Here's a new game to sate the fans of Cthulhu Dice.

All the references and allusions that the past decade of horror media has grave-robbed of Lovecraft and his mythos with some semblance of subtlety—only because you weren't familiar enough yet with the source material to notice a composite body when you saw one—at last reclaimed under the proper branding™ and collapsed into a grotesque and choppy pastiche apropos something you always heard was supposed to be scary, incomprehensible, utterly abhorrent.

This is Cyanide Studio's "Telltale with a skill system" narrow-path CYOA and soft-RPG detective game. Edward Pierce (your player-character Detective with a drinking problem) takes his first assignment in quite some time to clear the name and investigate the death of the disturbed artist, Sarah Hawkins, in creepy East coast fish town Darkwater. This macabre investigation involves the classic archetypes of locals like dim-witted fishermen, skeptic cops, street-wise gangsters, and secretive aristocracy in what is consistently a typical Lovecraftian tale about the pursuit for truth revealing too, too much.

COSMIC HORROR is hot, and with its growing popularity the past decade or so its horrors have become less scary and more familiar. Call of Cthulhu: The Video Game aids in the stagnating and genretizing of this strain of horror, animating the cosmic-indifferent to serve a fandom its favorite comfort dish with all the tasty ingredients included.

But similar to what you may get out of a mediocre evening with friends playing the Chaosium RPG—which this game shares a brand license with and whose mechanics it attempts to translate into the computer RPG medium—the scenario of Call of Cthulhu: The Video Game incorporates Lovecraftian markers (cults, tentacles, MaDnesS!) as the sum composition of its drama and not just as foundation and undermeshing. Instead of an intelligent synthesis of these motifs we get here an ugly snowball of mythos bullshit that your group's underprepared Keeper might breathlessly shape over the course of a sloppy one-shot campaign. Not engaging enough to be anything more than a decent way to pass an evening, not promising enough to make this a bi-weekly or even monthly thing.

"It sure would be fun to do this again," sez the friend who drank a conservative 1.5 beers over the span of three hours, "but hoo-boy, our schedules!"

"Well," this poor Keeper, "goodnight anyway..." Keepsie cleans up after their guests have left and wonders why, if all the essentials were in place, if there was variety and Cthulhu was, finally, Called, then why did this session end well before 10pm and my guests decline to take home their character sheets?

Because, my dude, it is no longer enough to drag out the old props and have them recite their mad barks or gloop and glop their sickly tentacles and leave it just at that. It's not enough anymore!

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There is a level of disdain over this game's satisfaction in being absolutely mediocre that I am attempting to exorcise. I have been questioning my own attitude about art that does not strive to be anything more than just (ugh) What One Might Expect. I wonder if it's possible to be content with being as barely serviceable as this game is, and I wonder if it really deserves to be criticized as viscerally as the alarming collisions of its narrative and mechanics make me want to. I may be a bit of a motherfucker about this but I don't want to forgive this game for giving just what I'm supposed to want and nothing more. Playing this game was a jarring, lame and stupid time.

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I surmise the object of the developers in making this game was to translate the Chaosium RPG into an adventure game encompassing the interactivity, ambition and freedom of queue lines for certain DisneyLand rides (look into Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye). For no good reason that I can see besides marketability this game includes a skill-point system that it routinely embarrasses itself to justify including.

At most times you are wandering semi-medium sized locations with locked doors and guards gating your progress with skill-checks. Progression gates like these are the most common application of the skill system in the game. Skills like Speech and Psychology affect what dialogue options are available to you but often appear as options in the same response opportunity, making their specific purposes as skills vague and homogeneous. This is compounded when the door lockpicking skill, Investigation, appears besides Speech and Psychology dialogue options in what, I guess, are meant to be social encounters that only a keen detective could escape with a positive outcome. Skills and their functions outside of social encounters include Medicine (knowledge leads to investigation shortcuts), Occultism (unlocks the BAD END), Strength (actually useless!), and Detect Hidden.

This last skill underlines the shortsighted design of this system most clearly. While Detect Hidden in the Chaosium RPG could actually determine the success or failure of an investigation, in Call of Cthulhu: The Video Game this skill effectively hides or reveals the world-building documents littered across the world but offers the player nothing substantial that could change the outcome or progress of the game. The skill functions in most cases a binary on-off switch for hidden journals, but I do understand there is for some reason a random factor totally separate of the Detect Hidden skill level that could reveal these objects anyway. What's the point? To hide a typical Telltale-style adventure game behind the superficial UI icons of an RPG with mechanical complexity.

I consider this dishonest presentation Call of Cthulhu at its lamest, and it extends—as if this weren't a crime already deserving of death—beyond the game's crummy mechanics. The shallowness of this game's smirking vanity, if we are to be cynical about all this, often reveals itself when its ambition as presented through dialogue encounters that are meant to bring the player/Detective's ignorance, knowledge or feigning-ignorance into consideration but collapse and produce confusing results. If you exhaust your options in conversations with characters you will find contradictions, like How did this person know that, Why do they believe that when they just acknowledge the opposite, and these shred the game's narrative integrity apart in my opinion.

These breaks in narrative consistency occur so often, the disconnect between the game's appearance as a competent RPG or narrative adventure became impossible for me to ignore. So when the game's conclusion convulses with all the explosions, death-threats, surreal dream sequences and terribly animated and voice acted cgi cutscenes, it is a beg to be taken serious that I in my most gracious mood imaginable could never acquiesce. If an artist can paint a backdrop of my surroundings in distorted blurring and running horizontal lines to give off the impression of a rollercoaster's thrilling mach-speed zooming I will not be moved to scream as I walk past it, unless ironically. And I don't think this makes me a cruel gamer.

In sum, this is a bullshit game trying to pretend its not a bad game. The $59.99 price point it had at launch implicates Cyanide or Focus Home Interactive as knowing-bullshitters, and I don't think there is any reason to pretend this isn't this case. As media consumers of a burgeoning art form (video games are less than a century old wtf!!) there is no tradition set, no social mores to respect that would justify any argument on the behalf of bullshit game makers and apologists of those games that says we owe them an intellectual handout comprising our dishonest participation in wack, crappy, boring, trite, garbage empty-hearted works like this.

If you are interested in actual progression and synthesis of Lovecraft horror, see Bloodborne, Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows' 2017 series Providence, or Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country. Don't bother with crud like this. Toss your Cthulhu dice and smile sincerely at your simple enjoyment there.

Call of Cthulhu is an adaptation of the lovecraftian tabletop rpg... Or at least it should be.

You play as detective Edward Pierce, a world war I veteran who is forced to accept an unusual case to avoid losing his detective license.

The game features a skill system based on the one from the tabletop rpg, and a similar premise to most campaigns (as the original game is based on investigating paranormal events), but the similarities are only superficial.

This is because the skill system is mostly useless. You can choose to invest in 5 different skills (investigation, strength, eloquence, spot hidden, psychology), while 2 can only be upgraded by finding items in the world (medicine and occultism). The issue is that most of these skills will only slightly change the dialogues, and have no bearing whatsoever on neither the story nor the gameplay.

When the skill system does work, it can be fun: upgrading your investigation skill will allow you to pick doors open, thus unlocking potential shortcuts, but even then, the effects are pretty minor.

Since the skill system is so simplistic, the game ends up playing like a story based graphic adventure. Sure, some sections will ask you to sneak past enemies or occasionally defend yourself, but they're both simple and very infrequent, although they do help give the game some variety.

At this point it should be obvious that the core of the game lies in the story and atmosphere, and while it doesn't do anything groundbreaking, it can be pretty enjoyable.

The graphics aren't particularly good, but I enjoyed the environments and the art direction, although I wish the game had tried to innovate a bit on the lovecraftian formula, instead of simply rehashing the same ideas that have been done to death (cults, green color scheme, creatures with tentacles, portals and magic circles etc...)

If you keep your expectations low it can be a fun little adventure, and can manage to keep you on your toes at times. It's enjoyable to see the character descend into madness, while getting to influence just how quickly this will end up happening, and just how much he should try to resist.

I feel like I can recommend the game while on sale. It has a lot of flaws, but enjoyment can definitely be found in it, and it does help scratch that lovecraftian itch

6.5/10

This was faithful to the story and fleshed out its most interesting idea. Being consumed by curiosity turns into a game mechanic, with choices that give knowledge and reduce sanity. I thought that was a good way of presenting the idea. You know that seeking knowledge will reduce your sanity but you still do it. That's the most interesting part of Lovecraft's story and this game proves to you that you'd do it too. this screenshot sums up the appeal of the game for me. I don't know what would have happened if I rejected all that knowledge. I wonder how many players reject it; I doubt its many. The last few chapters dragged. They were trying to build tension and tell me that I couldn't avoid my destiny, but I was uninterested because I already knew that it was going there and I wanted it to. the last few chapters also shifted the focus to be more about fate than curiosity, which was a bit less interesting. But I guess the ideas are linked. the last sequence was good but the 3-4 chapters leading up to it made me want to be done. The gameplay was lame and the horror sequences were dumb. Jolting sound effect to tell me that a slow moving enemy that is 20 feet ahead of me saw me and is stumbling towards me. The shrieking sound effect is brilliant but maybe overused. the characters were uninteresting. I don't know why the "truth" was talking to me towards the end. Was it supposed to build tension and creep me out? Was it supposed to tell me that my destiny was coming? I already knew that. What does "truth" have to do with this story besides that I'm searching for knowledge of the cult? Well the game nailed that one idea so good job. I like the sequences showing parts of Cthulhu. Looming dread and what not. And looking at the Cthulhu body drains your sanity; that's cool. But the last few chapters ruined the tension.

I like that it ended with "giving in" to the ritual, like the story does. And the flash of Cthulhu was great. But then some end credits scene comes up and who even knows what that was about.

I love hp lovecraft and horror and had been saving this one. I knew going in to have low expectations but... I wasn't prepared.

I imagine many probably made the same mistake that I did, which was to expect that to be like the "other"* Call of Cthulhu game (maybe you shouldnt have called it that?) which was a bit hurky jerky, but overall okay, I actually liked it and while I did not create a written review, I had played it and have fond memories of popping pills to manage the madness with the FPS hijinks. (A rather novel idea that was tongue in cheek and fun in and of itself.) Nah, this crap is nothing like that... THIS game is like a bloober turd that didn't flush... This is really one of the worst adventure games i've played in a while... While most games are fun, offer adventure, and a good time, in Call of Cthulhu, you have constant technical hicccups, dialogue choices that actualy either don't matter, or dont do what you want (something i havent actually seen before), I really am bewildered and dismayed that for such great writing implemented here and there (i thought it was one of the best written games ever, absolutely watch a lets play) more or less failed as a game. I mean, this is an RPG but 2 out of the 5 skills you actually cant even level up... Most of the books, notes, etc are filler and unnecessary (much isin the game) the lantern and stealth mechanic is absolute horse shit. i downloaded a trainer to turn it off (in options you supposedly can, but it doesn't seem to do anything and nobody seems to even know what the setting does, probably another switch that you flick and does nothing)

If you ever watch "walkthroughs" of games, it's really one i would maybe suggest doing so over actually playing, but in as far as it's a 6 hour playtime... i don't even really recommend that.

In the end you have some really good writing and tense atmosphere= in a world that you dont wanna be in. things look bad. puzzles hurt head and suck. game does bloober like gotchas changing world on you and such (annoying) trying to make you feel like you arent in control or your going crazy but wandering around to find ONE little thing you missed. having to do something over and over to get it perfect, or being given the illusion of choice is meh... I am never touching another Cyanide Studios game again

I love lovecraftian horror, I love creepy ass nautical towns, so I did like the setting. Probably unfairly, I would compare this game to Dishonored in my mind near constantly, so that made it seem like really bad in comparison.

I guess I’m just confused as to what they were going for. I know it’s based off a ttrpg, but any ttrpg gameplay was limited to extremely basic delegation of character points which just unlocked slightly different voice lines at most. The story was intriguing at first, but it ended up not making any sense. The characters weren’t compelling, I ended up just not caring overall. I got the bad ending I think but it all felt so annoying to sit through that i am not going to go back and listen to those ppl yap again.

So if the story was bad, then the puzzles should be good, right?

NOT AT ALL! There was one puzzle where the character was like ‘only a GENIUS’ could solve this’ and it was just counting things. Literally just counting things and putting them onto dials.

So if the story was bad and the puzzles were bad, at least the gameplay should be good, right?

NO!! It was such nothing gameplay, it was picking shit up and putting them places, shitty stealth sections, an even shittier ‘fps’ section, and these bullshit ‘other world’ segments. Outside of the setting, nothing felt worth sitting through any of this. I don’t even know why I finished it, but I’m somewhat completionist in nature so that’s probably why.

I don't want to downvote this game. I want to like it but ultimately, I think its just not a very good game, or even a great story.

I found the beginning of the game to be promising. You start out with RPG like state that you can pick which are similar to the tabletop RPG. You're a rugged private detective sent to investigate a mysterious incident in a sleepy island town. As you begin to investigate the town, you perform skill checks which fail or succeed and seem to determine the different paths you can take to perform actions. Like can you persuade someone to gain entrance somewhere or just brute force your way through. You can do some "investigation" which is yes, very simple, and the game seems a bit janky but its passable investigation. The game teases the idea of a somewhat "open" and RPG like decision making you can do.

But then it seems after that first area, the skills you choose seem to not matter, and you don't have all these different ways and options to approach scenarios. The idea of RPG decision making is never fleshed out. And then you are hit with my least favorite thing in video games of all time, forced "insta-fail if detected" stealth sections. It also tries to do some puzzles sometimes. None of the gameplay elements are very good at all, especially the stealth and honestly all of the gameplay got annoying to play.

That would all be okay with me if the gameplay was bad and the story was amazing buuuuut... the story is not amazing. The characters are all a bit cliche. The story is kind of predictable. The only thing that I do like is that some of the mythos is interesting and seems to be done right, and a lot of the environments and vibes are pretty cool.

I think the game had the right idea to making a Cthulhu game but just not a good execution at all. It's not terrible, but just not really good at all.

Goddamn, I was so close to rounding this up to a four until the ending. As far as horror games go, this isn't terrible. It's a good effort and does some things really well. Unfortunately, it also does some pretty poor things.

Pros:

• Pretty decent voice acting
• Great soundtrack (especially when you're walking towards your fate at the end)
• Intriguing storyline and universe lore
• Some parts are genuinely creepy. It kind of reminds me of a mix between Amnesia and Outlast
• There are some really weird and downright trippy scenes

Cons:

• graphics are underwhelming
• long loading screens
• I ran into the same bug twice where I couldn't click on responses and had to reload the game
• there are grammatical errors which bugged me because for the price of the game, it should be polished
• character designs are uninspired: everybody looks the same, their mouths don't move at the same time as speech
• the ending drags on, I would have appreciated the storyline much more if they'd finished it earlier
• repetitive modes of storytelling (can't reveal without spoiling, just trust me)
• the ending is cheap as hell - it just finishes and credits roll and you're left sitting there like wtf??? EDIT: there are different endings depending on what you choose, but none of them are overly remarkable.

Overall, a solid attempt at a horror game but no way worth the price it's going. Definitely only consider buying on a sale.