The main thing that ties Varney Lake to Mothmen 1966 is Lou, a detective-turned-writer who has fallen upon hard times in the early 1980s. The games can be consumed quickly, with minimal effort (it’s mostly a visual novel, with some puzzle aspects). That being said, they’re like contemporary pulp fiction rather than classic pulp fiction: the idea of pulp is there, but the content is definitely geared towards today’s audience. But there’s also a productivity aspect to it: the production cycles are short, and the team works quickly and steadily. So what makes Pixel Pulps pulpy? Thematically, it fits (they’re a sort of detective story, one could easily argue). The term “pulp fiction” emerged from these stories, and references generic, low-quality literature, things like detective stories and erotica. While stories of many genres were printed in these magazines, they’re perhaps best known for exploitative, sensational subject matter. “Pulp” isn’t so much a genre of writing as a medium, as pulp magazines were called such due to the cheap wood pulp paper used to print the product. The Pixel Pulp series contains stories inspired by mid-20th century pulp fiction stories, with 1980s-style computer graphics. Varney Lake again takes something familiar – vampires – and weaves them into a new, pulpy tale. It’s actually the Mothman connection that drew me to the series to begin with (though I called it a cryptid back then, and I’m no longer sure that’s the tea), and I enjoyed the new take on the Mothman mythos. I reviewed the first game, Mothmen 1966, about a year ago.

That’s the kind of story told in Varney Lake, the second in a trilogy of Pixel Pulp games. I love a good spooky story it doesn’t have to have jump scares, it just has to be deeply, deeply unsettling.

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