Call of Cthulhu is an emphatic character sheet fed to a game deficient of opportunities for self-expression. Imagine if, instead of a dramatic exploration behind the power and poison of enlightenment, Lovecraft only wrote a flat outline. Call of Cthulhu is eldritch horror without emotion or agency, and its madness is entirely mundane.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
H.P. Lovecraft’s opening to Call of Cthulhu could (generously) be read as an antithesis of a modern AAA game. The amount of things an open-world game provides for the player is staggering, and it can often feel like its designers tried to include every idea they ever had. This surplus of content not only directs attention away from a game’s premise but also alienates an audience from maintaining a personal level of engagement. It can feel impossible to find a waypoint without being able to see in any particular direction.
Call of Cthulhu—the second videogame with this title but the first officially based on Sandy Petersen’s role-playing game of the same name—retains the $60 AAA asking price but scales its content to a more digestible portion. A ten hour, self-contained adventure game centered on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is an attractive correlation of focus and fascination. Cyanide, best known for Blood Bowl, Styx: Master of Shadows, and myriad cycling games is responsible for production of Call of Cthulhu. This sounds great.
Call of Cthulhu is not great. Sometimes it is good, but it is lost in its own references to eldritch horror and damned by an inability to either develop consequence or subsist from its modes of interaction. The core of Call of Cthulhu is an insoluble detective game copying homework from L.A. Noire and Frogware’s Sherlock Holmes titles. Its attempts to use player agency to establish an identity for its characters wither in the absence of meaningful ramifications, and its Lovecraftian weirdness relies on a visual and narrative presentation unfit to either intrigue or horrify the player. Call of Cthulhu may have been designed with the best of intentions, but it’s a sluggish lunge at Lovecraft that misses its target and falls into its own pit of despair.
In 1924, struggling alcoholic detective Edward Pierce is dispatched the Darkwater Island off the coast of Boston. Deep in prohibition and afflicted by the dwindling whaling industry, Darkwater was also recently subject to the violent and mysterious demise of one of its most prominent families, the Hawkins. Pierce, at the behest of Sarah Hawkins’ father, sets out to penetrate the dilapidated fishing hovel and reveal the odd and alarming nature of Hawkins’ collective fate.
Piece’s statistical backend is left to the player. Character Points (CP) can be earned and invested into Psychology, Eloquence, Investigation, Strength, and “Spot Hidden” categories. These stats provide additional conversation options for Pierce, with the exception of Spot Hidden, which highlights otherwise unnoticeable objects in his environment. Two more categories, Occult and Medicine, can only be increased by finding occult objects and medical journals, respectively. Pierce’s skills are uncommon traits in a medium often reliant on individual empowerment. They feel designed specifically toward a detective videogame. This is neat.
As it’s paced, Call of Cthulhu follows a manageable a pattern. First is the investigation. Pierce walks around a room and comments on clues, occasionally performing a Reconstruction, where specific clues come together to form a potential motive. Conversation with an immediate party follows, and certain items Pierce discovers can provide additional dialogue options. Call of Cthulhu then descends into action sequences, all of which are alarming and distressing in a manor not intended by the game’s narrative. The blueprint of a great idea is perceptible, but execution is seldom able to capitalize on it.
Incongruity is visible in Call of Cthulhu’s second chapter. Immediately after arriving in Darkwater, Pierce walks into a bar and, for no reason, antagonizes ones of its innocent patrons. This irritates the bartender, creating a scenario where the player is allowed to either come clean (and collect a drink and some information) or continue to be an asshole (and receive less information and no alcohol). It is unclear what prompts Pierce to act like this, other than Call of Cthulhu’s need to manufacture tension and pull a decision from the player. It makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but feels unearned in the shape of a narrative.
For Call of Cthulhu’s world-building, this same chapter is also its most promising. Darkwater is absolutely wrecked; it’s rife with aggravated fisherman, bootlegging miscreants, and local officials playing dumb. The available real estate hints at Call of Cthulhu’s interest in player-authored exploration and deep conversation trees are available from a half dozen locals. The soaked, dank structures are all slightly off and suggest Darkwater and its inhabitants are guarding something sinister.
Pierce’s initial objective is to penetrate a warehouse that belonged to the Hawkins. Call of Cthulhu provides three ways to go about doing this. Strength will help Pierce smash into the sewer and find his way underground. He can also use Investigation to break a lock and find a back door. If he fails both of these, he can speak to Cat, the local bootlegging overlord, and owe her a favor for access. These are all viable and fair options! Player agency seems like a meaningful reflection of Pierce’s character, and it’s only the second chapter! This ambition rarely materializes after Call of Cthulhu moves Pierce out of the town square in its third (of fourteen) chapters.
Pierce’s operation outside of an investigation is an unresponsive and desperate tragedy. Call of Cthulhu sincerely believes an early aughts interpretation of a third-person stealth game, where Pierce needs to avoid suggested sight lines of roaming opponents or die. In a cave, in an asylum, and in a climactic boss encounter, crouching down and/or hiding behind a large object is the only path forward. Being found is being caught (in all but one chapter, Pierce is reluctant to deliver offense of his own), pushing trial-and-error and pattern memorization as Call of Cthulhu’s favored means of progression. It’s dated and distressed.
Between stealth sections are traditional adventure game sequences. An NPC’s eyes need to be diverted for Pierce to slip by, necessitating an order of operations for the player to discover and engage. Follow the pipe to a room, find the key to the room, frame someone for the transgression, and creep your way into forbidden territory. This is acceptable, welcomed adventure game puzzle solving! The sequence in the daylight, where the player is allowed to roam free and take in the atmosphere at their will, is better off than a darker sequence centered on escape.
Call of Cthulhu goes off the rails when it tries to do anything subversive. A bizarre sequence at the asylum, where Pierce keeps passing through illusions and darkness, is irritating and monotonous instead of bewildering and arresting. The aforementioned boss encounter, versus a one-hit-death enemy, is reliant on the player selecting one of a dozen objects as a weapon with no discernable indication of the “right” one until you try it. I understand Call of Cthulhu’s need to summon tough action sequences as a means to vary its pace, but all of its examples are miserable and boring.
Conflict inside of Call of Cthulhu’s own stated objectives is always prominent. The Cthulhu mythos, and much of Lovecraft’s work, revolves around the paradox between uncertainty and enlightenment. Truth is attractive, but what it imparts is, ultimately, ruinous for whoever accepts it. Call of Cthulhu manifests this by asking if Pierce (not the player!) really wants to read a handful of occult books or accept knowledge in key circumstances. Rarely do these sequences transfer in tangible information, instead building toward an invisible stat that affects Pierce’s fate. Except it doesn’t.
Those decisions don’t really matter, either. What occult objects Pierce views, how many drinks he has, and 90% of what he chooses to say has no material effect on Call of Cthulhu’s story. A woman Pierce speaks to in one chapter, for example, either be catatonic or dead in a hospital bed in another—and this is one of the few decisions Call of Cthulhu actually acknowledges. The rigid yet free path through the narrative, popularized with Telltale’s work, is entirely absent. The story shifts marginally in the mind of the player, but is rarely reflected by what is seen in the game.
Through two complete runs of Call of Cthulhu, selecting opposite paths each time, I couldn’t shake either the game or its narrative off of its rails. The company of a secondary character helps determine one of five endings, but their presence is entirely reliant on a quick decision in an action sequence hours ago. As best I could tell, Call of Cthulhu’s end game had nothing to do with the choices I made or the way I spoke to people. I could be wrong! But I feel like I made opposing decisions each time and came away with an identical fate.
The entire concept of sanity feels like a melodramatic waste. Pierce is propped up to be a haunted World War I veteran plunged into the depths of cosmic horror. This is only reflected when he spends too much time hiding in closets and starts breathing heavily. There’s an entire portion of the menu dedicated to measuring Pierce’s sanity, but I couldn’t find out if it ever manifests in the proper game. Unlike Eternal Darkness, the legitimacy of reality is entirely in the mind of the protagonist and not shared with the player. Call of Cthulhu made me question my time more than it challenged the validity of Pierce’s sanity.
What if the player could have had an active role in the search for truth? If Call of Cthulhu were a meta-commentary on Lovecraft’s enlightenment/uncertainty problem, where information revealed to Pierce was also a damning revelation to the player, it could have mitigated the damage done by its dreadful stealth and action sequences. Instead what’s presented is a rote trip through Lovecraftian hallmarks punctuated with a predictable climax. Bloodborne’s back half was somehow a better consideration of Lovecraft’s work and imagery.
But what kind of lenience is expected from a product officially brandishing the Cthulhu mythos? Grotesque cults, horrifying artifacts, and the resurrection of sleeping gods is camp and kitsch in other circles but treated with the utmost sincerity in Call of Cthulhu. Context matters, and Call of Cthulhu always plays it straight, but its origins feel more like an excuse than a point of interest. At the end of the day this is a $60 game launching four days after Red Dead Redemption 2. Even as a boutique item for those with a specific literary interest or affection for the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game, it’s hard to imagine walking away fully satisfied.
It is difficult to dispel the notion that Call of Cthulhu should have been a budget-priced title. Despite a few nice set-pieces, there’s not a lot to do inside its boundaries. Character animation is repetitive and hilarious, often with its cast repeatedly flapping their arms in canned sequences reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto’s PlayStation 2 outings. The voice cast is similarly mortifying, often sounding like different takes were stitched together in the middle of a conversation.
There are some bright spots, if you’re willing to look hard enough. Anthony Howell—who just turned in a brilliant performance as Jonathan Reid in Dontnod’s excellent Vampyr—plays Pierce with similar inklings of resignation and duty. The last ten minutes, with guitars so thick they could practically erase the cosmos on their own, is a practiced and controlled demolition that works as a conclusion. It’s unfortunate that Call of Cthulhu can’t maintain the same level of quality, tone, pace, or production with any sort of consistency.
I can only picture Call of Cthulhu working for lapsed fans of Lovecraft’s fiction. It’s referential without feeling substantial, relying on familiar tokens and weird fiction clichés to shock its heart into any identifiable rhythm. Imagine if Lovecraft’s work were a dry essay about the dueling power and poison of enlightenment rather than a range of weird fiction with vivid imagery and squirming dread. Call of Cthulhu is eldritch horror without emotion or agency, and its madness is entirely mundane.
