Lost Carcosa

Keep swimming to stay afloat and try to reach the shore of Carcosa – but any attempt is doomed to fail.

An interactive audiovisual poem based on "The King In Yellow" by Robert W. Chambers. After finishing the wonderful SIGNALIS by  rose-engine, I felt inspired to write a piece of music with a narrative based around TKIY, specifically Carcosa. This quickly turned into a video project and finally an interactive version based on the system I'm creating for a similar, more long-form project. Feel free to experience this in any way you like; you can swim around as much as you want or just as little as necessary in order to not go under, while taking in music, words and visuals.

Headphones and dimmed lights recommended.

Audio available on my Bandcamp page.

Non-interactive video version available on Vimeo.

Controls

Swim – WASD

Menu – ESC

Disk space requirements

Due to Lost Carcosa utilising heavily compressible video content in the game, the download size at ~100MB differs from an actual ~800MB in required space after decompressing.  

Hardware requirements

The wave simulation in Lost Carcosa is quite demanding. If you are running into performance issues, choose "Low Quality" from the Menu (ESC). Please note that this reduces graphical fidelity and the intended aesthetic severely and it may be preferable to choose the non-interactive video version instead.