[Review] Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game: Extremely C-grade video game cannot be forgiven

Here’s a new game to sate the fans of Cthulhu Dice.

(I wrote this at the start of 2018. Reposting here as the first of a damn saga of critical writings about Lovecraft games. The second is here, and the third one is here.)

All the references and allusions that the past decade of horror media has grave-robbed of Lovecraft and his mythos with some semblance of subtlety — only because you weren’t familiar enough yet with the source material to notice a composite body when you saw one — at last reclaimed under the proper branding™ and collapsed into a grotesque and choppy pastiche apropos something you always heard was supposed to be scary, incomprehensible, utterly abhorrent.

This is Cyanide Studio’s “Telltale with a skill system” narrow-path CYOA and soft-RPG detective game. Edward Pierce (your player-character Detective with a drinking problem) takes his first assignment in quite some time to clear the name and investigate the death of the disturbed artist, Sarah Hawkins, in creepy East coast fish town Darkwater. This macabre investigation involves the classic archetypes of locals like dim-witted fishermen, skeptic cops, street-wise gangsters, and secretive aristocracy in what is consistently a typical Lovecraftian tale about the pursuit for truth revealing too, too much.

COSMIC HORROR is hot, and with its growing popularity the past decade or so its horrors have become less scary and more familiar. Call of Cthulhu: The Video Game aids in the stagnating and genretizing of this strain of horror, animating the cosmic-indifferent to serve a fandom its favorite comfort dish with all the tasty ingredients included.

But similar to what you may get out of a mediocre evening with friends playing the Chaosium RPG — which this game shares a brand license with and whose mechanics it attempts to translate into the computer RPG medium — the scenario of Call of Cthulhu: The Video Game incorporates Lovecraftian markers (cults, tentacles, MaDnesS!) as the sum composition of its drama and not just as foundation and undermeshing. Instead of an intelligent synthesis of these motifs we get here an ugly snowball of mythos bullshit that your group’s underprepared Keeper might breathlessly shape over the course of a sloppy one-shot campaign. Not engaging enough to be anything more than a decent way to pass an evening, not promising enough to make this a bi-weekly or even monthly thing.

“It sure would be fun to do this again,” sez the friend who drank a conservative 1.5 beers over the span of three hours, “but hoo-boy, our schedules!”

“Well,” this poor Keeper, “goodnight anyway…”
Keepsie cleans up after their guests have left and wonders why, if all the essentials were in place, if there was variety and Cthulhu was, finally, Called, then why did this session end well before 10pm and my guests decline to take home their character sheets?

Because, my dude, it is no longer enough to drag out the old props and have them recite their mad barks or gloop and glop their sickly tentacles and leave it just at that. It’s not enough anymore!

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There is a level of disdain over this game’s satisfaction in being absolutely mediocre that I am attempting to exorcise. I have been questioning my own attitude about art that does not strive to be anything more than just (ugh) What One Might Expect. I wonder if it’s possible to be content with being as barely serviceable as this game is, and I wonder if it really deserves to be criticized as viscerally as the alarming collisions of its narrative and mechanics make me want to.
I may be a bit of a motherfucker about this but I don’t want to forgive this game for giving just what I’m supposed to want and nothing more. Playing this game was a jarring, lame and stupid time.

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I surmise the object of the developers in making this game was to translate the Chaosium RPG into an adventure game encompassing the interactivity, ambition and freedom of queue lines for certain DisneyLand rides (look into Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye). For no good reason that I can see besides marketability this game includes a skill-point system that it routinely embarrasses itself to justify including.

At most times you are wandering semi-medium sized locations with locked doors and guards gating your progress with skill-checks. Progression gates like these are the most common application of the skill system in the game. Skills like Speech and Psychology affect what dialogue options are available to you but often appear as options in the same response opportunity, making their specific purposes as skills vague and homogeneous. This is compounded when the door lockpicking skill, Investigation, appears besides Speech and Psychology dialogue options in what, I guess, are meant to be social encounters that only a keen detective could escape with a positive outcome. Skills and their functions outside of social encounters include Medicine (knowledge leads to investigation shortcuts), Occultism (unlocks the BAD END), Strength (actually useless!), and Detect Hidden.

This last skill underlines the shortsighted design of this system most clearly. While Detect Hidden in the Chaosium RPG could actually determine the success or failure of an investigation, in Call of Cthulhu: The Video Game this skill effectively hides or reveals the world-building documents littered across the world but offers the player nothing substantial that could change the outcome or progress of the game. The skill functions in most cases a binary on-off switch for hidden journals, but I do understand there is for some reason a random factor totally separate of the Detect Hidden skill level that could reveal these objects anyway. What’s the point? To hide a typical Telltale-style adventure game behind the superficial UI icons of an RPG with mechanical complexity.

I consider this dishonest presentation Call of Cthulhu at its lamest, and it extends — as if this weren’t a crime already deserving of death — beyond the game’s crummy mechanics. The shallowness of this game’s smirking vanity, if we are to be cynical about all this, often reveals itself when its ambition as presented through dialogue encounters that are meant to bring the player/Detective’s ignorance, knowledge or feigning-ignorance into consideration but collapse and produce confusing results. If you exhaust your options in conversations with characters you will find contradictions, like How did this person know that, Why do they believe that when they just acknowledge the opposite, and these shred the game’s narrative integrity apart in my opinion.

These breaks in narrative consistency occur so often, the disconnect between the game’s appearance as a competent RPG or narrative adventure became impossible for me to ignore. So when the game’s conclusion convulses with all the explosions, death-threats, surreal dream sequences and terribly animated and voice acted CGI cutscenes, it is a beg to be taken serious that I in my most gracious mood imaginable could never acquiesce. If an artist can paint a backdrop of my surroundings in distorted blurring and running horizontal lines to give off the impression of a rollercoaster’s thrilling mach-speed zooming I will not be moved to scream as I walk past it, unless ironically. And I don’t think this makes me a cruel gamer.

In sum, this is a bullshit game trying to pretend its not a bad game. The $59.99 price point it had at launch implicates Cyanide or Focus Home Interactive as knowing-bullshitters, and I don’t think there is any reason to pretend this isn’t this case. **As media consumers of a burgeoning art form (video games are less than a century old wtf!!) there is no tradition set, no social mores to respect that would justify any argument on the behalf of bullshit game makers and apologists of those games that says we owe them an intellectual handout comprising our dishonest participation in wack, crappy, boring, trite, garbage empty-hearted works like this.**

If you are interested in actual progression and synthesis of Lovecraft horror, see Bloodborne, Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ 2017 series Providence, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom. Don’t bother with crud like this. Toss your Cthulhu dice and smile sincerely at your simple enjoyment there.