Reviews
[Review] ‘Call of Cthulhu’ is an Immersive RPG, But Struggles to Remain Consistently Enjoyable
See if we can play with madness in our Call of Cthulhu Review.
On paper, Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhu has the potential to be a deeply enriching dive into classic Lovecraft mythos thanks to a heavy influence from the 1981 tabletop pen and paper role-playing game of the same name. and you know what? Those pen and paper roots are where Call of Cthulhu tends to be strongest, but that’s also a part of the reason the game’s weaknesses are so prominent.
You play as private detective Edward Pierce, stuck in a rut via existential crisis when an intriguing case lands in his lap. Pierce must travel to Darkwater Island to investigate the death of the Hawkins family, who all tragically died in a fire at their home. Pierce hasn’t got much to go on, but a disturbing painting by the family’s mother could provide an otherworldy clue. Before you know it, there’s cultists, unspeakable creatures, and a sense of impending doom around every green-hued corner.
Call of Cthulhu is presented in first-person and gives you a procession of large open areas to explore and investigate during each chapter. Pierce can interact with the people of Darkwater, asking them questions to gain fresh insight and information on the case. Here is where Call of Cthulhu shines. The game doesn’t point out its clues to you in an obvious way, rather, it asks you to pay attention to what you see and what you’re told and go back over the notes in Pierce’s journal. As you complete smaller objectives you gain points to upgrade your skills in deduction, conversation, and knowledge of the occult among others. These effectively improve your chances of succeeding in certain sections of the game, be it gleaning extra info from an artifact or sweet-talking a disgruntled fisherman into starting a ruckus.
While this method oversimplifies interaction in some ways, it makes for a great spin on the visual novel genre where you have a bit more control. Not so much a ‘walking simulator’, but rather a digital equivalent of a pen and paper RPG. This means you can fail an opportunity to progress one way, and still have a variety of other routes available depending on how skilled you are at a certain thing. The system is the most in-depth part of Call of Cthulhu and it’s a very good reason to persevere when certain other aspects of the game fall spectacularly short.
You see, while Call of Cthulhu talks a good game, whenever it tries to be a more ‘traditional’ video game it struggles. Stealth is introduced a few chapters in and is of the insta-fail variety. The first time it appears it’s fairly easy to navigate, though the game doesn’t explain itself very well in regards to how it works. It’s when it shows up the next time that it’s a frustrating mess. You’re hunted by a foe, unable to defend yourself without obtaining a certain weapon. Problem is, the stealth is implemented in such a patchy, ineffectual way that it makes traversing the environment a harrowing affair as you’ll be killed the second you’re touched by the enemy and its view of you is a tad vague.
Combat is another sore point. It’s very, very rare, confined mostly to situational button prompts that you can barely class as combat to begin with, but it does appear in an ever-so-slightly more fleshed out form later in the game, and it is wholly unpleasant and ill-fitting with the game. It’s telling that the source material has an aversion to combat in the first place, but quite why that extends to shonky stealth is a bit of a mystery, especially when Cyanide is no stranger to it.
These are somewhat brief ripples in the water thankfully. The structure outside of it is so well handled you can almost forgive these indiscretions. Take the way the game handles sanity. It’s woven into every kind of action you take, and your understanding, or lack thereof, can determine just how Pierce’s psyche holds up over the ten or so hours he spends on the damned island. That then flows through into the game’s branching choices and eventual multiple endings too, and the results are satisfying even with the more risible things you have to endure to get there.
These deep systems are nothing though if Call of Cthulhu can’t capture the tone and atmosphere of Lovecraft’s work, and for the most part, it does that exceedingly well, but this is a game with a fair few rough edges to navigate in the technical department. Visually-speaking, Cthulhu is a suitably uneven beast. On the one hand, it’s strong in its world design. The somber, grim greens of the game’s visual atmosphere wash over everything, giving an ethereal look to this once-proud fishing town. The biggest compliment you can pay Call of Cthulhu is that it often manages to feel positively Lovecraftian. Not all the time (there are some sections that are a tad humdrum and could be from any first-person horror), but a significant portion of it.
Detail isn’t always Call of Cthulhu’s friend sadly. The character models are largely stunningly similar, and for a game that does not exactly have the biggest cast of characters around, it’s rather unfortunate how cheap that makes Call of Cthulhu look. The animation commits a comparable crime. Lip-sync is well out, and character models move rigidly and mechanically. It surprisingly doesn’t take as much out of the immersion as you’d expect, but the wrong combination of issues (which is an all-too-common occurrence) really can derail the mood.
Throw in an endgame that funnels you towards the conclusion in a far more basic manner than the opening sections and the overall feeling I came away with was one of frustration. There is a lot of promise here, but not quite enough of it fulfilled. The combat could have been done away with completely (rare as it is anyway) and the stealth either ditched or simplified. The strong suit of Call of Cthulhu is in its conversation/investigation mechanics. Sure the game would have been a little lacking in variety if that’s all there was but honestly, it would have been a much more consistently enjoyable and immersive adventure for it.
Call of Cthulhu review code provided by the publisher.
Call of Cthulhu is available now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
Looking for New Episodes of “Chucky” on Peacock? Here’s What Changed
‘Mountain Man’ – Joe Manganiello Will Battle Zombies in Upcoming Horror Movie
‘The Blair Witch Project’ – Original Stars Release a Statement Asking Lionsgate for Residuals & Recognition
‘Trap’ – Official Trailer Previews a Wild New Horror Experience from M. Night Shyamalan
‘Longlegs’ – New Teaser Video for NEON Horror Movie Is Soaked in Cryptic Eeriness
You must be logged in to post a comment.