“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming” – H.P Lovecraft
Fish people. Fish people everywhere – Lolsie.
I like to think my quote is better, but I think both get the point across of what this game is about and what you can expect! Having recently gone from console to PC gamer, I wanted to find a game I could sink my teeth into and enjoy a good story and atmosphere, so my first choice was “Call of Cthulhu” based on the works of H.P Lovecraft and developed by Cyanide. I have always loved the works of H.P Lovecraft; he is able to weave a story of old Gods, occultism and a creepy ambience of unease and apprehension. The places his works take place in are also rich and vast, where you can vividly picture it in your mind and live it through your imagination, leaving just enough detail aside for you to fill in the unsettling blanks. You can be sure that the people you meet will already seem off-kilter right off the bat and by the time you reach the end are something wholly unnatural.
Spoilers will be kept to an absolute minimum, but there may be some to allow me to comment on the story or gameplay.
So how did this game live up to my Lovecraftian expectations? Let’s dig in and find out…..
The first thing that instantly stood out to me was how amazingly beautiful the graphics are. I would often find myself standing still in a new area just to look around at how incredible the surroundings are. The locations look so impressive and help to tell the game’s story; a long forgotten fishing island where everything looks weather worn, run down and sinister. The blue and green hues add to the creepiness and remind us of the colour of the sea, where the old Gods lie in wait.
There is always a slight hint of fog too that adds to the feeling of unease, wondering what is hiding behind simple appearances. I think back to the kind of places I’ve imagined when reading Lovecraft’s works and my imagination has always conjured up something similar to the images in this game. This is my first experience playing a Cthulhu mythos game and I was not disappointed by the way it looked and it only made me want to play and investigate the isle further and learn more about what actually happened the Hawkins family and where the player character fits into Cthulhu’s plans.
When it comes to anything Lovecraft I expect the creepy atmosphere to be spot on. It’s not about jumpscares or shock value, it’s about creating an unsettling ambience and having the tension increase as time goes on and you find more out about the location and the residents. Even before the shit hits the fan, something about Darkwater, the game’s main setting, just doesn’t feel right. The fisherman are superstitious about a whale that has been attacked and killed leading you to wonder what is big enough to kill a whale! There are bootleggers here that clearly don’t get on with the others, the fisherman are still talking about a “miraculous catch” that seems to good to be true, and everyone just seems……off. You can’t put your finger on what it is, but your gut is telling you something is very wrong. And it is, but you can’t leave just yet, or at all perhaps…..
It is a perfect example of a game telling the story through the look of its game and its characters, a show don’t tell approach, which I really appreciated and helped me get deeper into the story. And speaking of story, the game has a great one to tell. We are Edward Pierce, a war veteran with PTSD and a drinking problem who now works as a P.I. A gentleman comes to ask us to investigate the death of his daughter Sarah Hawkins, a famous painter, her businessman husband and their child who apparently died in a fire but he is not so sure, having received a strange painting by mail from her after the event.
So off we go to Darkwater to investigate. Only we don’t just discover the truth of what happened to the family, but also the cult that lives there that is working to invoke Cthulhu and it just may be that we have a part in that. We meet many people throughout the game, some our allies, others our enemies, and in some instances their lives are in our hands. But no pressure! Except if you happen to like some of your allies in which case there is absolutely pressure! We’ll meet a helpful cop, an eccentric bookseller and occult expert, and 2 very interesting doctors with different roles to play in the events of the game.
The lines between fiction and reality start to become blurred as the game progresses. Things we believe to have seen may not have actually happened, other things we wish we didn’t see have happened, and Edward tries to figure out what is what.
Something I really liked about the game is that frequently you will be told that your actions will affect your destiny, and although it doesn’t always feel like it, you have a choice. Do you drink alcohol or not? Do you answer in R’Lyehian? Do you tell the truth about things that happen? You’ll want to consider these things if you want to have any chance of getting out alive or at least preventing Cthulhu from being unleashed on the world, and there are 4 endings available to you so think carefully. Or you can just unleash him just because you’re a total savage.
Apart from one very short shooting section that is avoidable by just running around the enemies in question, the game primarily focuses on Edward exploring his surroundings and interacting with objects to learn more about what is happening and completing puzzles to progress in the levels. Instead you need to be stealthy to avoid cult members, hospital employees and a certain annoying monster! One of the main moments where you need to use stealth is to avoid the hospital employees and escape before a certain doctor begins experimenting on you. One of the great things about this part of the game is that there are more than one ways to distract the guards and escape, however all of them require you to explore the whole area and therefore put your stealth skills to use. You are warned when you have been spotted and need to hide before they come hostile, at which point you have no means to fight back. You had to use your brains to figure out how to leave and the game doesn’t really hold your hand which is great as it is a pet peeve of mine that certain games lead you to your objectives which can ruin the enjoyment for me.
The game borrows RPG elements and has a levelling up system where you can put your points into specific categories: Strength, Eloquence, Spot Hidden, Investigation and Psychology and you can level up in Medicine and Occultism by interacting with objects in the environment. It’s certainly not extensive but for a game which took me only 13 hours to complete, I wasn’t really expecting it to have a skill system to rival an open world RPG like the Fallout series. It is just enough for you to tailor your character for the play style you prefer, but is not deep enough to encourage you to play again to see how different it would be levelling up different skills.
Finally, the voice acting is really great, in particular Officer Bradley’s voice actor (Antony Byrne) and Sarah Hawkins voice actress (Christina Cole) who did a great job. The player character Edward is played by Anthony Howell who also voiced Jonathan from the Vampyr game so props if you recognised him like I did!
So now, we head onto the cons and the things that had me facepalming…..
The fucking Shambler first encounter.
God this encounter was a pain in the fucking arse. When you first enter the room, you need to look around at everything before you interact with the painting or GOOD LUCK, you will lose the will to live if you haven’t. I happened to look around the room and before clicking on the painting and there was one item that stood out to me. However, will you remember where you saw it when the Shambler turns up? Absolutely not!
Not only that but he always knows EXACTLY where you are. Even if you’re hidden and he hasn’t seen you, he is always going to walk in the direction you’re in which is literally some bullshit. Don’t have a stealth section if my stealth means literal sod all.
The Shambler “technically” patrols all 3 rooms, so even if he is walking where you are, he will walk through the other rooms. On my many attempts getting into the room with the item I needed, he always left one room and went to another, he never doubled back. So I smash the glass to pick up the item I needed, ran to the wardrobe to hide, and surely enough he came in the room. I watched him patrol it and leave the room and be outside my vision so I exited the wardrobe only for him to have doubled back and just waited in the door outside of my line of sight for me to come out. By the time we even made eye contact he insta-killed me. THE FUCK!! I had no chance to avoid that! It literally doubled back and waited like the game knew what I was doing which was bullshit. This happened 3 fucking times. On the fourth attempt I just waited 2 whole minutes before leaving while Edward went more and more insane just to be sure this wouldn’t happen and it get that shit over with.
Another con for me would be at the beginning the game felt a little bit disjointed. There was a short section getting into the warehouse, then a short section in the warehouse, then a short mansion section followed by the cave section, all with loading screens in between. Sections in games are fine but I think in the beginning the sections felt so short that the game felt slightly disjointed and it perhaps would have been better to have made them longer or perhaps made them in a way without being interrupted by a cut scene and then loading screen.
As great as the graphics were, the facial animations were interesting to say the least, in particular those of Edward, Sarah’s father and Algernon Drake. It is hard to describe the issue here, but if I had to try, there is always too much teeth! It’s like, they have lips, but they always seemed to be pulled back so far and even non-existent on occasion so that they are little just a bunch of teeth and it can very off putting sometimes! Take a look at some clips on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean.
I also always play with subtitles on in case of a glitch in the game where the sound cuts as I don’t like to miss anything. Call of Cthulhu’s subtitles are riddled with typos, such as spelling being with 2 e’s and even as far to say the sentence “to find if she did make it” which I understood with the context to mean “to find out if she made it out”. There were so many errors in there that you would have thought would have been checked before release and it ruins slightly such a brilliant game with such a lazy attitude towards the subtitles.
The endings are also a little too short in my opinion. I was happy with the ending I got, but would have liked it to be a little bit longer for me to know what exactly happened after I made my choice. I have no problem with a bit of ambiguity, but there was too much missing out in the ending I got for me to feel truly satisfied. I had resisted the call of Cthulhu and would have liked to know what came of the citizens of Darkwater in the aftermath, but that was left unanswered. There are some who are unhappy that Cthulhu is only seen in one specific ending, but it makes sense based on the choices and so I didn’t think that was a problem.
Finally, my final criticism is that it’s just not long enough! I loved it and had such fun with it that I wish it would have gone on longer but sadly that was not the case!
In summary, this is a wonderfully-told, atmospheric and creepy game that serves the Cthulhu mythos well. If you hear the call of Cthulhu, you can answer it with this game. As long as you don’t invoke him!
