Call of Cthulhu Review

The right call?

It’s not really a spoiler to say that I love role playing games, both in pen-and-paper and video game form. So I’ve been fascinated to see how Cyanide Studio’s take on the Chaosium RPG will turn out.

Will “Call Of Cthulhu” be a well-used license, or just an excuse to turn out a few horror tropes in a game with few RPG mechanics?

Story:

Cyanide Studio certainly doesn’t try to shy away from the classic setting, with the game starting you off as a grizzled, alcoholic private investigator in 1920’s New England. soon, you’ll find yourself investigating the deaths of a young artist, and end up in a prohibition-free fishing port in an island off the coast. Unsurprisingly, the citizens of Darkwater are about as creepy and welcoming as you’d expect. CoC is never really what you’d call “scary”, but it does have an excellent atmosphere and uses the well-worn setting about as well as you could realistically expect to create a wonderfully pulpy tale.

Lovecraft has (rightly) been criticised in recent times for being a racist and misogynist (amongst other things), but the game steers clear and concentrates on the horror and sanity aspects of his writings. Oddly for a modern RPG, the game has chapters, and this allows for a much tighter narrative than open world games, which is actually very refreshing.

Gameplay:

CoC is a part-RPG, part-adventure and part-investigation based game. Despite being licensed from Chaosium, this isn’t a direct use of the pen-and-paper based ruleset. You’ll have to test a variety of skills (but you won’t see the dice rolls), and you have a character sheet, but this is a streamlined version of the rules. The most disappointing part of this is the sanity system. What could have been an Eternal Darkness style of system where you start to doubt your own choices and environment is completely wasted. The end game basically uses sanity as a kind of “I-Spy” style system, where you tick off a variety of grisly or supernatural sights as you go along the various chapters.

The rest of the character sheet is a little bit more interesting. Levelling up Edward Pierce, your character, will unlock new abilities than can affect how you can go about solving each chapter, which certainly offers up a decent degree of replayability. For example, in the second chapter, you need to enter a warehouse. Just some of the options available to you include enlisting the help of some local fishermen (by finding them booze), sneaking past the guards, charming them, and finding some machinery to create a new way past them. The one disappointing aspect is the game fails to really tally up your choices to create anything meaningful from them. The game has four different endings, but three of them are based on your final choice and can be accessed from re-loading the last checkpoint.

Similar to the Witcher or AC Origins, Pierce will also be called upon to use his detective skills to piece together investigations. These situations are normally fairly simple, and just require you to have a good enough eye to find all the clues in a fairly compact location, but certainly help to break up the gameplay. There are also some forced stealth sequences, which feel pretty awkward, but the poor AI mean they are never overly frustrating to get through. CoC has numerous chapters, but don’t let that fool you – this is a short game with no multiplayer. Each chapter can be done in around 30 minutes (if you know what you’re doing), and you should be able to breeze through the game in somewhere between 7-12 hours.

Presentation:

Considering the chapter- based approach, Call of Cthulhu is unlikely to win many visual awards – it’s kind of on a par with an open-world RPG but with much smaller levels. Animation is particularly jerky by modern standards, and textures lack detail, especially at 4K resolutions. Having said that, the art style and direction is strong, and the team has done pretty well with the resources available to them. You really get the Lovecraftian vibe, with plenty of creepy locations and well-designed vistas.

The same can be said for the audio, which is solid but unspectacular. Sometimes the surround can be a little bit odd, with the audio levels somewhat all over the place, but the script is good, the voice acting decent, and there’s appropriately creepy music to play over the background.

Conclusion:

“Call of Cthulhu” uses the license sensibly, does a lot on a limited budget, and has some decent replayability. It’s not exactly going to rival Red Dead in terms of scope, quality and quantity, but what you get is a surprisingly solid, atmospheric RPG with a focus on story and investigation. For pen-and-paper fans, it’s well worth picking up. However, even more casual fans of games like Skyrim and Fallout may find the game too slow-paced and lacking sufficient combat for their tastes. Depending on your thoughts, you may also find the tight, chapter-based gameplay either contributes to the narrative, or feels extraordinarily old-school given how almost every other game is open world nowadays.

CoC doesn’t try and break what is possible with a smaller budget, and is all the better for it, succeeding gleefully with what it tries to accomplish.