#159: Call of Cthulhu (2018)
Well, it’s better than Dark Corners…
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 19, 2019.
Initial release: October 29, 2018
Platform: PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, XBox One
Developer: Cyanide
It’s here! After 37 years, we finally have “the official video game” of the smash hit tabletop RPG, Call of Cthulhu! (Not counting, of course, the 2012 strategy game, the 2005 stealth FPS, or the 90s adventure games.) And it’s not very good, hooray!
Maybe I’m being a little unfair. Unlike The Sinking City, for example, this game doesn’t make promises the devs can’t keep. It’s not a janky, unfinished mess like Dark Corners of the Earth. It’s not even really racist! It’s just… boring.
It’s 1924 or whatever and you play Edward Pierce, a veteran and survivor of the “lost batallion” of WW1. Now a drunkard and private detective, he gets a strange case — look into the deaths of Sarah Hawkins, a painter with a rather… striking style, and her family. So he ships off to a crappy little island fishing town called Darkwater (ugh.) The town’s seen better days; its main source of business disappeared in the 1840s, and it’s struggled ever since. And it doesn’t take long for pierce to realize that all is not as it seems.
Most reviews of the game basically state the same thing: the first few hours are pretty fun, but eventually it just kind of… peters out. I’d say that this is a bit of an exaggeration. The first few hours are dull as dishwater, but the game remains consistently so throughout. At heart, the game is a walking simulator with some fairly dull crime scene sequences that mostly consist of “find the clickable spot” in true mediocre point and click adventure game fashion. Occasionally you play as someone else. Less occasionally you get a gun, then lose it.
There’s people to talk to, but the dialogue wheel is absolutely infuriating. None of Pierce’s responses match what’s actually written on the wheel, and sometimes what Pierce says is subtly different in meaning from the dialogue option. The voice acting is middling to bad, especially the nameless NPCs. While the named NPCs are mostly okay, the main character is voiced by Anthony Howell, who just rehashes his performance from Vampyr and as such is far too posh and British for a broken down Boston PI.
You also have a skill system that you can spend character points on to upgrade. They mostly unlock dialogue options or give you more things to find during pixel hunts. Other than that… I’m not sure why it’s here. None of it really seems to matter. Your choices don’t matter.
To be honest with you i can’t really recommend this game to anyone. It doesn’t seem to know what kind of game it wants to be so it’s basically a walking simulator that occasionally pretends to be other things and is bad at all of them. But I think the real problem tends to boil down to the fact that the “1920s occult detective vs the Great Old Ones” theme is not only shopworn, but there’s only so much you can do with it in the first place. There’s a rich tapestry of options for cosmic horror; why do it this way? Perhaps it’s because of a devotion to the era that Lovecraft built his career in, an attempt to evoke the world that he lived in. But here’s the problem with that: it sucks. The world of the 1920s was a pretty garbage place to be, especially if you weren’t a white American. More to the point, it’s boring. First these games are rarely aesthetically interesting; second, it shows a real lack of creativity. What, you can’t fight Cthulhu during the Vietnam war era? Imagine hippie cultists in a barn somewhere near Woodstock. Or literally anything else. Your options are endless.
If we have to stick with the 1920s for this era, I think I would like it more if these kind of games borrowed more from film noir (or, more appropriately, German expressionism.) But that’s never going to happen in the AAA industry because AAA developers are creatively bankrupt.
Final thoughts: I wish Chaosium would just give up on this horseshit. Quite frankly I wish everyone would give up on this horseshit. There’s still some material one can mine from Lovecraft’s work, but for the love of Palutena put some creativity into it. Delta Green game when?
