Call of Cthulhu

1920s New England. A hardboiled private investigator from Boston travels to a small town off the coast of Massachusetts to investigate mysterious happenings. The villagers are secretive and distrustful of outsiders, otherworldly cults plot dark magics in the shadows, and our hero must battle his own mind as—

Hold on, am I going crazy, or did I already do this review? Let's see, according to my notes, the answer is... both.

Alright, so Call of Cthulhu and The Sinking City might have incredibly similar premises (and it was actually Call of Cthulhu that came out first), but they play out completely differently. The Sinking City is an open-world detective-investigation game, and Call of Cthulhu is a first-person adventure game.

While The Sinking City was deeply, deeply flawed, I adored the way it forced you into true, hardboiled investigations, navigating the city on your own based on street directions, physically chasing down leads while battling bizarre horrors that have become a part of everyday life, creating a sense of slow immersion into the madness as you uncover more and more ridiculous developments, while remaining enveloped in a bleak, melancholic atmosphere the entire time.

On the other hand, Call of Cthulhu was alright, I guess.

We play as Edward Pierce, a private detective who is approached by a wealthy man named Stephen Webster. Webster wants Pierce to investigate the death of his daughter, who died in a house fire with her husband and son. That daughter is Sarah Hawkins, a painter famous for both her work and for being mad, and so the police have just chalked the incident up to Sarah's mental instability. But Webster believes in his daughter, and received a painting of hers in the mail shortly after her death. He sends Pierce off to Darkwater, the small remote island where Sarah and her family lived, to investigate.

So based on that introduction Call of Cthulhu seems like it's going to be a spooky murder mystery. We have our crime, a foreboding isolated setting, and a bizarre hook. But there isn't any detective fiction-styled mystery whatsoever. Pierce has the magic ability to see what happened at crime scenes (which functions as a crime recreation game mechanic), which, as you might imagine, makes "solving" the incident relatively straightforward. The game promptly devolves into a Lovecraftian "mystery" that involves chasing and being chased by a cult for nebulous reasons.

While The Sinking City had an open world, Call of Cthulhu is a linear adventure game. However, since you're constrained to a limited number of set pieces, rather than free to explore an entire city that needs to be fully furnished and inhabited, those limited set pieces can be polished to perfection. And yet it's the polish of Call of Cthulhu that makes it a bit... boring to me. It was the rawness of The Sinking City that pulled me in.

That said, I adored the graphics in this game. They're nice, high-quality models with a damp, oppressive aesthetic. My only real graphics-based complaint is with the character animations. It seems to me that for the most part they just recorded some generic animation loops for use in conversations, rather than individually programming and syncing animations to dialogue. As a result, the characters' body language rarely matches the words they're saying. Everyone talks with their hands—but their hands and mouths say completely different things. It's particularly disconcerting for female characters, which all share the same weird animation loop. It's bizarre and immersion-breaking for every woman we meet to fidget in the exact same unnatural way.

There's not much music in the game, but the sound design is sufficiently creepy, which is all I think you really need in something like this.

Call of Cthulhu feels like a dressed-up walking simulator. Yeah, we need to talk to people, and recreate crime scenes, and combine items in puzzles, but... all that entails is walking around looking for the shiny points that designated something can be examined. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the game is linear. While most segments may have a few different ways of progressing, they all lead to the same result. But why add all the gameplay and mechanics and systems if what I do doesn't matter? Do I get a substantively different experience if I use a key to open a door as opposed to a crowbar, when the door gets opened either way? Does it make a big difference whether someone helps me because I intimidate them into it, or because I smooth-talk my way into their good graces, or because they take pity on me because I have no social skills, when they help me regardless? Does the mere fact that I have the choice among these options provide value even if they have the same end point? I don't think so.

I suppose I might be oversimplifying a bit. There are some action and stealth sequences, and having to solve puzzles and accomplish tasks is entertaining. But the sheer linearity and the fact that most sequences boil down to "find the shiny spots" make a large swath of the gameplay feel unnecessary. Call of Cthulhu is just a visual novel with extra steps—and maybe it's my own fault for expecting something more. (In which case I take absolutely no responsibility and shift all blame to The Sinking City.)

The game is divided into chapters, each of which takes place in its own discrete level. While you can't backtrack to earlier levels, you're free to explore each level when you're in it, talking to characters, collecting items, and solving puzzles.

As I've said many times already, the game is largely linear, so even though you can approach each level as you wish, the game won't progress until you complete the specified objective. Some puzzles and dialogue segments can be completed multiple ways, but, as discussed, they all end up in the same place at the end, which to me zapped the power of the ability to choose how to approach the problem. When in dialogue, the game tells you what skill each option will test or what was required, which I thought was a helpful touch (if you do decide to play multiple times).

The gameplay does provide a nice, balanced variety of activities, preventing the experience from ever getting stale. The bread and butter is simply investigating and talking to characters. Even though Call of Cthulhu is ostensibly a mystery game, there aren't any deductions for you, the player, to make. While there is an event recreation system, similar to The Sinking City, here you just need to find all the hotspots to investigate (while in The Sinking City you at least needed to arrange them into the proper order).

I will commend Call of Cthulhu for not having many sneak sections! I do not like stealth games at all. I find them a seemingly-contradictory-yet-overwhelmingly-obnoxious combination of stressful (from having to manage the locations of enemies without real peripheral vision or the ability to easily turn your neck without changing the direction you're moving) and boring (from needing to wait for the right time to slip past patrolling enemies). Since this game is one big Lovecraftian love letter, I expected plenty of Amnesia-style sequences where you need to avoid eldritch monsters. There was even the telltale wardrobe perfectly sized for hiding the player character all over the island. Every time I saw the wardrobe in an "ordinary" section I groaned, since I assumed that meant the map would be used for a sneak sequence later. But that wasn't always the case! There were some stealth segments, but oftentimes the developers found some other sequence to include, which I appreciated and preferred. Also, there's some combat near the end of the game, and while it's simple, it's quite satisfying after spending the whole game fleeing.

So while the gameplay is overall serviceable, as an adventure game (or dressed up visual novel), the plot is the core component of the experience, and yet it felt lackluster. There's a Lovecraftian façade with little behind. There are cults and unspeakable creatures and madness and the Necronomicon but it all feels rote and formulaic. We run around bumping into all sorts of Lovecraftian buzzwords until we reach the finale with very little special or interesting about any of it.

I say "very little" and not "nothing" because I think Pierce's descent into madness (if you choose to succumb to it) is handled well. But I still thought they did it better in The Sinking City, where the way the plot unfolded made me feel like I was going crazy myself, rather than just watching someone else unravel.

So Call of Cthulhu is disappointing regardless of how you look at it. As a choose-your-own-adventure, the choices you make feel arbitrary and unimpactful. As a linear narrative, it just isn't that interesting. It's not clear exactly which side Call of Cthulhu is trying to lean into, but it doesn't do a good job regardless of its intentions.

I'd like to discuss the ending system, because it had a large impact on my feelings on the game. I will be explaining how the ending system works but will not include any plot details (and briefly mentioning The Sinking City's ending system as well), so consider this your spoiler warning.

The core of the ending system is that when you get to the finale you get to directly choose your ending, but the options available to you are based on the choices you've made. I thought this was a cool idea in theory, but in practice, like many other elements of Call of Cthulhu, it turned out underwhelming. There are four possible endings. The first is always available. The second becomes available depending on your response to a binary decision earlier in the game. The last two endings unlock based on the culmination of a variety of actions and choices over the course of the game.

However, the issue for me is that there isn't a clear nexus between those last two endings and the choices needed to unlock them. For neither ending I can see any reason why making the required decisions results in the ability to select that ending. I can't find any sort of explanation online, either. In fact, there are threads where people post the choices they made and the endings that were available to them, and the choices differ from person to person, so there is presumably some slack in the requirements, rather than needing to make an exactly precise series of selections. But there isn't any sort of explanation behind these choices. Even if the choices don't directly lead to the ending, if there's a guiding principle or common thread among the choices, such as in Chaos;Head, that can serve as a link. Yet there's nothing like that here. Consequently, the endings and ending system feel arbitrary. I'm not working towards anything, I just need to make the arbitrary decisions selected by the developers to see their last few ending cutscenes.

This issue is also compounded by the game's linearity. If the game branched or had variations within the choices, this might not be so bad. After all, it'd make sense! Different choices lead to different branches which lead to different endings. But since the game is linear, seeing the endings (without relying on a guide or YouTube) means running through the same narrative again and again with minor surface-level variations until you make the decisions the developers wanted you to.

To be honest, I'm a bit worried that I'm criticizing Call of Cthulhu just because my emotional response was lacking and I'm simply trying to justify those feelings with logic. For instance, if I loved Call of Cthulhu but found The Sinking City mediocre, I could just have easily said "Call of Cthulhu's ending system provides the perfect balance of allowing alternate endings without having to make a fully branching narrative (which would have been nice, but this is a perfectly fine alternative if that was unfeasible for the development team)" and "The Sinking City's choices are hollow, and the fact that all endings are available regardless just emphasizes that fact."

For clarity, that's not how I feel about The Sinking City at all. I think that if you're going to have a largely linear narrative with multiple possible conclusions at the very end (putting aside how desirable that is compared to a branching or fully linear narrative), I think just making all those endings available is a lot more respectful to the player than forcing them to play through the same linear experience multiple times. It might cheapen the experience, but I think the experience is cheapened in both systems. (Plus I approached The Sinking City's ending decision seriously, even though there isn't any actual need to do so, which made me appreciate it a lot more.)

But there's still that nagging doubt that my feelings are just arbitrary. After all, The Sinking City is essentially the same as Call of Cthulhu in terms of having a bunch of choices that just create minor variations within a set, linear narrative. However, I think the difference is in the stakes of the choices you make. In The Sinking City, you get to decide how the cases resolve; whether to turn a man stealing food to feed his starving family to the authorities is a heavy, impactful decision. But why should anyone really care whether I order the soup or the salad, which is what Call of Cthulhu's decisions feel like?

So even if both games are similar in terms of linearity, I appreciate that The Sinking City doesn't lock the ability to see all of its endings behind arbitrary choices and (unless you are using a guide) multiple monotonous playthroughs, and also like the fact that the choices you make in The Sinking City are more impactful within the world of the game than those of Call of Cthulhu, even if we don't actually get to directly see the results of most decisions in the narratives.

In the end, I just don't care much for Call of Cthulhu. It looks nice and has a decent balance of gameplay without an abundance of obnoxious stealth segments, but the lack of anything worthwhile in the story of a narrative adventure game just leaves the experience feeling hollow. Yes the game is filled to the brim with Lovecraftian plot elements which is great when you're in that mood, but at the same time it feels like the plot was developed by writing them down and figuring out the easiest way to transfer from one to the next. The Sinking City, for all its janky weirdness, provided a much more visceral and engaging experience that actually felt like I was in a Lovecraftian adventure. Sorry, Cthulhu, but this is a call I think it's better not to answer.