Year: 2018

Developers: Cyanide Studios in behalf of Focus Home Interactive and Chaosium Inc.

Website: callofcthulhu-game.com

More than 13 years have passed since the last mainstream video game expressly inspired by the narrative cycle of the Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was released in 2005; perhaps many of you still remember it, because it is still on several online stores and is playable on current Microsoft systems; I played it at the time of the first Xbox console. In these long years, several independent games have been inspired by the works of Lovecraft but the only one that I can recommend is Conarium (2017, Zoetrope Interactive).

Will CoC: TOVG succeed in fulfilling this long wait? We will see it together in the conclusion of this review!

The project was born by the will of Chaosium Inc., the company that has been producing the homonymous pen & paper role-playing game since 1981 and which had already granted the license to Dark Corners of the Earth. The production was entrusted in 2014 to Focus Home Interactive and the development initially to the Frogwares Studio that many know for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. In the next two years something must have gone wrong, as Focus canceled the project and then resurrected it in 2016, this time entrusted to Cyanide Studios. In the meantime Frogwares has not given up and is developing a lovecraftian game of his own, The Sinking City, due out 21 March 2019. It will be interesting to see if Frogwares will do better than Cyanide Studios! Fascinating challenge between developers and a wonderful opportunity for fans to fill up with Lovecraftian adventures!

Since the launch of the game, critics have expressed polarized positions; surfing the web you can find scores of 90/100 just as 40/100, according to aggregators of reviews the average is about 67/100. For this reason I hadn’t high expectations before playing it. Now, after completing the game twice, I can understand why critics are so divided.

We can distinguish two main approaches to Videogames, not mutually exclusive: someone consider them just as challenges full of action and puzzles, others more generally as virtual experiences able to entertain and immerse the player in story, content, aesthetics. The latter approach is more open minded, less restrictive, more forward-looking, in step with the times. The first is too simplistic, antiquated, limited, closed-minded. I can understand that most people like simple and traditional games based on challenges, action, shootings, fights, puzzles, etc. I like them too, I swear! I play them all the time! Long live traditional games! But the playful approach is not the only one, Videogames can be much more than electronic toys devoted to easy entertainment. This is the empirical assumption that supports my project Video Games & Art.

Those who understand games as easy entertainment products based on challenges, those looking for action, shootings, fighting, those looking for gore, splatter and jump scare, those looking for titles like Resident Evil 7, Dying Light, etc. they will be disappointed by Call of Cthulhu. Those who appreciate games offering narrative and aesthetic experiences, those who love the suggestions and the pulp literary style of the writer from Providence, those looking for gothic atmospheres with thick fog, ancestral and sinister mansion, cursed artists, detective of the occult, psychedelic visions, etc. Well, they will not be disappointed at all, on the contrary will appreciate the experience a lot.

Story is set in the 1920s. The protagonist is veteran Edward Pierce, who is in a state of deep depression after the horrors of the First World War and tries to make a living as private eye when he does not drink and is not under the effect of sleeping pills. Classical lovecraftian situation: in his enigmatic dreams surmounted by incomprehensible architectures, he seems to receive the call of some obscure and indefinable cosmic entity… Upon awakening he receives the visit of a rich entrepreneur who hires him to discover the truth about the death of his daughter, a famous damned painter, Sarah Hawkins; in her paintings there are indescribable and disturbing creatures whose inspiration seems not to be of this world… The painter died in mysterious circumstances following a fire, her body was never found. Recently one of her cursed paintings was mailed by unknown people from Darkwater Island, where Sarah was living with her husband and son before the tragic accident. The letter specified that the painting was to deliver to Edward Pierce! Why him? The detective goes to Darkwater to find traces of the painter in the ancient and ghostly mansion that dominates the island. An adventure full of dense mysteries and unspeakable horrors awaits him, on the border between dream and reality, madness and rationality, a hallucinatory journey whose destination seems to be inevitably chaos…

Story is able to fully grasp the spirit and suggestions of Lovecraft’s novels. In this regard, allow me to open a parenthesis about literature. The writer from Providence certainly does not lack fame, but his literary value is not recognized unanimously. Indeed, as far as literary style is concerned, it is placed within the fantasy-pulp literature. But if you go beyond the style, you can understand what makes his works so interesting, modern and long lasting. Lovecraft, like few others, has succeeded in capturing in its horrifying and cosmic metaphors the chaos that crawls underground into the human unconscious and more generally into the folds of History and Nature; the chaos that awaits hidden behind the appearance of order and respectability, and which presses to emerge, dominate the world and spread degradation everywhere. He was able to represent very well the weakness of mankind and his social organizations that do not resist the call of irrationality and degradation and are inevitably destined to historical cycles of ascent and decadence: sooner or later chaos comes out and triumphs over reason. This is a metaphor that works both on an individual and social level, and which is grafted onto a scientific vision of reality; basically we could say that Lovecraft is the cantor of Entropy. His works were written at the turn of the First World War, and in their pages we can find the anxieties of the ’20s -‘ 30s that seems to anticipate the horrors of the Second World War and Nazism. From a thematic point of view, therefore, Lovecraft seems to have much more to say than Edgar Allan Poe, who on the contrary undoubtedly has a superior literary style; let’s not forget, however, that Poe writes horror stories well before Lovecraft and even invents the detective novel and the prototype of the investigator a la Poirot, Auguste Dupin.

Let’s go back to the game. Although not transposing a specific novel by Lovecraft, CoC is able to perfectly express all the just mentioned tensions because it is inspired by the stories of the homonymous pen & paper role-playing game.

As anticipated, the experience is more narrative than challenging. We are in the shoes of Edward Pierce and our main occupations are conversations and investigations. Dialogues have multiple choices and are characterized by impeccable writing. The choices we take have a small impact on the ending; there are 4 alternative endings, of which the most beautiful is the one that leads to the personification of chaos… To see all the endings you have to repeat at least once the whole experience from beginning to end and take diametrically opposed choices! In essence you have to choose whether to play the part of the skeptical detective who seeks rational explanations and fights the darkness, or whether you completely abandon yourself to instincts and the call of evil… Typical lovecraftian conflict! I’m not a fan of multiple endings or alternative scenes; in my opinion, what matters is the emotional load related to the choices we can take, not necessarily how they affect the story; that’s the lesson of narrative masterpieces such as Life Is Strange S1 or The Walking Dead S1. From this point of view CoC does not shine; what emerges most is the gothic, foggy, dreamlike, visionary, seductive, poetic, elegiac mood, just like in a novel by Poe. Story is interesting and enigmatic at the right point, but does not have a great emotional afflatus; in fact this is a feature of all Lovecraft’s tales, they manage to somehow stimulate our mind, but not to move us from an emotional point of view.

Investigative mechanic is the classic one to which games like Batman by Rocksteady or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter by The Astronauts have accustomed us: you have to search and collect all the clues scattered in the scene by illuminating the dark corners with the suggestive and trembling flame of an oil lamp, and then to reconstruct the clarifying sequence, which will take virtual consistency before your eyes. I appreciated the fact that the virtual reconstruction of the scene almost never interrupts the control of the avatar; in this way investigation becomes an effective narrative trick well inserted into the gameplay. Although you are collecting a lot of documents and books, their content is reduced to minimum and their reading is not essential, it is sufficient to listen to or read the synthesis by Edward himself. This is an important detail that gives greater rhythm to the investigation; reading too long texts is not suitable for Video Games, it is better to use video or audio memories.

To make the two basic mechanics, dialogues and investigations, more stimulating, developers have implemented RPG mechanics for enhancing deductive, intuitive, persuasive, psychological, physical abilities, and for better understanding of occult and medical practices. The classic points or tokens based mechanics borrowed from RPGs. Improvement of such skills will not affect our gaming experience, apart from some trifles that may interest those who want to complete the game 100%. The low weight given to such classic RPG mechanics did not bother me at all; I believe that in narrative games the development of character’s abilities should depend on the choices he takes and not the contrary. Let me explain: classic RPG mechanics aim to build a character whose skills can influence dialogues, investigations, gameplay, just by distributing points or tokens. Instead it would be better that the way the player conducts dialogues and investigations automatically determine the acquisition of specific skills! In short, it’s better to build the characteristics of the protagonist depending on the actions and choices of the player! The game that cleverly interprets the gameplay! Abilities depending on gameplay and not the contrary! Much better than just artificially earning and distributing tokens or points to upgrade the capabilities of your avatar.

A game inspired by Lovecraft could not miss dream sequences, even totally playable; their main purpose is to create some challenges based on environmental puzzles, but to tell the truth they are a bit disconnected from narration; however they remain in line with atmosphere and topics of the experience. Much more successful and more amalgamated with the narration is the key scene where you have to face the dreadful “pictorial” nightmare called The Shambler; the challenge is entrusted to stealth mechanics and keeps you quite busy and breathless.

I appreciated the diversity of locations, not only the dark gothic mansion on the hill, but also the psychiatric hospital and others that I do not cite for not ruining your experience. About psychiatric hospital, I found very effective and suggestive the sequences where the detective slips into madness and perceives more and more the call of atavic and unmentionable entities; in such sequences the gameplay is not interrupted, you always maintain the control of your avatar and assist in real time at disturbing visions; madness, dream and reality mix together and you start not to distinguish them anymore, just like in the best Lovecraft’s tales.

Another great resource that convinced me to elevate the final rating is the multiplicity of avatars; in fact, in several intriguing sequences, you can even control other key characters, not just Edward. The narrative value of this choice is enormous and avoids the excessive use of passive cut scenes. The narrative depth would have been even higher if developers had inserted a greater number of fully playable flashbacks. They did it only once, at the beginning of the game; it is in fact a premonition, but it is enough to understand the narrative effectiveness of such escamotages, which would make the number of passive cut scenes minimal and would immerse the more the player in story and lore.

The lore has the part of the lion thanks to the seductive and decadent atmosphere, coming with “sick” and alienating aesthetics faded to green. Scenarios, shapes, architectures, settings, colors, frames, etc. they are convincing, bewitching, immersive despite the graphic power is not the best, certainly not in step with the end of this generation of hardware. On the contrary, ambient soundtrack and environmental sounds are extremely effective. I appreciated the effect of the flickering flame of the oil lamp spreading warm colors around. Avatars animation is not up to this generation of console, but it’s passable; on the contrary nothing to complain about the good voice acting.

I want underline again the value of the excellent story, well told thanks to modern interactive storytelling techniques that look at the novelle vague of narrative games released in recent years; I appreciated very much the desire to break away from the classic model of mainstream games too much related to combat mechanics and traditional challenges, just interspersed with long passive cut scenes with main narrative purpose . Fortunately, you will meet only one jump scare and very few bloody scenes, while you will often enjoy psychedelic and dream-like visions.

I cannot avoid the comparison with the previous gaming incarnation of the Cycle of Cthulhu, Dark Corners Of The Earth. DCOTE, still playable on modern Microsoft systems, has a certain appeal because in the first part is largely inspired by the novel “The Shadow over Insmouth“. But after the good start, it falls in the usual FPS where you have to shoot monsters and solve some puzzles with serious loss of the lovecraftian lore; narration is exclusively entrusted to cutscenes, there are no investigative reconstructions and multiple choice dialogues; don’t forget it was developed 13 years ago! CoC is a decidedly better and more mature Lovecraftian experience, aimed at a more adult audience, the same of the homonymous pen & paper role-playing game. DCOTE had the merit of introducing for the first time the sense of panic and anguish that distorts our vision when the protagonist witnesses scary or revolting scenes. In CoC the effect is there, but with less effectiveness. On an aesthetic level, I do not necessarily speak of graphics but of artistic and expressive style, there is no comparison, CoC is definitely superior. Let’s note the concurrence of similar narrative features: the private eye, the psychiatric hospital, the caves etc. It’s no accident, they’re both games licensed by Chaosium Inc.

In conclusion, whatever certain critics think about, CoC succeeds in satisfying the appetites of Lovecraft fans starving for 13 years, with the exception of the Conarium appetizer! Because of the adherence to serious literature and pen & paper role-playing game, because of its attention to narration more than cahellenges, it has low appeal for a generic audience eager to shoot at monsters, it’s better suited for a more critical audience. At the same time it is not the absolute masterpiece that we would have desired, certainly not the definitive and unsurpassable lovecraftian game. We hope the next game to implement even more advanced interactive storytelling techniques and to have graphics and animations in step with its own generation of hardware. The American writer has created an imagery so rich and attractive, with a powerful universal metaphor, so that I do not think it will never cease to inspire new stories and games; and I am sure that they will always fascinate us, enveloping us in dreamy decadence, leading us at the brink of chaos, and above all making us think about what hides and bubbles under the surface of Humanity and Nature.

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

UPDATE 21/10/2019: I decided to increase the rating. I played CoC from start to end for the third time, and again I found myself delightfully immersed in the unhealthy lovecraftian atmposphere, especially in the suggestive and visionary ending, a sort of initiatory journey toward chaos and madness. Delicious. Not perfect, but one of the best lovecraftian game so far.

Rating: 85/100

LF