O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth has always been janky. Released in 2005 on the original Xbox and half a year later on PC it looked outdated, it had tons of problems and was ridiculously hard at moments. Nonetheless, it was also beloved by many despite its issues, because it created a genuinely fantastic atmosphere and was full of memorable moments and ideas unlike anything else in videogames. I liked the game when it got released, but always dreaded returning to it due to countless frustrating elements it had. But it was the time to finally take the dive and see how the game feels in 2022.
As one may guess from the title, this game is based on the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game that is itself based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, specifically the so called Cthulhu Mythos. And during the long 6 or so years of development, it initially planned to have a ton of role-playing elements and non-linear aspects that the tabletop RPGs are known and loved for. But the task turned out to be too ambitious for the budgets that the team at Headfirst Productions were given, so the scale of Dark Corners of the Earth became much more limited. Which isn’t to say that the game doesn’t do things that you don’t expect it to do. It still attempts to be something of an immersive sim-light, mixing FPS, stealth, adventuring, city exploration and other elements, while having complicated systems for healing wounds and main character sanity. And it was also among the early adopters of the “no HUD” idea among first person view titles, joined by Peter Jackson’s King Kong released same year. The idea is far more common now, but back then not having even an aiming reticule for weapons was quite novel.
You may correctly guess then that the gameplay varies wildly between story chapters due to this amount of mechanics and ideas. You start with an adventure section, go into a proper city exploration, then suddenly learn about sneaking and stealth and it’s not until several hours in that you get your first gun and can actually fight back. Yet, since then the game still manages to constantly change things up, either due to level structure, or due to the enemies or your tasks or via whatever else it invents next. This unpredictability greatly enhances the horror aspect of the story as despite the main character’s almost consistently calm demeanor, you’re going to experience some terrifying sequences in the game.
But, this unpredictable nature also makes this game often frustrating. A memorable and terrifying escape from the town, for example, starts suddenly and requires players to basically know what they have to do before they can even comprehend what’s going on. Unexpected deadly platforming segment is exciting, if not for horrible platforming mechanics mixed with lack of nearby save points. Fun action filled exploration of a factory is less fun when enemies seem to respawn infinitely without ever dropping any resources that are always scarce. The game loves to just suddenly drop you into poorly explained situation that can kill or seriously wound you almost immediately and then expect you to enjoy replaying the section over and over again. And it would get obnoxious even if the mechanics were solid, but a lot of the mechanics in this game are cool for variety, not for the quality of any of them in particular. And the overdone sanity effects… I’m so glad games in general stopped thinking that giving players nausea and making it almost impossible to see what’s even going on is a good design decision.
Sadly, on top of the issues that were always present in the game, time has added new ones too. I’ve played the GOG version, as it has more built-in fixes than any other version, but even that version requires the DCoTEPatch that fixes some more of the issues the game has on modern hardware. And even that wonderful patch doesn’t fix several consistent crashes, permanent blockers and sudden deaths that you just have to dance around in one way or the other, either by avoiding parts of levels or doing things in a very specific way. For me, for whatever reason, the final section bug that makes it impossible to escape the final location wasn’t fixed by the main patch, but increasing the player speed did help. Which, by the way, is an issue that persists in the PC version of the game since the release – player speed sometimes is just much slower than it’s supposed to be.
Despite this… I was still glad to revisit Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. I mean, I doubt that I’d wanna replay it again and I don’t know if the game needs a direct remake, rather than just a new title based on the license. But it’s still really impressive and has many inspiring ideas and moments. It’s most certainly far better than the horrible mess that was Call of Cthulhu from 2018, geez that game was terrible. If you’ve never played it before or if you have, but have less patience for old jank than you did in 2005, I’d still recommend checking Dark Corners of the Earth, but you might as well use the DCoTEPatch to just enable the God mode and enjoy the story. But don’t get it on Steam, grab the GOG version if you’re getting it.