Despite still never giving a proper go with the works of H. P. Lovecraft, I’ve had a lot of experience with art and entertainment based or inspired by his writings. That included the previous most recent videogame official adaptation of his “lore” in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth from 2005. Despite its shortcomings and multiple issues that game was genuinely interesting and had numerous great moments and ideas (and I really should revisit it soon, since it’s been a while). This new Call of Cthulhu? Well… There’s hard to find many good things to remember this one by.
After several behind the scenes changes and development issues as the game switched the developers, Cyanide Studio, mostly known for their mid-budget big ambition titles which sometimes have good stories and characters, delivered something that… well, fits really well with their catalogue. The game can be described as mostly an adventure title with first person view, but there are stealth and action sequences and even the RPG elements with character skill progression. But most importantly – nothing in this game feels coherent.
It would’ve been somewhat easy to excuse the dreadful stealth or barely working action that appears in a few sections near the end of the game if the storytelling worked. But it doesn’t, entire sections of the story occasionally feel completely absent as the characters get introduced or killed off abruptly, no story beats click, some of the talks you’re having with the characters make you feel like you’re having a bad dream. And it would’ve been great if it all built up the nightmarish atmosphere where you don’t know what’s real and what’s not, but instead it feels like (and clearly is just) a badly put together story.
And on top of that, there’re those terrible gameplay sequences, mostly pointless skill system (it does influence stuff, but none of that seems actually meaningful), clunky chapter to chapter pace as you go from one claustrophobic and possibly to be reused later location to the next one. It just doesn’t work and all I could think of when playing the game and being slapped with weird development choices and scene transitions was: “Wow, they really had almost no time to develop the game, did they?” But hey, at least the final location of the game looks fantastic.
Call of Cthulhu is simply not worth time, money and effort. Dark Corners of the Earth, for how infuriating it can be, might still be a very interesting playthrough, even the old point and click Shadow of the Comet, for all of its clunky design, still has some curious decisions and at least holds some historic interest. This game, though, just mostly exists and I doubt even it can explain why it does.