fiction, lighthouses often serve as symbolic and visual anchors, perched at the boundary between reality and the unknowable. We drew upon the image of Basil Elton, the lighthouse keeper from The White Ship, a solitary wanderer, slipping into dreams in search of distant, forbidden worlds. Our lighthouse remains ever-present and always on the horizon.

The lighthouse burns with a pale light above the cliffs, casting its indifferent glow across the shoreline. But deeper in the fog, other lights flicker, a thick, venomous green