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I'm thinking of adding humanoid squid into my world, as an expy of the bloodsuckers from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. These cephaloids somehow fell into our universe from a parallel one (they don't know how it happened either), and have the following attributes:

  • Their home environment is mainly inside coastal caves with Earth-like gravity and atmosphere. They primarily live on land, but can stay underwater for up to an hour.
  • They have an internal skeleton and lungs similar to humans, but with three fingers/claws instead of four (not including the thumb).
  • No sternocleidomastoids for extra creepiness. They can still rotate their head, but with a reduced range of motion compared to a human.
  • Average adult height range is 5-6 ft (1.5-1.8 metres); weight ranges from 50-70 kg.
  • Their head and mouth resembles that of the European squid, with six tentacles around a beak. The tentacles basically work as extra hands or tools, though their primary use is holding food.
  • Their diet is primarily fish, with some algae (e.g. seaweed).

Are these viable on Earth? If not, what would I need to change?

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No sternocleidomastoids for extra creepiness

That makes it likely they have eyes either on the side of their heads or more then two eyes. You want peripheral vision.

Their head and mouth resembles that of the European squid, with six tentacles around a beak. The tentacles basically work as extra hands or tools, though their primary use is holding food.

Why do they have hands? Did they evolve from climbers who evolved from sea creatures? If food is held by the tentacles why do they have well developed hands? You can totally have hands but you need to justify them developing in the first place.

Their home environment is mainly inside coastal caves with Earth-like gravity and atmosphere. They primarily live on land, but can stay underwater for up to an hour.

Cave dwellers tend to have large eyes to see well with limited light. They seem a bit big to spend most of their time in caves. Personally I would make them more coastal swamp dwellers. That gives them access to trees to climb. Perhaps they feed in the water, hence the tentacles. But escape dangerous prey by climbing trees.

Then later they grew in size and took a more land based existence, perhaps even some cave dwelling. So cave dwelling might work after all. But spending long periods of time either in the dark or underwater would likely lead to degraded vision. Especially with limited head rotation.

They likely favor sound and smell as those are less inhibited under water. Maybe even taste, that works well underwater. And on land they could lick the ground, maybe 'smell' the air like snakes.

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    $\begingroup$ The out-of-universe reason for hands is that I want them to mainly use spears, harpoons, etc, but keep the tentacles for hand-to-hand combat and scaring people. However, your last paragraph gave me another idea: use them for smelling/tasting. $\endgroup$
    – user7076
    Commented Apr 14, 2017 at 13:32
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    $\begingroup$ Spears can be used by tentacle like appendages. But if you go for arms I would keep the tentacles for highly developed sensitive things like food, tasting, smelling and maybe mating. If they're as large as the bloodsuckers or smaller I doubt they could do much when fighting with a human. $\endgroup$
    – Mormacil
    Commented Apr 14, 2017 at 14:29

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