This game has a pretty interesting premise with a story centered around cults and the Cthulhu legend. I donāt know much about either so I was intrigued and since I received this game in a bundle some time ago, I wanted to give it a shot. The game is narratively focused so Iāll talk mostly about theme, art, and story as I go.
Iāll start with the look and feel of the game by saying that I have middling opinions on how this game looks. The textures are good for the most part and convey the atmosphere pretty well. The game falls apart though when it comes to animations. Everybody moves and expresses themselves worse than cardboard. Remember the canned talking animations of Skyrim? Itās that but in a narrative focused game and worse. The characters need to be believable but when someone is talking in a relaxed way while their hands do frantic motions or are frozen in front of them, it breaks a lot of the illusion. However, the rest of the art, atmosphere, and lighting looks pretty good.
When it comes to story, I wonāt claim to be a narrative expert. In my playtime, I didnāt get hooked by the story at any point. The characters are trying to do that thing where they provide little detail and are therefore mysterious. That didnāt track well with me and instead they felt dull and shallow. It sucks because some of the dialog is really good but there isnāt enough of it to carry a narrative game. The best bits of story are told to you in cutscene form and this game almost seems like itās better suited as an FMV game or similar. The biggest benefit to the story though is the multiple choices. I felt my choices were impactful and they donāt let you exhaust dialog for other options. You have one conversation and there is at least an illusion that you couldāve had many more discrete conversations.
The RPG skills are another middling feature as they help a lot of the exploration and conversational aspects of the game out and yet theyāre paper thin at the same time. The game has you assigning points and yet I donāt feel that it wouldāve played any differently than if Iād just picked skills at the start and nothing afterwards.
Lastly the sound is another 5/10. Sometimes it really sells the horror of a scene. But a lot of the time the same repeated music tracks take me out. And the compression used on the voices is embarrassingly bad. It harms the performances so much that I began tweaking my setup because I thought I had audio issues.
To wrap it up, I wanted to like this game and I still like aspects of it. Itās maybe worth playing if you catch it on sale or get it in a bundle. And since itās a short experience, some of these gripes arenāt dealbreakers. I just found it to be a disappointing use of the setting and theme and I wish more couldāve been done to immerse me in the game.
If youāve played it, Iād love to hear your thoughts on it!
Which Call of Cthulhu? Cause I played the one from 5 years ago or so, and kind of enjoyed it. Like it was fine as a Lovecraftian story and all, but the gameplay was a bit slow. I got one ending, then I just reloaded the save right before the ending and got the other one too.
By the description itās that one OP is talking about.
Can confirm, itās the one from five years ago. I still enjoyed it btw but it feels much older then 5 years
I think my favorite parts were hiding from the thing in that museum mission, and the very, very ending where youāre up on the cliff looking out at the sea and horizon.
Absolutely, there are gem moments in this game. Which makes it kind of tragic that I couldnāt get into it. The art is really good and so is the theme. I just wish the mechanics of the Shambler section and the psych ward were used more.
I definitely started reading this as though it was about the older CoC game, Dark Corners of the Earth. Itās a bad sign when so many descriptions of a 5-year-old game also apply to one thatās almost 20 years old.
Dark Corners of the Earth is actually pretty great, if anyone would rather give that a try. Thereās one level set in a factory that really drags, but everything else is enjoyable. Thereās one sequence in the hotel that feels straight out of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.
The RPG skills are another middling feature as they help a lot of the exploration and conversational aspects of the game out and yet theyāre paper thin at the same time. The game has you assigning points and yet I donāt feel that it wouldāve played any differently than if Iād just picked skills at the start and nothing afterwards.
The RPG skills in a few scenes work as skill checks and can lead to different outcomes, impacting the story.
You can get a few playthroughs out of the game fiddling with them and the variations to the story they entail.
Yep! I enjoyed that factor of the story but like I said, I donāt think thereās much reason to have you picking where to put new points as the story goes. It personally led me to a situation where on a first playthrough I was a jack of all trades, master of few and didnāt have the skill checks required for certain things. Also the skill checks arenāt frequent. The strength skill is pretty useless and the eloquence skill gets used a small handful of times.
The strength check is used early on, where you can force yourself way into the warehouseā¦
It is but I donāt remember seeing any checks of strength past about the middle of the game. Maybe there was a couple.
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I didnāt notice many either. There was one or two where you could threaten someone.
