Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox S/X, PC
Release Date: March 23, 2021
Publisher: Asmodee Digital
Developer: LuckyHammers, Asmodee Digital
I initially had some (a lot of) trouble writing the article for LuckyHammers (RIP 2019) and Asmodee Digital's Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace as played on the Nintendo Switch when I started back in April. I decided to break the one article up into two because I felt that was how I was mentally breaking down the game when I thought about my experience playing it and how it might be perceived by unfamiliar audiences. I was also afraid of coming off as gatekeeping-like because there were a lot of times that this game felt like it was made for fans of Mansions of Madness and I could tell what the developers were trying to do, and other times that I felt that people who have not played the board game may not enjoy the video game. In the original draft of this article, I found that it was quickly getting out of hand, both in terms of its composition and the flow of information mixed with anecdotes, so splitting this up into separate and slightly more focused articles seemed like the best way to continue writing and remain sane; although I am still going to be jumping around a lot because I was unable to write this in any other way.
Conklederp and I are avid fans of the Mansions of Madness board game (both first and second editions by Fantasy Flight Games) and we have delved a few times into the card game Elder Sign. Both games exist in the shared Arkham Horror Files universe along with the original Arkham Horror board game, Eldritch Horror, and a slew of similarly themed card games. Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace (AHME) was originally announced back in 2018 as Mansions of Madness: Mother's Embrace but later changed the name to Arkham Horror, I assume to keep the game under the primary umbrella of Arkham Horror Files rather than one of the side-games. You can read more about the game's delay and the changing of development companies over on Dicebreaker's article from November 2020. I bring this up because I feel that it plays into the expectations of a traditional mystery/adventure video game and the final product that was released.
AHME is based on the mechanics of a board game and a lot of the time it feels like you are playing a single-player board game within a video game setting. You take control of a primary character chosen at the start of the game and other pre-determined characters join your group as you play through the various scenarios. Each character has both health and sanity points with HP typically in the 15+ range while SP was between 6-8. This disparity tells you immediately that the odds are stacked against the characters suffering mental trauma than physical trauma, but more on that later. There is no dice rolling or the usual action limitations that you have in board games (number of actions you can perform each turn) because that would make the game cumbersome and instead, you move around the playable area as you would any other 3rd person exploration game. There are objects to interact with, some are merely just observing curios like paintings or a disemboweled corpse, while others you are able to interact with.
Thinking again about the board game, having Hit Points means that once you reach 0, you become injured and your HP resets, but if it reaches 0 again, you are killed. In AHME, your character only passes out for the duration of the fight unless you have an item to revive them mid-battle, although there are some sanity and status effects that can cause damage while you are exploring your location, but I never had a character "die" outside of a fight. Sanity Points in AHME operate differently than in the board game, where you become insane when you reach 0 and die if they reach 0 again after being reset. While bandages are used to heal HP, the only item I consistently came across to heal SP were cigarettes, which also caused 1 HP damage (because smoking is bad kids; no but really, it is), but my biggest problem was that there were far too few cigarettes to be found, which made acquiring trauma feel inevitable; maybe that was the point? Here, you acquire trauma, but that trauma is already built into your character and you are actually able to see ahead of time what that trauma will be when their SP reaches 0, because it will reach 0. Knowing ahead of time what trauma a character could experience allowing you to choose which character would have the least inconvenient traumas that would affect your chances of completing an upcoming scenario. Having this knowledge is not what this type of game should be about, and instead should have had the trauma be randomly picked from a collection of possible traumas to add a sense of fear and unknowing. This was another major critique I had. Having trauma should have felt more impactful than it really was and more often than not, it just felt more like an inconvenience than anything else.
Another game mechanic that dealt with going insane and acquiring trauma that felt like it should have been more feared was the Mythos Clock. This was a five-pointed pentagram clock displayed in the upper right of the screen that advances if you fail a skill check (see below) and the clock reaches five. During the first scenario, I was actually pretty concerned every time the Mythos Clock inched closer to five as I was unsure what type of horror the game would unleash on my characters. By the time I reached the third scenario, the Mythos Clock became an inconvenience similar to trauma, that I sighed at and little else. Similar to traumas, having your initiative taking a slight hit or requiring everyone to make a sanity check or just straight up taking -2 to your SP is something that I can live with. There was an item you could use to reset the Mythos Clock, but for whatever reason, you were only allowed to use it while you were actively engaged in combat.
Speaking of items, (and better transitions), inventory management was actually a nice part of the game, something you never have to worry about in Mansions of Madness. In AHME, each character only has four inventory slots which you could fill with equipment at the beginning of each scenario. Here you chose from all of the items you gathered in previous scenarios that were now open to all characters; re-equipping everyone was not bad at all and I would have actually hated having to unequip and then re-equipping everyone. Having a limited inventory does make sense to a certain extent if you think of this being a realistic game with characters who are not pack mules, but then again you are investigating a cult obsessed with cosmic horror resurrections in 1926, so realism is not a requirement. Most of the time, I would have characters armed with a ranged weapon, a melee weapon, an item that granted a buff to one of their skills, and either a healing item or empty to make room for items found during a scenario.
Coming from the board game which does have sliding block and codebreaking puzzles (think Mastermind), I was pretty disappointed to find out that puzzles as a mechanic were completely removed and replaced by contextual clues and the pressing of a single button in order to solve the puzzle. Each character is proficient in a particular skill (Search, Manual, Willpower, Social, Logical, Physical) that can assist with them solving a puzzle, otherwise you have to essentially guess what the appropriate action to take would be or you suffer another advancement on the Mythos Clock. A few scenarios into the game, you come across the reporter Rex Murphy who has a unique attribute that gives him an additional skill that can help to determine an additional clue when solving a puzzle, making them very useful to have in your party since the investigating character pulls information from everyone in the group, not just the individual who is interacting with the object. Often times this would lead me to include Rex in the party when given the option, but I would also choose characters that seemed to make sense for them to be going to specific locations, but that is just me roleplaying instead of thinking strategically.
The biggest frustrating thing about the game is the load times. Oh, bloody hell the load times! I do not know if this is an issue on the Nintendo Switch and if it primarily happens in handheld mode, but these were easily the worst loading times I have experienced for any game on the Switch.
Thankfully the game would only need to load when you started a scenario and when you finished. Moving between floors in locations or cutting between gameplay and cinematics would typically only take a few seconds. The load times starting the game would easily take over a minute, oftentimes upwards of 1m30s on average. One time in particular it went as long as 1m48s. What is kind of ridiculous about this is that there is music playing in the background while the game is loading, but there apparently was nothing in the game's code to tell it to repeat because the song would end before the game finished loading and there would just be dead air.
As long as we are now discussing things that bothered me about the game, there was a stage that took place in a swamp, which in and of itself was fine, but the game itself looked off. First and foremost, this area felt more like a physical board game than any other stage. When you had your character walk through swamp-like areas, there was zero interaction with the ground, as in areas that the characters should have been up to their knees, they were standing on like it was hardpacked dirt. There were some textures to plants and rocks and the trees were not exactly two-dimensional panels that rotated with the characters, but the swamp water, which you could walk on like a painted garage floor, made it feel like the characters were not a part of their environment, just placed there as an afterthought.
Another issue I had was commentary by a character throughout the entire game who was never in your group. Without giving too much away, it does kind of make sense by the end of the game, sort of and in the loosest way, but it still seemed strange. You would be exploring a room or engaging an abomination that had been trying to kill you, and this character would give you advice or analysis of a scene. From a narrative standpoint, it seemed like it might be more fitting if you were reading a book, but within the game and the game world itself, there would have been no way for your playable characters to have any of this information. Not that the information was integral to completing a scenario or giving hints on how to solve puzzles, just commentary akin to sports commentators being broadcast into a football player's helmet between plays. Like in the scene here, the investigators were questioning the origin of the sigils and runes written on the floor, and the character interjects that creature may spring back to life and kill you if you do not leave.
The optimization of the game for the Switch felt like it could use some improvements, both in terms of fixing some bugs and improving the frame rate of cutscenes towards the end of the game. In one instance, the dialogue while searching a mailbox had been swapped with dialogue for searching a table at a cafe, and vice versa. In the same location, one search location had code/text instead of the in-game text. Going into the final battle is when I felt the game suffered the most because it almost felt that whoever was in charge of Switch optimization did not seem too focused, especially after watching a video on YouTube for how the cutscene should have played out (major spoilers!); I will include a video I captured on the Switch from the same scene far below the article as it does contain major spoilers. I could chalk it up to being played in handheld mode, but that should have been something to have been accounted for. My last gripe with the game was the end. In Mansions of Madness, there is always an epilogue that is very Lovecraftian in nature if you succeed or fail. When you successfully complete a scenario the wording can still fill you with dread and oftentimes, successfully completing a game simply means that you escaped alive to tell your tale, but the cosmic horror is still likely to strike again, possibly through influencing another cult to try to bring its consciousness into the world. You do not so much save the world as prevented this one event from coming to fruition but likely have suffered physically and mentally because of the events. There is an open-ended-ness to a number of Lovecraft's stories and to the epilogues in Mansions of Madness, but this one felt only half-written. Maybe I was just hoping for too much, but once the credits started rolling, I felt kind of ". . . huh. . . Okay."
You know what, I think I am going to leave this article at that, which I realize is kind of a downer with you have come this far and only finding out now that this is not the end, but the middle. I promise you that Part III will be a shorter article and full of a lot of the fun that I did actually have playing. And I did have fun, otherwise, I probably would not have completed the game or even set out to write this series of articles, and also being the main reason why it has been so difficult for me to write about. So feel free to visit us again on Friday for the final article in this (now) three-part series looking at Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Such Attitudes
BEWARE: MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW
