Just got Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

[Alinestra Covelia]

This game is excellent too. It's an FPS, but more story driven than most. (I'd say a little less so than Deus Ex, but similar to Undying, where conversations give little choice but contribute greatly to the plot.) It's about as stealth based as Thief, especially given that for much of the game you have no weapons.

Various steps have been taken to reinforce a feeling of horror and helplessness. You have no health bar - instead you have to try to puzzle out your injuries and tend to them from a medical box. (This also takes time, so quick fixes in midcombat are impossible.) Several places intersperse puzzle solving with stealth, all amid a graphical presentation that's pretty stunning. Maybe not on the level of Bioshock, but definitely faithful enough to the 1920s to bring Lovecraft's horror stories to life.

The sanity visual effects should be familiar to anybody who's played Eternal Darkness on the GameCube, and the setting is similar to the historical genre of Blood.

[Sarxis]

Sounds like a good choice for a new thriller/adventure shooter

I'll have to check into it.

[Alinestra Covelia]

One problem I'm finding in the game (and I'm about three hours into it, with no weapons, which is pretty cool as I have to rely on stealth) is that at times it relies heavily on platform jumping. This would be a bit tedious in any FPS, but here it's worse still because of the vertigo vision-blurring effect if you look down from a height.

[Proteus_MST]

Sounds interesting,
how faithful is it to the Cthulhu Mythos itself?
(as I have read almost all stories from H.P. Lovecraft [and love the Cthulhu Mythos] this would be an important thing to make the game interesting for me)

[LordShiva]

[Alinestra Covelia]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
Sounds interesting,
how faithful is it to the Cthulhu Mythos itself?
(as I have read almost all stories from H.P. Lovecraft [and love the Cthulhu Mythos] this would be an important thing to make the game interesting for me)

I have read some of the collected short stories but not all the longer ones. It's quite faithful to what I've read. From what I can tell, it's an adaptation of Shadow of Innsmouth, which I don't remember reading myself.

The feel is very different from other FPSes I've played.

1. Healing is very lengthy. You have to guess how badly injured you are, based on your heartbeat and your breathing and other effects (shaking hands for arm injuries, blurred vision and color drain for head injuries, slowed movement for leg injuries etc.) and then use various healing supplies to check the injuries. This takes time and judicious use of supplies. Sometimes if you're running low on sutures to use for serious bleeding, it's worth waiting a while for the bleeding to slow, so you can use the more-plentiful bandages on the low bleeding instead.

2. There is absolutely no HUD whatsoever. Everything you see is more or less exactly what the character would see. You have to approximate where your weapon is aiming onscreen, and there's a button you can press that moves your weapon into a centralized position to help you aim. This emphasizes the fact that you're a detective, not a soldier, and that firearms and the like are not really familiar items for you to use. If you aim for too long, your arms start to waver more and more.

3. Cutscenes are well woven into the storyline. Part of the story is that your character gets disturbing images and visions, sometimes even seeing things through other people's eyes (hence the cutscenes).

4. Atmosphere is good. The maps are claustrophobic and small, but that's okay because your character moves quite slowly (at realistic speeds instead of deathmatch FPS speeds). The level design can get a bit linear in places, but I'm willing to forgive that because it's a trade off on the excellent storytelling.

5. Your character is very vulnerable. A few bullets will cause heavy bleeding, and if you're not able to get to a quiet spot in time, you won't be able to sit down and heal yourself. You can take a hit of morphine to dull the pain and soldier on... for a while at least, but that's a stopgap remedy at best.

All in all, a surprisingly deep game with plenty of interesting mechanics. It also doesn't suffer from the "sidekick sentimentality" that many games do. If you're a poor player, your sidekicks can and will die violently.

[Nostromo]

Can you lose your mind?

[Alinestra Covelia]

The manual says that if you see bad things, you start to show sanity loss effects. If you see too many of them, or focus on one for too long, your character will start to behave out of your control. (Mouse aiming may be very slow or suddenly very fast, he may sit down suddenly or stand up, he may put away his weapon or start shooting randomly, etc.)

It also says that if it gets too much, your character will kill himself.

I've never seen any of the more extreme effects. Mostly blurred vision and floating aim is the worst I've seen so far. But then again I'm not very far into the game.

[Alinestra Covelia]

I've gotten past the end boss and I'm at the final leg of the game.

Feedback so far:

The game has a lot of really good elements to it. However, the game was hastily ported over to PC from XBox and there are some issues with graphics. One particular bit (on a ship) was incompletable because the graphics didn't show up the necessary stuff.

The game also has quite a few merciless "instant death" situations in it, where you'd basically have to die at least once to know what to expect and then to get past it a second time. I didn't like those but I do respect that they put in some realism for it. Those became especially bad after you get to the deadly traps on the Reef level.

All the weapons are interesting and fairly well balanced. I especially like the Shotgun, which is my favorite weapon generally and which is unbelievably powerful in this game (though with several important drawbacks).

[Jon Miller]

I thought about this for the PC, was it good there?

JM

[Alinestra Covelia]

Yes, it really is excellent. Just be forewarned, depending on your video card, there's a bit in the middle where some lights in the distance don't show up where they have to.

This will make the game incompletable from there on unless you download a save that gets you past that trouble spot.

I did that and it was just a minor problem. Otherwise it's fine.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Oh, forgot to mention. The very end of the game has a race against time element.

However, on some computers the game will run very slowly at that point making the actual race element impossible to win.

There's a tweak pack that you can download to increase your character's running speed to get past that bit.

[Marid Audran]

I played this game a couple years back when I was living with a flatmate and we shared a gaming "rig". We had been fans of this sort of thing (horror/fantasy genres) since our dewy youth, and I in particular during long-ago angst-filled summers read some H.P. Lovecraft stories. Though we'd long since ditched the pulp paperback genre fiction for high-minded "literary" fare, we still loved it in games.

It definitely boasts some of the most lavish and absorbing atmospheric visuals I've ever seen in a game, like a double-dipped slab of Tim Burton film thrown onto a smoky broiler. Innsmouth is definitely a work of art; that baroque town square, that heavy gothic sky! The dilapidated and sinister feel of an economically depressed seaside village gone to seed (in more ways than one) really bowled my senses over. I was also particularly impressed with the voice work, considering VO jobs in video games are notoriously wooden (I remember the Innkeeper in particular having the voice of "Sarevok" from Baldur's Gate). The cutscenes seamlessly segued into gameplay segments and had an appropriate emotional tenor & payoff (I remember being particularly fond of the flashback scenes in Arkan Asylum; they were actually frightening!). I observed with pleasure how the Innsmouth citizenry became progressively more grotesque as the game went on with your investigation of the cultist evil, resembling troglodytes by the second half (Lovecraft's own “racial mixing” paranoia coming to the fore here, no doubt). The angle of survival horror the game designers took with the inexistant HUD and fragility of the protagonist, Jack Walters, were very novel. The welcome puzzles definitely challenged you to think outside of the usual twitchy, simian mode of a FPS, or the non-cerebral, acrobatic puzzles of a Tomb Raider game or the like.

I thought the game showed some scars of a prolonged development cycle, however. Bugs, yes, but more to the point some gameplay elements were taken too far. Saving is limited to certain "checkpoints," a tell-tale sign of console-crossover syndrome. The "horror vertigo" during heights got old real quick. Progress in the game is mercilessly arbitrary and very unforgiving, especially when platforming or stealth is involved; you're not given nearly enough cues as to when you're "safe" or not. One misstep or faulty move usually results in death, and thus the need to reload from the last checkpoint and do it all over again, including triggering in-game NPC encounters or chatter. This amounts to *a lot* of trial and error. Nowhere is this more evident than the initial escape from Innsmouth Inn, a lengthy sequence that requires very specific, timed input from the player to make it out alive. The argument could be made that this is intentional in putting you in you-are-there survival horror mode, with fragile, non-warrior everyman Jack Walters. However when you need to play the same segments over and over until you finally "snag it", you definitely become disenchanted with the game.

Inclusion of weapons doesn't really bring the relief you may think it does. There is some combat, though most of it is the random encounter, respawning kind and feels decidedly non-cathartic and nonessential, and certainly doesn't put an end to the insta-death setups later in the game. This is a pity because combat definitely feels more intense, more real, and more engaging than any shooter out there, especially as Jack is scrambling with his Colt 911 and frantically trying to line up gun sights (just with the HUD, there is no target cursor).

I would have preferred a few rudimentary cRPG elements in the (admittedly excellent) gameplay, like maybe a few points to toss around that would make you jump longer or minimize "horror" fainting spells or the like. Not too many; just enough to make you specialize/customize the type of private dix you're playing. Just the inclusion of a save anywhere, anytime ability could have made the game a lot better, however. It would have cut a lot of tedious replaying.

Even so, my flatmate and I both managed to reach the last stage of the game, though we found the endgame really *too much* by that point, difficulty-wise. One day I returned home and I discovered that, in a fit of rage, he had uninstalled the game and thrown away the disc! I had to laugh, as I empathized. All the same I'm glad I played it and I'm sorry that Headfirst Productions went bankrupt (it seems to happen with so many promising companies; Black Isle, Troika, Looking Glass Studios). Not many games have you hook up and fight side-by-side J. Edgar Hoover and make it work. It was essentially their flagship product and it sunk them. A unique game approach...cleaning up design issues could have paved the way for a truly outstanding sequel. As it stands, I suppose "we'll always have Y'ha-nthlei."

[Alinestra Covelia]

To that entire review.

I also felt the game was rushed from console. Personally, I think the "save only at certain points" mechanic actually worked well in this game, precisely because it's supposed to be a constant survival fear type game. Normally though it's a pain in the neck and it's usually a sign of shoddy conversion work.

The insta-kill moments also irked me. It would be one thing if there was some sign that a careful player can notice. (It would actually be even better if it was something that reset itself between games so no walkthrough can adequately tell you how to do it, e.g. if the maze run actually changed each time, so you'd have to pay really close attention to the raised symbol map.) But I agree there are times when the ground just crumbles out from under you with no rhyme or reason, or a large chunk of masonry falls on you with no way to tell where it came from.

Ideally in those cases you'd have a sleuth-like player looking at the cliff trail and deducing some unsafe parts, or perhaps keeping a wary eye on the ceiling and working out which parts are likely to be unsafe.

But I like the game's willingness to take chances. It's a lot braver and innovative than most other games in this day and age. For PC gamers it's a shame that it wasn't a devoted PC development game. But it still beats playing Sequel X of the same old "Point and shoot" blastfest that crowds the market.