Also, the reconstruction mechanic the game uses is not executed as well as it could have been. There are far too many spelling mistakes, the copy for the subtitles doesn’t seem to have been proofed all that well, and the game’s controls aren’t in the slightest bit intuitive. I feel obliged to mention some other issues briefly before I get into how Call of Cthulhu‘s sense of space is highly commendable, so here goes.
The player can see without it, and that way you don’t need to compromise your character’s status as an apparently intelligent person. Oh wait, this could have been flammable, couldn’t it?” It wasn’t even that dark. “This smoke is like nothing I’ve ever seen before better spark my lighter. had access more than a couple of light sources, one of which is sparked at a particularly inopportune moment as the character progresses through an obfuscating field of mysterious smoke. It’s sillier still when you eventually see just how strong and capable the Hollywood-abs protagonist really is, and an entire new layer of silly is slapped on top yet again when he eventually pulls a pistol from his belt, which he had all along, apparently. However, when your character is an ex-military private detective and still manages to insta-fail stealth sections because he was seen by a solitary, unassuming stock guard, well, it’s just a bit silly, isn’t it? Sure, this can be uncanny in some cases, yet unconvincing in others.Ī stealth game that opts to focus more on stealth than combat is fine actually, in many ways it holds the potential to be far more interesting mechanically than its gun-toting, rip-roaring counterparts where a covert opts mission can become a war zone at the drop of a hat. The scenic and structural elements of Call of Cthulhu are seriously well done however, anything that is tasked to move does so in the most awkward way possible. Really, that’s the kind of arbitrary situation that the frantic movements of characters call upon, aside from when they’re trying to pull their hand out of their face after having lodged it there in an attempt to have a smoke. However, it becomes difficult to take the game seriously when someone who is supposed to deliver a statement imbued with the core of the game’s horror is waving his arms about in a way that makes it seem as if he’s just telling you that he’s off to the shop because you’ve ran out of bananas. I don’t say this in order to devalue the hard work of people who did so many things right. I mean it in the sense that he who smokes a cigarette impales his cheek with his knuckles, the cigarette temporarily disappearing into a parallel, Cthulhu-less universe.
I don’t mean this in the way in which the residents of The Shadow Over Innsmouth walk in a way that resembles that of an amphibian soul locked within the clumsy infrastructure of the human body. That said, no one moves like an actual human. Eliot’s feline fog, the smells of all things dead and buried lick the walls and stretch themselves out to bask in the artificial light of a fluorescent asylum bulb that has confined itself to an existence spent flickering on and off, with light and darkness being equally terrifying. The hues of sickly shades of green create a damp and cold world in which the most repulsive stenches imaginable mingle with the air itself. It does earn some other badges, though, and it is by no means a bad game.Ĭall of Cthulhu‘s art design is fantastic. Bloodborne springs to mind as a game that masterfully played with the “-ian ” Call of Cthulhu doesn’t get that badge of honor, I’m afraid. While it’s fine to stay true to your source, many games in the past have done the exact same thing. Nods to Miskatonic University here and there lend themselves well to pleasing a fan of the source material, but overtly ostensible injections of Lovecraft into the heart of the game can sometimes spoil the momentum it manages to build by itself. While the game does contain a lot of “Lovecraft,” it doesn’t delve as deeply into the suffixed “-ian” to be truly innovative in a worthwhile sense. However, this game-like so many others-leans toward the wrong end of the adjective Lovecraftian. Call of Cthulhuis a game that does a lot of things right, but gets some other bits wrong here and there in fact, some of its horrors aren’t all that to do with genre.
Lovecraft wrote some of the greatest weird fiction tales of all time, yet is perhaps used as a crutch a little too often in contemporary storytelling. Lovecraftian-the delightful adjective we have assigned to all that borders on cosmic horror.
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