Calling Cthulhu, part three After plowing through two extremely rough point ‘n clicks and one FPS th

Calling Cthulhu, part three After plowing through two extremely rough point ‘n clicks and one FPS that started decently but ended in the zone of pure anger, finally, with 2018′s Call of Cthulhu game, we come upon a Cthulhu Mythos product that is actually enjoyable. There’s still noticeable roughness around the edges - a quality that seems to be inescapable for officially licensed CoC games - but I had consistent fun playing this one, which is more than I can say for the others. 2018 CoC puts you in the shoes of a private investigator named Edward Pierce, who’s standard as far as Mythos protagonists go. He’s a WWI vet with a dependence on sleeping pills who finds himself called to an island off the coast of Boston named Darkwater. There, he attempts to investigate the death of a family in a vicious fire, and instead uncovers your garden variety cultists, a fishing population that may have consumed parts of an Elder God’s spawn and lots of characters with janky animations that resemble the “made in Europe with a woefully low budget” vibe of the first Witcher game.Like all the other CoC digital experiences before it, this one’s got a plot cribbed together from various Lovecraft tales, though the big bad is a not-so-memorable made-up thing named “Leviathan” that seems to have been chosen to give us a break from Father Dagon and Mother Hydra. The atmosphere of Darkwater Island is appropriately spooky, though, and Pierce became a sympathetic protagonist once I saw the abject terror that appeared on his face every time he stumbled upon monsters from beyond the veil. (Weirdly enough, his hair also always gets disheveled in cutscenes whenever the Mythos starts stressing him out, which is a funny way of pointing out that his sanity is about to take a hit.) Pierce suffers from claustrophobia - meaning that whenever you stay in an enclosed space for too long his vision will get woozy - and this camera trickery seems to be something that the devs pulled from Dark Corners of the Earth. Thankfully, they didn’t borrow that game’s horrid shooting mechanics. You do get a gun in 2018 CoC, and the controls for using it are nowhere near great, but at least 99% of Pierce’s meanderings stay firmly in the adventure genre, focusing on investigation, dialogue and using skills from the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG like Spot Hidden, which is worth maxing out as soon as possible.Some folks gave this game middling reviews upon release, though - and I can understand where this is coming from. The investigation segments frequently veer close to walking simulator territory, where there’s not too much to do but wander around the same rooms until you’ve found the hidden widgets necessary to evoke Pierce’s version of Detective Vision, where he mentally reconstructs crime scenes like his mind is the Bat Computer. Dialogue trees are also clunky, with characters often referencing things that you haven’t officially asked them about, and I got the unfortunate feeling that none of my choices with them mattered much in the long run. For instance, you can choose to reject certain NPCs who attempt to help Pierce, but I’m pretty certain they show up anyway later down the road. (You can, however, ask people questions in R’lyehian, which is something I demand to see in all future Cthulhu games!)This illusion of “stuff appearing to matter more than it actually does” extends to the sanity meter that ticks away on the menu screen. Sanity seems to be an important factor that you need to watch out for…but I’m not convinced that it influences the game’s multiple endings much. In fact, a careful player can easily get most of the endings in one playthrough, and I personally had all but one accessible and was able to simply reload my last save after beating the game to view them one after another. These chestnuts make 2018 Call of Cthulhu the equivalent of an enjoyable but linear CoC tabletop campaign that could probably be completed by a group of players in three or four sessions. I don’t mind linearity as long as the Keeper guiding me through the story is a deft storyteller, and if this game were a Keeper, h/she’d be…a 6 or 7 outta 10, I think. With a tad more protective magic, this could’ve been the definitive Cthulhu experience - as it stands, it’s got a few black spots thanks to too many minutes spent staring into the inky depths of the Necronomicon.  -- source link
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