Blood, guts and dark, wet tunnels, filled with shadowy figures. The nightmares of the Private Investigator Edward Pierce are filled with horrific visions, driving him slowly towards insanity and quicker towards the bottle. He's tired and depressed and sleeps only with the help of a bottle of sleeping pills, downed with whiskey.
A case arrives through his door when Stephen Webster walks into his office, asking Pierce to look into the death of his daughter and her family. His daughter Sarah was suspected of killing her husband and their son before dying in a fire. Webster wants to clear the memory of his daughter so he needs Pierce to find out what really happened in the remote whaling town of Darkwater. The only thing Pierce has to go on is a single painting by Sarah Hawkins, a painting of immense darkness and horror as well as a seemingly incomplete police report. Armed with this information, Pierce takes off to solve a case that will be much more than he ever bargained for.
Darkwater is a miserable place, a decaying community with only tales of former grandeur to keep the remaining people dreaming for a possible better future that will never come. They talk of fabulous Miraculous Catch that once saved the village, the dream of greatness in the midst of stagnation. A dying village filled with fools and drunkards, who give no heed to the prohibition going on in the mainland. Why would they care? They are, more or less, isolated from the world beyond their harbours.
After investigating the Hawkins warehouse in Darkwater, Pierce joins office Bradley, who takes him to the Hawkins mansion that burnt down at the time the family died. There had been a stench of sinister occultism on the case from the get-go, but now, in the mansion, it all seems even clearer. Or perhaps grimmer is the right word. Piercee pieces together what had happened in the mansion and he sees someone escaping. The chase leads him underground, deeper into the madness that is Darkwater.
Through perverted doctors, students of the occult, hallucinations and secret societies Pierce has to reap his way towards the truth. He himself soon finds out, that he might have a bigger part on the play he didn't even know he was a part of. There is only insanity and horror waiting for him at the end, but despite the knowledge of that, he has to push through as there is no other choice. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn! The dreamer must awake.
Call of Cthulhu belongs to the ever-growing genre of narrative-driven adventure/RPG hybrids. There are puzzle sprinkled here and there, mostly relatively simple ones, but the main attraction are the skills Pierce has which can help him tackle the situations in several different ways. He can, for example, use his detective skills to notice details that can give him an edge during conversations or he just might be a skilled conversationalist that might provide him with more dialogue options. He also has two skills, medical and occult, that can only be increased through reading books scattered on the island. You can, during the initial character creation, assign points however you want, including to the two previously mentioned, but during the game, the skill points can only be assigned to his other skills.
The use of skills is important from the getgo, as you can get to the Hawkins warehouse through several different ways, some of which have a higher impact on Pierce's destiny. Depending on how you play, for example, there are several occasions where you can choose to drink which has an effect on his destiny, which will unlock different endings. There are, I believe, 5 in total, so there is some replay value here.
Graphically CoC looks decent. The location art looks appropriately decayed and run down. None of the places, the village or even Pierce's own office, are in good condition. All is weathered and in various degrees of decay. This isn't a happy world. It's a world that has nothing else but memories going for it and even those are turning sour for most of the people living in it. Or perhaps those memories were sour, to begin with, only seeming good to a town that had nothing else to hang on to.
The character art is okay, but the animation makes them look a bit worse than they are. Of course, the unappealing quality of the populace of Darkwater is highly intentional, but for some characters, the rigging seems to be somewhat broken, or at least the quality there is very uneven.
Voice acting is mostly good. There aren't any standout vocals in the game, but considering that some of the dialogue is somewhat clunky, the cast does the laudable job of keeping it together as well as they do. The music is appropriately fitting as well for a horror game like this is.
Perhaps the worst aspect of the game is a couple of scenes where you have to either run away or hide from a monster called the Dimension Shambler. The way the gameplay works makes these scenes extremely frustrating. There's also a couple of later scenes, in which you have to use stealth to hide from hospital staff. These are, overall, the least inspired bits of the game as the stealth system hasn't been realised very well. This isn't really a surprise, as I've yet to meet an adventure game that uses stealth well. In general, stealth only works if the game is built around it, not when it's used just as another gameplay gimmick. The shambler scenes are mostly trial and error until you manage to push through them and the stealth sections are just boring and lack, really, any genuine feeling of a threat of getting caught.
Towards the end, there even is a bit where you get to play some kind of a 1st person shooter, albeit a very sluggish one at that. After the cult finally takes over the village, you have to shoot a couple of people or just try and play it by stealth. The enemies aren't very nimble, so you might just even opt to leg it. The last option at least seems like a genuine possibility the way the game is constructed.
Call of Cthulhu isn't quite a slamdunk. While it does shine on some areas, especially on the way it at least seemingly gives you a plethora of choices for proceeding, it still suffers from poorly designed or underrealized elements. It also isn't that scary of a game, which is somewhat common in the works derivated from the writings of Lovecraft: the cosmic horror simply is a difficult thing to realize, as it all often revolves around being "unimaginable", which leaves a lot of room for the readers' imagination run wilder than the most artists can pour to paper.
Still, it is a game worth playing. It's by no means a bad game, just a tad uneven as it at times bites more than it can chew. Then again, that sums up most of the games based on the works of that old rascal Lovecraft.
Call of Cthulhu is available for Windows, Switch, PS4 and Xbox One.
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