Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
Original Release Date: October 30th, 2018
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Developer: Cyanide Studio
Play Time:
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I was pleasantly surprised by Call of Cthulhu, not that I was expecting a bad game, just that the Metacritic reviews (which I only just looked up while writing this article) rated the game across all systems between a 63 and 68, with the Nintendo Switch port receiving the highest of the ratings and the general clamor that I seemed to hear online was that it was not a great game.
I loved this game.
I almost feel that I could just leave that as the entire article, but I will delve a little bit deeper.
Call of Cthulhu is a game based on the Cthulhu mythos created by H.P. Lovecraft and expanded upon by some of his contemporaries and is an original story by Cyanide. I feel that a lot of games based on Lovecraft's works pull mostly from his story, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" where a veteran of World War I and Private Investigator Edward Pierce is hired to look into a missing person case in the town of Innsmouth where he checks into a hotel, is attacked by locals, meets colorful locals who don't attack him, then witnesses a procession of Deep Ones emerging from the sea and eventually, more or less, goes insane. Okay, I guess this Call of Cthulhu game does pull a bit from that formula, but unlike a lot of video games that are steeped in cosmic horror, there is predominantly no action. There were a few context/dialogue choice sections that involved violence, and one area at the end of the game where you could shoot a gun. The rest of the game was spent talking to people, running from creatures, trying to stealthily avoid orderlies, and making deductions using clues found at various locations.
Call of Cthulhu came out around the same time as a similarly themed game that I reviewed last year, The Sinking City from Frogwares Games. And while The Sinking City was an open-world (within the confines of a city), Call of Cthulhu was a more contained experience, allowing the player to explore set pieces with loading screens acting as transitions between chapters and locations. For the most part, it allowed me to feel that I could not get lost trying to locate the next area, although there were a couple of times when I felt confused as to what I needed to do, or even if there was more than one way to proceed to the next area.
The first thing that stuck out to me was how good the game looked on the Switch in handheld mode. I know the Switch screen maxes out at 720p, but this might have actually made the game look a bit better than playing on a larger screen, although I did play one of the additional endings in docked mode and it still looked good. Not that the game has to look good for the storytelling to be effective, but that was just one of my first impressions. I did notice though that the Unreal Engine 4 had some animation snafus when it came to the lips of some of the characters, often with their lips pulling back pretty far to reveal a mouthful of pearly whites. I just chalked it up to this being a Lovecraftian story and the effect was purposeful to make characters feel a bit off.
However, there were a number of cinematics where the facial animation was amazing, both in terms of running on the Switch and just in the accomplishments of Cyanide's team to capture minuscule facial animations. This scene happens to lead into the third act (I think?) where Edward Pierce has witnessed something that would normally be something that would be considered impossible. His reaction here, I feel, is the buildup from the first half of the game and he just is unable to contain a sense of normalcy. The straw that broke the camel's back. I love the way his eyes twitch back and forth.
I love when he looks down in the briefest moment of disgust as if something is crawling up his chest. I love the brief look into the figurative camera as if he is looking at the player themselves. I love how he breaks down at the end as I am sure a lot of us would do in the exact situation, that he is not so macho that he is above the inability to accept everything that has happened to him. I find it a brilliant performance from the animation team, the director, the voice actor, pretty much everyone involved in this scene.
Another thing that stuck out to me early on, was that the choices I was making, especially through dialogue options had immediate and seemingly long-lasting consequences. In the bar on the island of Darkwater, there was a local who was giving Edward Pierce some guff while in a bar so I punched him when he came at me. This apparently did not sit well with the bartender and he refused to serve Edward a drink because he was an outsider who had caused violence. No amount of trying different dialogue options would get me a drink, so I moved on and continued talking to the rest of the patrons, a few even commenting about the scuffle at the bar. There were a number of times during conversations, or interacting with objects that the game notified me that what I just said or did "will affect your destiny." At the time I did not know if that meant something along the lines of The Walking Dead: A Telltale Series, and only after I beat the game did I discover that certain actions did affect which endings you were eligible to receive, but I will get to the end of the game later.
A mechanic that Cyanide implemented was a sanity meter of sorts, complete with a meter and a list of ways that your sanity has been affected and could possibly be in the future. I was a little worried when I discovered that your sanity meter would never refill or repair itself and that witnessing potentially horrific events was the primary cause for the meter being depleted because exploring and examining weird phenomenon is one of the hallmarks of a Lovecraftian mystery. So then the question is to examine something that could potentially decrease your sanity, or go without information that could change how you perceive current and future events. Is it worth it to examine the body of a desecrated corpse on the operating table at an asylum to find out if the body was surgically mutilated or possibly from some otherwordly creature, leading your investigation towards either a human or a supernatural suspect? By the end of the game, I did completely use up all of my sanity, which I was fine with and it made sense considering the events that happened, but there were a number of sanity effects that were left hidden making me wonder how I could replay the game and see if I could manage to have Edward Pierce go semi-insane in a different manner.
There was one book that I had Pierce read that affected his sanity, but the game had apparently not Autosaved before I turned the game off (I know this because there were other events that I ended up having to repeat). This brings me to the saving mechanic, or auto-save mechanic as it were. There are only specific moments when the game saves as well as all scene and chapter transitions, which I did find frustrating at times. I can understand not having access to specific save files or being able to save right before examining something hoping for a different outcome, but there were a few times when I wished I could just save the game manually and go to sleep (it being sometime after midnight and knowing that Goblino was likely to wake up in 4-5 hours). Maybe it's just nitpicking at this point and I think I must be spoiled by being able to save whenever I want.
There was one section in the game that I felt pretty lost at, as you had to navigate a maze through darkened rooms with limited light. It was definitely one of those moments in a game where you feel like this might be the place that you cannot get passed and you either have to stop playing or seek a walkthrough. You might wonder how this section played during playtesting or if the game even went through playtesting because of how lost I felt. Did the game even go through playtesting? Eventually, after two nights of failed progress, I took a step back from the game, and because the chapter restarted from the beginning each time I started the game back up, it actually allowed me to approach the maze and notice clues directing you where you needed to go that I had bypassed the first two attempts. It is still a semi-anxiety-inducing section of the game that does not bring back good feelings when I think about playing through again, but there were a number of well-placed jump scares and a well-established feeling of dread as you began to realize how you needed to solve the level to escape the maze.
The end of the game was interesting and I only fully understood what had been going on during the game after watching all three of my available endings and reading what a fourth possible ending could have been having I not drank any alcohol during the game. I do not want to spoil any of the endings, but I will say that they felt very Lovecraftian, than no one ending felt like it was designed to be the "Good Ending." What I mean is that all of the endings had some level of trauma involved, seemingly regardless of your sanity level at the end of the game, and while a character may have survived the whole endeavor, they were forever marred by the experience. They may have stopped a cult attempting to resurrect or bring about a cosmic aberration but at the further cost of their own sanity or even their life.
I would love for Cyanide Studio to tackle another weird horror story, maybe not specifically Lovecraft as there are a lot of stories that could be well adapted, thinking specifically of Algernon Blackwood's novella "The Wendigo." I would not want another Edward Pierce mystery nor would I want an Edward Pierce origin story as The Call of Cthulhu does a great job with his particular story. These types of stories are difficult to do well in video game form and despite the low critic scores across all systems, I really think that Cyanide Studio did a great job with the material and the feeling that comes across in a lot of Lovecraft's stories. They did The Call of Cthulhu justice, and that was really what I was hoping for from this game the whole time.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
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