Name That Game 77: The Man who Sold the World May 24, 2011
Name That Game!
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In this episode of Name that Game, all the games described involve humans aiding eldritch abominations (or something equally powerful) in the hopes that they’ll be rewarded after said abomination has eaten everyone else. Needless to say, this never works out well, but they keep trying…

1. In this fantasy game, a man creates a cult to serve as the means to open a gateway so that a powerful, dimension-hopping magical entity can enter the world and take over. He ultimately dies when he badly bumbles a ritual, not only tearing him to pieces but allowing three evil shades to take possession of three members of your party.

2. In this fantasy game, umm…a man creates a cult to serve as the means to open a gateway so that a powerful, dimension-hopping magical entity can enter the world and take over. You finally defeat him by entering the world he has created in his mind and killing him, then go on to deal with the demon…in a rather oblique way.

3. In this horror game, you play as a man desperately searching through a nearly abandoned town for your daughter…who you eventually discover has been kidnapped by cultists so they can sacrifice it to their elder god so he can enter the world and take over. And unless you’ve done everything right, they win.

4. In this fantasy game, living cultists willfully aid undead wizards and warlocks and help them achieve their goals in the hopes that they will become powerful. (Instead, of course, they become zombies.) Then after they’re dealt with, more cultists willfully aid an extraterrestrial-extradimensional being’s attempt to return to this world, knowing full well the death and destruction he’ll bring, again because they think THEY’LL be spared and made more powerful. After THEY bite the dust, even MORE cultists release an imprisoned, insane dragon who believes he is the personification of death itself. His attacks scar and change the entire world, and he makes no bones about the fact that his goal will be fulfilled only when every living creature is dead…yet the cultists continue to fight for him, believing that “death” is code for “change that benefits me somehow”. The people of this world are SO stupid.

5. In this game set in World War II, a single secret agent is sent deep into enemy territory to investigate claims that the Nazis are trying to summon supernatural forces to help them. They are. The agent trails them through several locales, slaughtering tons of Nazis along the way, but arrives just in time to see the summoned demon turn all the Nazis involved in the ritual into his undead thralls. Of course, since he’s a one-man-army, he manages to destroy the demon along with his entire crew.

6. In this post-apocalyptic game (see, I have to keep mentioning the setting ’cause the plots are so similar), there’s a church full of people serving/protecting something in the basement. That something, it turns out, has a hobby of taking “pure” (IE, non-irradiated) humans and turning them into horrible, hulking, asexual brutes capable only of the most base reasoning, which it then plans to unleash upon the few remaining knots of civilization left.

7. In this game, a young man who has lost a young woman he cares about makes a deal with the Ultimate Evil, who tasks him with killing the sixteen guardians who hold him in check. After doing so, the Ultimate Evil does bring the young woman back from the dead…before promptly possessing the young man.

Good luck and have fun!