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hopping_vNight of the Cephalopods is an 8-bit 2D third-person shooter (8b2d3p?) in which you play a fellow with a shot gun being attacked by floaty octopi and trying to survive until dawn. Ammo is limited, so you basically wander around looking for more and blowing the octopi away when you need to, but otherwise husbanding ammo.
The gameplay is conventional, but tense enough; what's different about Night of the Cephalopods, and something that couldn't be done back in actual 8-bit days because voice was too expensive (computationally, and in terms of data storage) is the voice-over narrative. It's read in a rather over-wrought tone appropriate to campy horror, and at least per the developers is intended to be Lovecraftian. It doesn't quite achieve old HPL's purple prose, however; there are no squamous entities, no congeries of bubbles, and little of the Victorian and (even in Lovecraft's day) archaic diction that characterizes his prose. Yet it does add an ejoyably kitschy note to the enterprise.
There weren't enough screens
There weren't enough screens to explore, and like any game with in-game voiceovers the dialogue ran thin before the end of the first playthrough. Interesting concept though.