Answering the Call of Cthulhu (again)
A second look at Cyanide’s Lovecraft Detective Simulator
It’s 2021 and I’m playing Call of Cthulhu again.
When I booted it up for the second time, I questioned my choice almost immediately. I didn’t love this game when I played it back then. I wrote about it briefly on my author website in 2018. Here’s what the me of yesteryear said:
The other game I wanted to talk about is Call of Cthulhu. This game is…not anything that I wanted it to be. It’s essentially a walking simulator with some very diet-light environmental puzzles. But being able to spend some slow time in a quaint little Lovecraftian world is kind of fun. If you can snag this game up for cheap (or maybe a rental?) I think you should do it. Especially if you’re a Lovecraft horror nut.
Not exactly a shining review. I’m not sure how accurate the walking simulator line is, but the ‘diet-light environmental puzzles’ is spot-on. So why am I hear again? Am I a glutton for punishment?
Before we get into the why — and the point of this article — let’s get the basics out of the way.
Call of Cthulhu was released in 2018 onto most modern game consoles. It was made by Cyanide, who have been cranking out cycling games (?) since at least 2001. They just released the insanely titled Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Earthblood earlier this year. They are certainly a veteran studio, even if their output hasn’t always been the best.
But what kind of game is it? Call of Cthulhu is a linear first-person horror-adventure game that takes place with a Lovecraftian universe. That on its own is quite promising, if not particularly ground-breaking. The gibbous elevator pitch is as follows: You play as private investigator Edward Pierce as he is hired to look into the Hawkins family, who live in an enormous mansion on Darkwater Island. Over the course of the plot, Edward uncovers a conspiracy and a cult that controls Darkwater Island and its inhabitants. A prophecy is imminent, and Edward is right in the middle of it.
The Unnamable
This is my second play through of this game. As you saw above, it didn’t completely click with me. On its eldritch surface, the moment to moment game play of Call of Cthulhu is very basic. When a level kicks off, you are in a small environment. These areas vary. It could be the the port town of Darkwater, with its pub and fishy warehouses. Or the Hawkins family mansion, with hidden rooms and an unhealthy amount of bookshelves. We even have several glowing caves, crawling with violent cultists and monsters from other dimensions.
Once you’re here, you play through ‘investigation scenes’. You speak to characters and investigate a small number of objects in the environment. In the Darkwater Harbor, its old photographs and a lighter in a shed. In the Hawkins mansion, it’s a crime scene and a bust with an amulet draped over it. The conversations with characters have a Elder Scrolls-esque wheel that explores various options. Your skill points and clues found in the environments unlock certain conversation options. These unlockable pieces don’t do a lot in terms of story, but it does reveal small bits of story details.
70% of Call of Cthulhu is wandering around environments and chatting with ugly NPCs. The remaining 30% is rolled into what I not so affectionately refer to as ‘action scenes’. These are the games horrible stealth sequences. These are also sequences where you have to flee a monster or outrun a collapsing cave. These scenes drag the game into the muck nearly every time they pop up.
To be a more specific: let’s talk about the Sanitarium level. Having to play through this level two more times for the Platinum trophy was like having a cultist pull my teeth out with ceremonial pliers. This level requires you to sneak through a stupidly arranged sanitarium, hiding from guards and solving rudimentary puzzles. When the guards spot you, it’s a nearly instant fail. This game has no real stealth system in place, and the AI is quite bad. Once all the puzzles are done, you creep your way into the next sequence.
There is a point system that governs many of these actions throughout the game, but this system is under-baked. It takes direct inspiration from the source material, which is a common thing for games like this (looking at you Cyberpunk). As you complete sections of the story, you unlock points to drop into different areas. In theory, this would allow you to see different aspects of Pierce’s investigation. In reality, you miss out on a couple of lines here and there and get a different ending in very specific circumstances. For the sake of trophy hunting, I put nearly all my points into either Hidden Object or Occult (depending on my play through). The walk-through I used said this was the right choice, and I’m not one to question the dark texts.
We’ve talked the basics of the game thus far: ‘investigation’ and ‘action scenes’. Bad action, abysmal stealth, small puzzles in boring environments. But how is the story? If the story is good, perhaps these issues can be forgotten? Maybe they can be hidden away behind an Elder Sign?
The Dream-Quest of Edward Pierce
Call of Cthulhu revels in modern Lovecraftian cliches.
While cliches are often considered a bad thing creatively, I think they have their place. Lovecraftian fiction has its fair share of cliches, built over the years through the spider-web of stories that the Man from Providence birthed. These cliches are like catnip for fans of the genre; they are comfortable and familiar, tropes and stories that play with the cliches in a variety of different ways.
I certainly prefer original takes 9 times out of 10, but Call of Cthulhu didn’t need to wow me with its story-telling ingenuity. I knew what this game was. I knew how this story would go and had a rough idea of the troubles that our private eye would find himself drawn into. I came here for the tentacles and clumsy mythology. As someone that has written with these cliches and has read about them widely, I enjoy all of it. Because Call of Cthulhu uses the role-playing game of the same name, we get a more fun aspect to the mythos. The player character is more capable than a standard Lovecraft protagonist, even if his sanity is constantly in flux.
(Side note: The Sinking City (released in 2019) is a perfect example of using cliches in a interesting manner. That game is flawed as well, but its flaws are a bit more creative.)
Call of Cthulhu’s story is not original. It sticks to a formula set up by the tabletop game. Its characters are paper-thin and exist to drive us into the next cliche or bad stealth sequence.
The Writer on the House on the Hill
And now we have found ourselves at the end.
Outside of Medium, I do a lot of writing. I write horror fiction, predominantly short stories. I’ve had a small amount of success (mostly due to dumb luck) over the last couple of years. The type of fiction I try to write is literary, with a touch of the nonsense that makes genre fiction so popular. I want to keep my fiction weird, but I want monsters running about as well. I want emotion and powerful themes, but I also want fungi monsters, gods from other dimensions, and blood-thirsty vampires in equal measure.
I write the kind of fiction I like to read. A mix of Weird, Commercial, and Cosmic horror. The most important of that list — for this article at least — is Cosmic. Lovecraftian fiction can falls into all three categories depending on the piece, but Cosmic Horror is the one where Lovecraft’s influences are seen most often. This genre of horror is built on the ideas/themes of Lovecraft, and expanded by his contemporaries and the writers that came after.
H.P. Lovecraft was a colossal racist, which is problematic and a part of his legacy that should be mentioned. I attended a writer convention called NecronomiCon back in 2019, which is the most fun I’ve ever had by myself in an unfamiliar city. Over that long weekend, I attended workshops and readings, meeting a lot of writers and editors that I’d only chatted with over the internet. A near constant thing that was brought up was Lovecraft’s racism. Those writers understand that this should never be forgiven; no under-rug sweeping here. I understand how important he was to the horror genre, but it was understood that his time has past. When I think about Cosmic Horror, I think of all the other incredible writers that work in this field. I think about the groups of writers — who would have terrified ole’ H.P. — who continue to astound me.
(Second side note: But it’s because of this that I recommend paying attention to the other writers working in Weird Fiction. My work is fine, but there are dozens of writers that have used Lovecraft as a jumping off point to explore the field in legendary terms. These are the writers I was talking about above. Buy their books.)
Cosmic Horror reminds us of how perilous the world is. Good Cosmic Horror finds ways to terrify in the dread of the universe, in the cracks between the stars that lurk outside of humanity’s reach. That’s why Cosmic Horror has endured. His stories weren’t about monsters and private eyes. His heroes rarely got into fist fights, and victory was something that came with a dire cost.
Games like The Sinking City and Call of Cthulhu don’t make it there. They are populist facsimiles, built to entertain. I don’t hate them for this: The Cthulhu Mythos and the worlds that spun off of them have room for fun. They have room for writers like me who use fiction to explore the world and the concepts laid down by the talents that came before.
Pickman’s Point
I played Call of Cthulhu again because I respect the vision. I played Call of Cthulhu again because I was close to the coveted Platinum trophy. I played Call of Cthulhu again because it reminds me of the world that I write in and the writers that I respect. I like to be reminded of the power that fiction holds.
It’s not ground-breaking. It sometimes sucks to play. But Cyanide came with a small budget and did their best to give us a dark corner of this world to play around in. I love these tropes. I don’t need ground-breaking fiction all the time always. Sometimes I just want to fail a speech check and somehow get to the same place. Sometimes I want to see a cut-scene where a Great Old One rises from the ocean in a moment that I can only be described as awe-inspiring. This is valid, even if I know exactly where I’m headed.
We live in a terrifying and alienating world. Sometimes its nice to relax at the tail end of a seaside prophecy.
