Call of Cthulhu is a linear interactive narrative game from Focus Home Interactive. This product released October 31st, 2018 for $60 on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Unfortunately, this adaptation of the pen and paper RPG does little to earn its price tag at launch. Let’s dig into what went wrong with Call of Cthulhu.
Interactive narrative games, often called walking simulators by less enthusiastic critics, are an admittedly niche product. This isn’t inherently an issue as many developers have delivered masterfully crafted products that often achieve critical acclaim in their category and sometimes beyond. Unfortunately for Call of Cthulhu, this puts this game into competition with great works like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and What Remains of Edith Finch. Call of Cthulhu simply failed to deliver an experience of the quality required for its price tag due to problems of technical care and content design.
Call of Cthulhu is much more expensive than its competition, it is also significantly more bug ridden. There is a persistent issue with audio playback associated with playback of character dialogue. A loud pop or cracking noise punctuates every bit of spoken word, and the game seems to drop a few frames to signal the beginning of speech. This is extremely damaging to player immersion and should not have been present for retail launch. No excuse for this one, Focus Home Interactive! Fortunately, the game never crashed during my six-hour play-through, and I can’t recall other performance issues running this game on an Xbox One X.
Unfortunately, this game suffers the more from questionable design choices than from sound hiccups. The pen and paper RPG elements featured are of little consequence to gameplay. I was able to achieve all but one of the multiple endings on a single play-through, apparently, I missed a spooky book along the way. The player is awarded points to allocate into an attribute chart, which can be used to increase knowledge of lock-picking or conversational finesse. Unfortunately, aside from unlocking a few achievements, it doesn’t really matter how the player spends the points. This game is linear, so you’ll always have access to a solution to your problem no matter how your character is built. This game would’ve been much better had it ignored half-hearted RPG elements in favor of branching paths and immersion.
The core story and environmental design here plays out like a Lovecraftian Best Hits album. There are a spooky island, spooky buildings, and spooky people to inhabit the buildings. There are creepy cultists, creepy fishermen, and creepy fish presumably for the fishermen. It is all very textbook Lovecraftian, and remarkably dull. Never once did I feel unsettled by anything aside from a previously mentioned audio bug, and perhaps the fact that I spent $60 on this game. There is a close-up encounter with a monster from a painting, but it ends with a tedious trial and error scenario in which the player must work out which of the many ritualistic daggers is meant to seal away the spooky-scary. Playable, just not very fun. I will say that the story kicked off in a way that at least kept me curious, but the interesting mystery components devolve into an incoherent babbling mess. This game works much better as a murder mystery than it does as a horror game, and I wish they’d have stuck to the mysterious bits.
Call of Cthulhu is almost a good experience, and I believe some might really enjoy a single play-through of this game. Unfortunately, the price point is much too high at launch for me to recommend anyone pick this up right now. This will be a buy only after a deep sale discount and performance improving patch.
Verdict: Wait on this one. It is a solid buy around the $20 mark.
Leave a comment: