#108: Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land
Mobile roots mar an otherwise interesting tactical terror RPG
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 9, 2019.
Initial release: January 30, 2012
Platform: Mobile, PC
Developer: Red Wasp Design, ltd.
The mobile game industry is a weird, wild west. Aside from the mountain of shovelware, there’s major franchise side games, ports of older console games, and weird one-off stuff like The Wasted Land, Red Wasp Design’s World War 1-flavored horror tactical RPG operating under the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG license.
The story is pretty simple: A mad scientist is using the Great War as cover and a source of material (read: corpses) for a blasphemous summoning ritual, and it’s your job to stop him. What this shakes out to however is 11 levels of a mediocre turn-based strategy that moves slowly, has a fairly anemic presentation, and, in the case of the PC version, has somewhat unresponsive controls and other bugs (the most annoying is the screen going black after exiting item swap.)
It’s quite obvious that this is a port of a mobile game, as the keyboard is barely used at all — the entire game can be used with a mouse. But sometimes your clicks don’t register; sometimes the game will think you clicked something when you didn’t. In games like this where every decision matters, this can be bad news.
RPG elements make what’s otherwise a fairly ordinary TBS into something a little more strategic, as you slowly build up the characters (most of whom are eventually expendable and can be replaced, even the important characters!) and improve their stats and loadout. Aside from the obvious elements of action points and health, there’s also sanity points. Let this number drop to 0 and the character freaks out in a variety of ways, sometimes getting an enormous boost in action points. If you don’t calm them down within one full turn, they die.
Keeping health and sanity up is done by medkits and psychology books, though curiously characters cannot heal themselves. Ultimately what this means is you’ll likely want to have two books, so your shrinks can soothe each other’s tormented psyches.
The game strives for thematic accuracy — all the weapons are period appropriate, though artillery is amusingly instant for being called in via carrier pigeon (which has a cooldown and can’t be used indoors.) The only real anachronism is the existence of poison gas in 1915.
Sound is generally pretty sparse. Guns all make the appropriate noises, humans scream when they die, gross mini-Cthulhus mumble chants or whatever as they shamble about. But there’s no music during battles, only ambient noise that cuts off when you use the swap screen.
While the game has its bugs, the swap screen seems to have the majority of issues associated with it. There’s also the fact that the game doesn’t seem to understand how resolutions work — anything over 1920x1080 will be too large on a 2560x1440 screen.
I do want to point out that the idea of setting a Lovecraftian horror game in World War 1 is a fairly novel one; Lovecraftian-style cosmic horror more typically tends to be either in far future settings, or the Roaring Twenties in keeping with Lovecraft’s era. Off the top of my head, the most well-known game with such a setting is Eternal Darkness, which dedicated a chapter to an incident during the Great War. But there’s ample evidence that horror as a genre was changed indelibly in the aftermath of the war. Even Lovecraft, who had been writing since his youth, saw his work take on a noticeably darker tone. But hey, don’t take my word for it — lots of people have analyzed how war, Great or otherwise, changed horror and the broader pop cultural mileau. We’re now a little over a century after the end of the war, but everything that’s happened in the last hundred-and-some years can be traced back to an angry teenager shooting a royal heir on vacation. The Great War was, for all intents and purposes, the end of the old order, knocking no less than three empires off the map and putting serious cracks in the rest. With all the sheer pointless violence and carnage that was waged in Europe, is it really any wonder that horror fiction suddenly seemed to “grow up” a little, ditch the tired gothic trappings, and really start thinking about the vast hopelessness that is existence?
But I digress. While the game is still listed on Steam, there is no longer any option to purchase it; as near as I can tell, the license expired and Red Wasp folded. it’s kind of a shame, because while there IS the ghost of a good game here, it’s hampered by everything else.
The only real surprise to this game is that a mobile game actually offers ten hours of play, or more if you do the DLC (which I did part of then decided I didn’t care enough.) But that’s a ten hours you really have to want to be rid of.
