For instance, heavily investing in one particular skill will allow you to pick a lock and avoid a progression-blocking puzzle entirely or spot hidden clues to aid in your investigation. These neat abilities play their way into conversations, and I’m always a sucker for more dialogue options, but they also determine what and how you interact with certain objects in the environment.
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A lot of your time in Call of Cthulhu is spent exploring, questioning the residents of Darkwater, and piecing together the overarching mystery, using role-playing attributes to spice things up.īeing an investigator, you can allocate skill points into a variety of attributes that allow Pierce to pick locks, spot hidden clues, outsmart the village idiots or straight-up punch them in the face during conversations. They’re a superstitious bunch too, sneering at Pierce and thwarting his progress along the way.ĭarkwater is a brooding mass of rock with plenty of dark secrets and shady characters, and the entirety of the game tasks you with seeking them all out. But then the whales thinned out and modern-day Darkwater still suffers the aftermath, now inhabited by bootleggers and drunk fishermen eager for work. We’re talking a whale so big that it fed the entirety of Darkwater multiple times over. So you arrive in Darkwater, the totally not ominously-named shithole that used to be a thriving whaling town until the legendary “Miraculous Catch” of 1847 saved the citizens from starvation. Insert another “cool, cool, cool” meme here for good measure. Hawkins suffered from severe mental stress and the sole painting she left behind was particularly disturbing. Why would he come all the way out to Boston, though? It turns out that Mrs. That name isn’t ominous or anything - insert Brooklyn Nine-Nine cool, cool, cool, cool, cool meme here. As luck would have it, should a concept exist, an elderly gentleman shows up at your door with a “simple” request: investigate the mysterious death of the Hawkins family, especially its young mother-slash-artist, out on the island of Darkwater. The recurring nightmares certainly don’t help and neither does the sleeping pills you chomp down on a nightly basis.
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You’re on the verge of losing your license, yet purposely avoid hunting down new cases. It’s supposed to get in your head, not in your face.Ĭall of Cthulhu Colon The Official Video Game tells the tale of a down on his luck private investigator named Edward Pierce, set in 1924 Boston. This isn’t a great horror game, but it is a damn good (here we go again) Lovecraftian adventure that favors atmosphere, consequences, and narrative instead of being swarmed by a constant barrage of monsters. It’s as much an adventure game as it is horror, and while some genre faithful may find the slow-burn narrative and pacing, the branching conversations, and skill trees often found in RPGs to be a turnoff, I beg to differ. This is very much a first-person horror game steeped in otherworldly mysticism and monstrosities, but also heavily leans into the “role-playing” aspect when it comes time to solve puzzles and converse with the locals. With the subtitle “The Official Video Game” slapped onto the box, it’s important to remember where the inspiration came from. Rather than basing their work solely on the writing of Lovecraft, however, the developers at Cyanide were mostly inspired by the 1981 pen and paper RPG of the same name when they took over development duties after Frogwares (known for their Sherlock Holmes games) left the project. Lovecraft’s name is synonymous with horror (and racism and xenophobia) and plenty of writers are inspired by his earlier works, but rarely is the term Lovecraftian used as anything meaningful - it’s like calling a game a Soulslike or a Doom clone, which have become throwaway, generic blanket terms in their respective genres. When it comes to describing horror games, the term “Lovecraftian” gets thrown around whenever it’s time to talk about gross monsters, loss of sanity, and a general fear of the unknown.