LoL has been all about player choice when it comes to cosmetics for a long time now, although we’ve come quite a way from the early days of minor changes being a mainstay of customization. Using unique skins is all well and good, but having a wholesale event built around a particular theme is much more engaging, and horror forms the basis of many examples within the LoL canon. Here’s how the spooky side of human culture gets translated into League of Legends.
Harking Back to the Harrowing
Turn the clock back all the way to 2010, and you’ll find LoL’s first major horror-themed event, with all the associated trappings, including unique skins and a healthy dollop of lore to make it feel earned rather than superficial. The Harrowing ran in various guises over the years, with new map designs and summoner icons sprinkled in alongside a range of other inspiring goodies. And while it might no longer have the same place in the LoL events calendar it once held, it helped lay the groundwork for what was to come.
Treading Carefully in Neighborhood Nightmare
Made up of a pair of skin lines, including the aptly named Fright Night and Goth, Neighborhood Nightmare added yet more horror-themed fun to LoL, and again went deeper than cosmetics alone, with flavorful lore and voice lines ensuring players feel like they’ve got their money’s worth. The obvious inspiration for the art style here is Tim Burton, whose classics like Sleepy Hollow and The Nightmare Before Christmas added more than a little to the aesthetics of this corner of LoL’s history.
It’s a lot like how you’ll find other game genres adopting seasonally appropriate themes without changing the core mechanics. So with the Big Bass Halloween slot, for example, the underlying game is known and loved, with a nice sprinkling of cosmetic changes and visual upgrades.
Creating Fear in a Coven
Horror comes in many forms, and cosmic horror is popular in LoL and a number of other games. Coven, within the Eclipse universe, follows aspects of this trend, with its inclusion of Old Gods and the mystical might they represent. It’s also inherently witchy, with aspects of dark fantasy thrown in for good measure, as the Coven Ahri skin and several others attest.
Cosmic horror also has a place in High Noon Gothic, perhaps the most impressive and varied mashup of genres and styles that League of Legends has ever put out there. Gods and demons clashing in a desert setting, with tinges of gunslinging and oodles of supernatural charm, shows just how much the developers and designers can squeeze from horror.
So the answer to the question of how LoL turns horror into entire universes is that it does so with bravery and aplomb, occasionally sticking to genre lines but more often going in its own direction to cater to a varied audience of players, meaning there’s something for fans of the weird and the wacky in whatever form it might take.
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