Call of Cthulhu Review

Let this call go to voicemail

Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One

Developer: Cyanide Studio

Release Date: October 30, 2018

Reviewed by: Matt Gregoire (@Matty_Gregoire)

H.P. Lovecraft’s works have seen something of a renaissance lately, most prominently in games like Darkest Dungeon and Bloodborne, which explore the themes and imagery of the author without directly referencing his work. Developer Cyanide Studio’s latest, Call of Cthulhu, is an adaptation once-removed, taking inspiration mainly from the pen-and-paper RPG which draws from all over the Lovecraft mythos. It’s a game that clearly has a great love for its source material, and for a while it appears to stick the landing, but its stumbles begin around the halfway mark and rarely let up after that.

Call of Cthulhu follows the story of struggling private investigator and drug addict Edward Pierce. On the verge of losing his license, Pierce is approached by a man looking for answers after a mysterious fire killed his daughter, Sarah Hawkins, and her family. Hawkins, a painter gifted with otherworldly visions, her husband Charles, and their son all are said to have perished in their manor on the fictional island of Darkwater, somewhere off the coast of Massachusetts. Intrigued and desperate, Piece accepts the investigation. The initial premise is compelling enough on its own, but it is also supplemented by some genuinely striking environmental design that strongly evokes the tone of Lovecraft. The opening hours in Darkwater and the Hawkins family manor are absolutely engrossing. The town feels worn down, lived-in, with evidence of its history and the current climate of the world at large smartly littered about. In exploring it and talking to its citizens, you get a sense of this town and how it got to this place in time. The manor is similarly well-developed, carefully skirting the line between cornily cliched haunted mansion and tense, dangerous labyrinth as you learn about the Hawkins family. It’s a slow start, but the pace allows the environments and player to breathe while also building the mystery behind the Hawkins case.

The atmosphere in the early parts of the game is superb (Courtesy of Focus Home Interactive/Cyanide Studio)

This slow-burn trip through the game’s opening hours allow you to come to grips with the game’s ambitious RPG skill system. Points earned through various actions can be attributed to seven different skills including eloquence, strength, and investigation (though two skills, medicine and occult knowledge, can only be upgraded through finding relevant books after the initial point investment). The system allows for a number of unique builds with different focuses, and the opening areas do fine job of exhibiting this through branching pathways and alternate solutions.

I played the opening hour twice, the ultimate goal of which is to sneak into a warehouse owned by the Hawkins. The first time, I used my strength to open a hidden hatch to a tunnel connected to the warehouse, a fairly straightforward solution. My second time utilized the eloquence skill, allowing me to talk two bootleggers guarding the warehouse into leaving their posts. After sneaking by, I was caught by their leader, Cat, who beat me in a fight (due to my reduced strength skill). After coming to, I approached Cat in the local bar and confronted her, winning her over with my perseverance through the game’s Mass Effect-esque dialogue wheel and convincing her to let me into the warehouse. These differing options make each skill feel useful in some way, and provide different narrative experiences. In my first playthrough, I encountered a hallucinogenic green gas of mysterious origin, while in my second I got to spend more time with and learn about Cat, a character who had previously snubbed me entirely. One thing I appreciated in the first three hours of the game was its lack of fail states and other genre missteps. The game uses its atmosphere and serious-but-campy writing to entirely engross the player.

More standard horror fare dilutes and disrupts what began as promising and unique (Courtesy of Focus Home Interactive/Cyanide Studio)

Sadly, the game’s strong tone, intriguing story, and promising skill system don’t fare well outside of the opening hours. Around the three hour mark, stealth sections are introduced into the equation featuring poorly-scripted AI which becomes frustrating and tedious to avoid. From this point on, stealth sections are introduced more frequently, both throwing the game’s finely tuned pace off course as well as drawing attention away from its strongest aspects. These sections are slow, much like the beginning of the game, but the rate at which story is doled out also slows to a crawl during them, causing the plot to become less slow-and-steady and more a stop-start-stop-start affair. It’s also around this time that that plot becomes a jumbled, jumping from location to location at an alarming rate. Shifts of character motivations and characterizations on a dime with little explanation, and just generally being confusing, feel like a hamfisted attempt to provide story details which instead end up being massive information dumps for the player.

The insistence on genre-pervading gameplay like stealth and combat sucks any tension out of the proceedings, conflicts with the tight, tense design of the early game, and leads to an incredibly uneven second half

Many Lovecraft-style works utilize some sense of disorientation, confusion, or lack of clarity, but many times it is intentional and designed. Here, it feels unintentional and patchwork, and the introduction of horror gameplay tropes feels forced, detracting from the tension and controlled tone of the early chapters. Call of Cthulhu feels like a hybrid of two games made by two different developers with two competing design philosophies. Nowhere is this more clear than the only moment the player is handed a gun, late in the game. The level has the clear indicators of a stealth section, but the abundance of enemies makes them impossible to avoid. This isn’t an issue, however, as the gun automatically locks on to targets for an instant one-shot-kill, only a trigger pull required. There isn’t even the tension of ammo scarcity, as I only ran out by the end of the area with a couple enemies left standing. The insistence on genre-pervading gameplay like stealth and combat sucks any tension out of the proceedings, conflicts with the tight, tense design of the early game, and leads to an incredibly uneven second half.

Things get a bit messy when it comes to more sensitive themes (Courtesy of Focus Home Interactive/Cyanide Studio)

It’s time to address the Cthulhu sized elephant in the room; Lovecraft was a huge racist, homophobe, and xenophobe who wrote stories that simplified mental health to an offensive degree. This is territory that most adaptations of his work have to be mindful of and navigate in their own way. In the realms of race and sexuality, Call of Cthulhu does this by mostly avoiding the subjects entirely. One queer couple is mentioned in a case file early in the story, a thread that goes nowhere, and people of color are entirely absent from the game. In a way, the game succeeds by being just mindful enough to avoid inadvertently adopting any of the original authors’ views, but it misses a huge opportunity to flip the subject around and provide a critique of the source material.

Where the game really stumbles, however, is in the way it deals with mental health. From the offset, there is a tab in the pause menu titled “traumas.” Edward, as a World War I veteran, has many traumas in his past, so at first it appears that this screen may be part of an exploration of his mental state. An early scene even has a surprisingly well-handled depiction of a panic attack, as Edward is dropped in a space that could remind him of a battlefield and begins hyperventilating, his field of view constricting, stating his need to leave the situation immediately.

As the game wears on though, the trauma menu becomes filled with jump scares (alongside a sanity meter steadily decreasing) and it becomes clear that the game has no interest in examining mental health with any nuance. It’s a game mechanic, one where you literally unlock traumas for your character as if they are collectibles, many of which are unavoidable. This lack of tact when it comes to the subject is driven home in an early level taking place in a cliched sanitarium setting. The conditions in the facility are bleak to say the least, and at one point the player finds an electric chair connected to a vat of a strange substance. The game has the opportunity to address the horror of the conditions that many mentally ill people in the twentieth century, and even now, face. It later pays lip-service to the idea, but only barely. Instead, this horrific device is turned into a puzzle which is solved while wandering past dozens of muttering patients repeating numbers to themselves, whispering vague phrases, or simply screaming. The conditions suck, yeah, but it’s the patients we’re expected to be scared of. “Look at all these crazy people. SPOOKY!”

Call of Cthulhu is a game with huge ambition that partly delivers. In the beginning, its carefully constructed environments, controlled and deliberate tone, and focused gameplay promise an excellent Lovecraft experience. As the latter half of the game’s eight hour runtime rolls around and as more disparate gameplay elements are introduced, though, it begins to fall apart, losing focus on all levels. It feels like there is an excellent five to six hour experience buried within Call of Cthulhu, but poorly executed genre obligations are piled on top. Cyanide Studio clearly understands and has a love for the mythos of Lovecraft, but that can’t save Call of Cthulhu from weak gameplay, genre tropes, and hamfisted story dumps.

Call of Cthulhu was played on PC using a review code provided by Focus Home Interactive