So, I have just completed Dark Souls 3, the last game in the series, and was struck by the way in which the game uses gameplay mechanics to deliver a certain mood. My question is: how can we as authors create a similar mood in written fiction, and would it require breaking some conventions?
For those unfamiliar with Dark Souls: It's an action RPG with fighting, leveling up etc... Where it differs from modern games, is that it explains almost nothing about how to play the game, or even what your goals ought to be. Even the lore is very cryptic and needs to be discovered (rather than told to the player). This creates a very different mood from the 'clear goal'-oriented stories we are used to reading (catch the killer, save the world etc...), where the world still has meaning created by such a goal based context. Also, the game is hard for a reason I feel. It wants to beat you down and make you feel like there's no point in moving on.
The feeling I want my reader to get, is that the world truly is indifferent, and that the protagonist's decides to 'go on anyway' without really having a goal that objectively matters, and that no choice is truly right right and wrong. I feel like it would make a good allegory for depression, where the depressed person truly feels like they are alone in an indifferent world, and with every defeat they come closer to being a shell of what they once were. The way to defeat depression (in my case at least) is to begin seeing this indifferent world as a set of smaller, context based goals that can be tackled.
In some ways, Lovecraft got close to doing this, although it usually happens as a twist, rather than being a theme that runs through the whole story.
Contrasting this with the typical detective story, we can say " sure, we know the goal is to catch the killer, but there are bigger questions 'outside' the book that can make that goal seem futile, such as: why should we even bother catching the killer? Why bother with saving a world that will die in the end anyway? Why have goals?"
Any tips on how to achieve this type of mood in a novel, without making the read feel pointless? Is it posssible to create a character the reader cares about, that doesn't really pursue anything with full conviction? I'm doing this kind of as an experiment in writing. The character in "The Stranger" by Camus, I just couldn't empathize with, although it gets close to what Im pursuing in my writing.