Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, PC
Release Date: March 23, 2021
Publisher: Asmodee Digital
Developer: LuckyHammers, Asmodee Digital
When you start the game, you are given the choice between seven investigators to play throughout the scenarios. During the game, you do come across additional investigators who join your group. In between scenarios, you can select who you want to be in your group and you do not have to always have your initial investigator in the group. All of the characters are taken from games in the Arkham Horror Files universe and I was familiar with all of them except Sefina Rousseau and Zoey Samaras. Not knowing how the game was going to emphasize certain skills and attributes, I decided to go with the trumpet player Jim Culver, being a trumpet player myself did not factor into my decision-making process. I did take a bit of a meta-gaming approach though deciding on Jim in that he had strong mental resistance, was not weak in any of his combat skills, and was strong in both initiative and ranged attacks. Also having the passive ability to offer mental buffs to the other members of the party seemed like a great skill to have as well.
As I talked about in Part II regarding Traumas and the Mythos Clock becoming more annoying and an inconvenience rather than its intended threat, during the first two scenarios though, I was pretty terrified about the effects and how often I seemed to suffer attacks to the characters' sanity. I would be frequently on the lookout for cigarettes and more often than not, even in the late-game, I would use them immediately. By the third scenario, you have enough investigators to choose from that you cannot take everyone, which is when you can take advantage of being able to heal Trauma by leaving players back at your head office. Each investigator left behind during a scenario is able to heal one Trauma each scenario, although I could not tell you if the healed Trauma is chosen at random or if it selects the oldest Trauma to the most recent. By the end of the game, I had Jim in my party for a couple of scenarios and definitely going into the last one without an ounce of Trauma on him, partly because I had him stay back for a couple of missions, but also because I had him focus on ranged combat.
So let us talk a bit about combat. Compared to Mansions of Madness, there is a lot of combat in this game. Combat in AHME was all turn-based and semi-tactics based on a gridless area. Sometimes in MoM, you could go the entire game without fighting anything, and then in the final act, you might fight a couple of cultists and then a race to activate a portal that would pull a Star Spawn back in. In AHME, some levels would have body counts in the dozens, especially in the later levels. In the early game, this became worrisome and tiring all at the same time because I would often want to progress with the investigation and uncover clues related to the story but instead, I found myself attacking inmates in an asylum or cultists in any number of different locations and barely hanging on by single digits by the end of encounters. This is one area where I felt the game diverged from its cosmic horror roots where individual encounters felt emphasized over the dread of what could be; although getting that sense of overwhelming fear across in a video game is admittedly difficult to convey. That being said, combat overall felt pretty good, never feeling that the enemies were purposefully overpowered or that there were eight enemies against three investigators. In fact, some of the minibosses during the first couple rounds of combat came across as overpowered to the point where I would start panicking, but my team was such a well-oiled machine, that with the exception of one battle that I kept losing because I was taking on too many cultists too early in the scenario, we never lost a fight.
Speaking of weapons, I had not mentioned it in Part II, but the weapons all have a durability mechanic so that M&P Revolver you picked up two scenarios ago is likely going to break before the end of your current mission. Thankfully the game does a good job of giving you a general idea about when an item is weakening and going to break by changing the color or the text on the item, changing the durability description, and then the damage decreases as well. In the early game, this was a pretty frustrating mechanic, especially with guns because ranged combat was preferable to melee for obvious reasons; the further an enemy is the less likely they are to harm you unless they of course have guns too. As mentioned above, one of the reasons I chose Jim Culver was because he was strong with ranged weapons so it was at times frustrating to have a character who could not use one of their innate abilities because either a gun broke or you were just plain out of ammunition. By the last three chapters, however, there seemed to be both plenty of ammunition and guns so that I had even had one character carry additional guns in case someone else's wore out and I had almost stopped carrying healing items altogether.
You know, I feel like that sums up a lot of how I played the game as told through a few of the in-game mechanics. I am leaving a pretty big chunk of the story untold because there are pretty significant spoilers the further along in the game you go, even more so if you are familiar with gods that H.P. Lovecraft created (not just inspired by Lovecraftian mythos)*. The story itself was pretty interesting if not a bit predictable halfway through, but I still felt compelled to play through the scenarios through to the end of the game. There were not any escort missions or mini-games that made the game itself unbearable. The voice acting at times fell a little flat and emotionless especially considering the events unfolding around the investigators.
Because this is based on H.P. Lovecraft's writings, I feel I should also talk about how the blatant racism and anti-Semitism present in some of his works were not incorporated into the game. In terms of social commentary and awareness considering that the story takes place in various areas of the Southern United States in 1926 with a cast of characters who were not all white, I did not pick up on any racism towards the characters; which could also mean that it was there and I was oblivious or did not pick up on it at all, which I am of course open to admit if it was there. There were some scenarios, the one that took place in the asylum was a bit cringy in that 90% of the enemies you fought were patients of the asylum, all acting violent due to the proximity of certain events/creatures in the asylum. It genuinely did feel a bit strange having an admitting doctor join your group partway through the scenario then engage in murdering the patients, even if it was out of self-defense. This probably could have been handled a bit better, but that is just me and my 21st-century lens.
So where are we now at the end of this three-article series? I am 100% genuine that Asmodee Digital (and Luckyhammers) did a great job in making Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace feel like a video game version of Mansions of Madness, they very much succeeded on that front. And, I could see that same reason being the biggest turn-off for people coming into this game cold. According to the trailer that was released in 2018, back when it was still titled Mansions of Madness, the video game kept the room tile system of the board game so that the rooms and maps in each location can be randomly generated allowing the game to be replayed multiple times with the layout being different each time. While this concept I do actually love, having played through the game once, I do not feel overly compelled to play through it again, at least for the time being. However, having the rooms and movable tiles potentially opens the game up to additional DLC that uses the same tileset for various locations which I would actually be pretty excited for, but due to the lukewarm responses I have read about AHME, I honestly would be pretty surprised if there were additional games that came out any time soon. But at least I would be interested, so at least there is one.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
P.S.
SPOILERS
So it is mentioned, maybe by the fourth scenario (the cult mansion one) that the primary cosmic horror in this game is Shub-Niggurath who is also known as The Black Goat of the Wood with A Thousand Young. When this name was being dropped, first I was like, "Okay, I know which monster was connected to Shub-Niggurath in Mansions of Madness, so that is probably what we are going to be facing here and I am not at all looking forward to that encounter." Secondly, knowing Lovecraft's racist views, I always make sure to pronounce the name of Shub-Niggurath (even if he did modify the name from a mention in a story by Lord Dunsany) to sound the least racist possible so that it doesn't sound like that particular racial slur that it very much could sound like. And Lovecraft has said that a lot of the names that he came up with were written to be approximations of sounds created by creatures without human vocal cords so one pronunciation being different than someone else's is not necessarily wrong. So I was a little surprised that the pronunciation of Shub-Niggurath that went with was the one that I try to avoid; I won't type it out. Whenever this god comes up in games and I have to pronounce it, I stick to "Shub-Nih-goor-ah-th," with an emphasis on the "goor."
Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there.
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