 Review By: Cameron Morris |
Developer: | Headfirst Productions |
| Publisher: | Bethesda Softworks | |
| Genre: | Adventure | |
| ESRB: | Mature | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | N/A | |
| Buy Now: |   |
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a game that holds a special place in my heart, largely because I've been watching it grow since sometime in 2001, which happened to be when it was originally supposed to come out for Halloween. The game has never been particularly hyped and never gotten a lot of publicity, but it was still something of a shock when it came out without so much as an announcement save for when it actually hit shelves.
I've never played the role-playing game that the game is purportedly based on, so I don't know how faithful it is in that regard, but I have extensively read the stories that that game is based on, if that gives you any idea of the kind of perspective I bring to the table for this review. With that out of the way, I can get down to the meat of the review.
The game starts off with a rather disturbing cutscene that actually takes place several days after the events in the game - I won't describe it for fear of spoiling it, but let's say that it sets the mood for the game perfectly. Dark, earnest, and mildly disturbing, the game's opening sequence really makes you sit back and consider exactly what you're getting into. A strong opening is really important for a game like this because it sets the tone and expectations for the rest of the experience, and in this respect the game excels.
You play as a private detective named Jack Walters, who is eventually sent to look for a missing person in the backwater port of Innsmouth. Jack is notable as a hero for several reasons, chief among them being that he is interesting and fragile in a very human way. This is partly due to his characterization throughout the story, which really makes you feel for him in his plight and actually care what happens to him, but a big part of it is the fact that Jack can't get stabbed or shot very much before he dies. It feels like you're as fragile as the people you're fighting, which isn't all that common in this kind of game.
The game starts off like a more interactive kind of point-and-click adventure game, essentially with you running around and investigating objects and people. The game's first couples of hours are slow but intensely atmospheric, so even though you don't actually do a lot it's hard to be bored. You spend most of your time getting acquainted with your situation, soaking in your surroundings and the kind of people you'll be interacting with. For the first while there's a slowly building sense of foreboding, a sense that something awful is going to happen, and soon, but you don't quite know what it is. The catharsis for that feeling doesn't come when the action starts - and start it does - and in fact that feeling of mounting dread continues to build through most of the game. It's never tedious and always effective, because you'll look around and wonder, "If what I'm seeing now is this bad, how much worse can it get?" The answer to that will have you biting your nails for a long time.
Before I can start on the gameplay in any capacity, I need to go over part of what makes it so effective. One of the first things that people will notice when the game actually begins is that it has no HUD; that is, there's no health bar, ammo count, or anything like that. If you want to gauge your health without looking at your inventory you have to take visual clues from the screen, and if you want to know whether you should reload…well, count your shots. This might be daunting to some people, and initially it might be a shock, but after a while you begin to appreciate exactly how immersing that can be. Without any bars or numbers to distract a person away form what's going on, you're drawn into the game more effectively - and the scream that Jack gives when he's shot in the leg, that blood that splatters his vision, and the staggering limp that he develops, all tend to convey his injury far better than any set of numbers in the corner of your vision.
The game has two types of gameplay, outside of the generally intuitive puzzle solving: stealth and combat. The stealth sequences are pretty nice while managing to be nerve-wracking, and the action is some of the most frenzied, pulse-pounding stuff that videogames will ever throw at you. Both of these are thanks to the fact that you are going up against things that can kill you, and probably more easily than you could kill them if the playing ground was level. Every encounter, whether requiring sneaking or combat, carries a pervasive sense of your own fragility. I might be elaborating on this too much, but it's in every moment of the game that isn't a breather, and it's hard to convey how important it is concerning what makes the game work.
Controls are pretty simple, though at times they can be so position-sensitive that they feel kind of wonky. Aiming is as tight or as loose as you want it to be, depending on how hard you press the left trigger, and interacting with your environment is simple but can sometimes be problematic if you're not facing exactly the right direction, which can mean the difference between bolting a door and opening it for the slobbering monster just beyond it. Which will probably eat your face. It's happened to me once or twice, and you can bet I wasn't happy, but all in all it wasn't too bad. In general the controls respond pretty well, and you'll never find yourself blaming your death on the programmers…more than once or twice.
When Jack gets hurt, it is represented on him dynamically: if he gets shot in the leg with a shotgun, his leg will break and his flesh will be torn in several places. He will bleed profusely, he will limp, and in general it's just a bad thing. So what do you do? You go into your inventory and check out where you injuries are, what they are, and what needs to be done. If you're bleeding profusely you'll need sutures, if you have a broken bone you'll need a splint, that kind of thing. The relative scarcity of these items means you can't afford to go around getting shot or slashed open all the time, which adds another level of either tension or stress to the game, depending on how you play. The way you actually regain lost health is kind of arbitrary: you patch up your wounds and wait for Jack's health to get back to normal. Granted that they couldn't really do anything else for this, but something just doesn't feel right about being able to sit in one place for thirty seconds and then being right as rain. There's another problem in there, too: if you have the most minor wound left, you won't regain any health, so if you run out of sutures or bandages you are in a lot of trouble.
The graphics of the game are somewhat dated, which is to be expected since the game's been in development since the beginning of time, but it's still somewhat disappointing. The game's generally dark environments hide this to some degree, and there are some instances of really great geometry in architecture, but textures and visuals in general are merely effective instead of impressive. The same isn't true of character models, though, which are effectively designed and nicely detailed. Enemy designs are a mixed bag, ranging from good to utterly spectacular - as hard as it is to be impressed with some of the enemies, there are instances of monsters which really and truly grasp at the concepts that Lovecraft must have been trying to convey when he put word to page all those years ago. The boss creature of the gold refinery, if you can really call it such, is probably one of the best-made monsters I've ever seen, and it's very hard to not be impressed with it once you see it in action.
The sound in the game is arguably the single most important component in a game like this because it's such an important part of the way a game feels, and this game succeeds as well as any other you can name. The ambient noise you'll hear at different points - the hum of machinery, dripping water, scurrying rats, talking people - all serve to build up the sense of foreboding that wouldn't be nearly as strong otherwise. More than once I caught myself stopping dead in my tracks and just standing there, listening, for fear that I was hearing footsteps other than my own. Immediate sound effects are just as impressive: gunshots sound appropriately explosive and powerful, monsters sound as reprehensibly horrible as you would expect them to, and in general everything sounds like it should. The sound that the last weapon makes when you fire it is particularly pleasing. The music is appropriately creepy or ironically upbeat to the point of being creepy, but never to the point that it's obnoxious. The opening cutscene is as good an example as any for the effectiveness of sound in the game, but trust me when I say that it's all very appropriate and pleasing to the ear.
Character voiceovers are the weakest part of the whole sound design, even though they're generally good, and Jack himself is one of the most ironically hilarious and disturbing characters ever put into a game. Some of the dialogue seems out of place, but some lines will strike you so much as something out of a 20's pulp crime novel that you can't help but laugh at them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing depending on how you look at it, so take that as you will. In general the cast is effective but not particularly impressive; out of all of them I was really impressed by only one or two, which is better than some, but considering the care that was given to the rest of the sound design I couldn't help feeling a little let down.
Have I mentioned that this game can be hard? It can. Even on the lowest difficulty level, this game can knock you down and kick you right in your teeth. There's a certain way you can get through each scenario more or less unscathed, but unless you know how to go through each scene perfectly you're going to be in for one rough ride, and that's going to put a lot of people off. Of course, part of that is due to the fact that the enemies in the game are often so powerful compared to you, but it doesn't make the fact any less real. Part of the difficulty comes in the fact that at certain times you will panic, usually at the least appropriate times, and you will make mistakes that by all rights you shouldn't, and you'll die because you made them. It's a kind of daunting feeling, but the sheer visceral difficulty the game carries for anyone who doesn't know how to play it can be refreshing if that's the kind of experience you're looking for.
If I haven't made this clear up to now, this game most likely will scare you. It's full of themes of the occult and monstrous, and packed to the gills with imagery that a lot of people will find disturbing. But the fear it creates, the real fear, isn't so much about what you see as what you think might be there. There are no jump-out-of-the-closet scares to be had here, none of the cheap tricks you may have grown tired of in even the most adult Resident Evil; all the fear here hinges on possibilities, and the one time you may be inclined to scream will be at something you cannot see. I know that in one sequence, when Jack is forced to flee, I felt quite a lot like doing the same thing, and the fact that I was running from something I couldn't look at made the entire scenario that much more effective.
Finally, let's talk about the game's sanity system. Though it sounds like Headfirst took a page from Silicon Knights' Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, the sanity system in Call of Cthulhu, appropriately enough, is handled in a much more serious way. Never as theatric or radical or humorous as the aforementioned sanity system, this one is all about subtlety and effectiveness. Whenever Jack encounters the game's more disturbing and unsettling elements (and woe betide him, for they are legion) he loses a piece of his sanity. As he does, things happen: his vision blurs, he begins to hear voices, he talks to himself, and so on. This system effects the player pretty deeply because when Jack panics in a firefight you can't help but panic along with him, swinging around drunkenly while he's freaking out and not daring to run for fear of being dragged down and murdered from behind. If he goes too crazy, he'll put his gun to his head and blow his own brains out. That's some rough stuff right there, and always shocking when it happens because it's often unexpected. In general, the reason it's so effective is that it affects the player directly; when he hears things, you hear things, and you question what you're really hearing and what you just think you're hearing. That feeling is a powerful tool, and the fact that the developers managed to pull it off with this kind of system is very impressive.
Bottom Line:
This is a game that deserves attention, for its own merits and for its attempted faithfulness to its real source material. One of the most important elements of Lovecraft's fiction was fear of the unknown, bypassing the gore and easy scares that we've conditioned ourselves to and making us consider what could be there. In that respect, the game succeeds wonderfully, and you will spend much of the game wondering at the atrocious things that are set before you, realizing that they're only building up to some greater unnamed horror that you may or may not be ready to face.
The game isn't without problems - environmental controls can be problematic, voice acting can be weak, graphics are dated, etc. - but the things it does right far outshine the things it doesn't. I can't recommend this to everyone, because of its subject matter if nothing else, but if you're the kind of person who doesn't feel repulsed by the idea of sitting in the dark, alone, and taking part in one of the only truly terrifying and most engaging games on the market, you owe it to yourself to at least give this game a try.
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8.0 |
Posted: 2005-12-31 12:52:57PST