GregHowley.com

Yesterday, my office closed due to a freak localized blizzard. There was no snow at my house. This gave me extra time to finish off the horrific experience (pun intended) that was Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

I developed a serious love/hate relationship with this game. While it really did have a lot going for it, the frustration factor was just through the roof at some points. And before I can get into any of the things that I really did like about the game, I've got to vent.

I can't count the number of times I fought my way through a long and difficult sequence only to be suddenly killed by something I never saw coming. There were many parts of the game I had to replay many times, and when you're going through the same sequence for the tenth time, it saps any sense of suspense that may have been there. It stops being fun and simply becomes monotonous and boring. After I've spent ten minutes slowly sneaking past enemies - and the protagonist in this game does move sloowly while sneaking - it drives me crazy to have a random object fall on me from somewhere above and kill me, forcing me to redo everything I just finished with. This reached its worst during the climactic final battle in the game. You're allowed to save the game just before this battle, but the battle is long and drawn out, and requires you to do things that no sane person would attempt, and afterwards you have to run through a hazard course before the game ends in which you have roughly a 85% chance of dying, regardless of your skill. It's luck. Just before firing the final shot against the end boss, I managed to climb a surface which you're not supposed to be able to climb (took me 5 minutes) and save the game. So from here, I have to walk in, fire the final shot on the boss, and use a couple items, which takes about 5 minutes, and then run through falling debris for another 5 minutes. The only problem is that giant boulders fall on my head most of the time. I tried this 5 or 6 times last night before giving up. I know I can complete the game in about ten minutes from my last save, but it may take another ten or fifteen tries. And I wasn't even supposed to be able to save where I did! If I hadn't, each try would take over a half hour, and I would definately give up. On top of that, this is the first game I've played in years which actually allowed me to use items incorrectly and put the game into a state where it's impossible to win.

On top of that, (yes, I'm continuing my vent) so much of the game is staggeringly nonintuitive. You need to do things that I can't imagine anyone ever thinking to try. I'd never have made it past the first couple chapters without going to an online walkthrough, and I hate having to do that. The puzzles in games like Indigo Prophecy, Beyond Good and Evil, and Half-Life 2 were challenging, but I never got so stuck on any of them that I had to go online to look up the answers. When I've tried to move a lever and found that it won't move, I don't think to backtrack later on and try it. When it's been twenty minutes since I last saved the game, I don't think to try jumping into that seemingly bottomless hole. I could go on, but suffice it to say that the actions you need to take to proceed are frequently less than obvious. At one point, I needed to get into a kind of gondola, but there seemed to be an invisible wall blocking me from getting on. So after trying for about 60 seconds, I started looking elsewhere. When I eventually checked the walkthrough I found that I was indeed supposed to get onto that gondola. I hate poor collision detection.

But now that I've got my personal grudges out of the way, let me go into the ins and outs of the game. I've read a good bit of H.P. Lovecraft, and although I've never actually read Call of Cthulhu, I have enjoyed his writing, and thus thought I'd like this game. And there were parts of it which I certainly did like. It certainly had more of a story than Condemned: Criminal Origins or F.E.A.R. did, although it reminded me quite a bit of both those games.

You play a detective named Jack. Jack has a mysterious 3-year gap in his memories. Where was he for those three years? What was he doing? Having not actually finished the game yet, I don't know for sure, but I've got a couple guesses. As the game progresses, Jack's investigations take him deeper and deeper into the bowels of the organization known as The Esoteric Order of Dagon, and he becomes witness to things no man should see.

The game mechanics for injury are actually pretty original. Instead of having a generic life bar, Jack's injuries come in the form of bruises, cuts, and broken bones. Being shot may require a bandage, or even stitches. Jumping from too high a ledge could give Jack a broken leg, requiring a splint. Application of these items takes time in game, so using them in the middle of a battle is impossible. But running on a broken leg is slow and produces a sound that will likely make you wince. And leaving a bad cut untended results in blood loss, and eventual death. As Jack's injuries worsen, your vision will blur and slowly go to black-and-white, and you'll also experience some hearing loss. You'll move more slowly, and your aim with any weapon will wobble. This is what you get instead of a life bar. It's kind of neat, but it drove me crazy at times. Luckily, Jack comes equipped with morphine. Taking the morphine won't eliminate the injuries, but it allows you to ignore them for a short period of time. However, although your vision clears and you can run at normal speed, it doesn't mean that the injuries won't still kill you. And more than once, I couldn't tell that I was injured, and my death took me totally by surprise.

Other than injury, the other life mechanic is sanity. This doesn't come into play so much until much later in the game when you begin to see some fairly freaky stuff, but witnessing certain creatures or scenes causes Jack's sanity to slip. Some of these are unavoidable, such as the flashes of out-of-body experiences Jack has. Those actually remind me of similar flashes from Indigo Prophecy. But others - the bad ones - are sights that you can and should avoid. During the middle of one boss fight I was playing, Jack went insane and killed himself because I spent too much time looking at the enemy I was fighting. To finish that fight, I had to play through it and minimize the time I spent looking at my opponent. On one hand, it's sort of innovative, but on the other, it's sort of annoying.

Similar to the insanity mechanic, Jack seems to be afraid of heights. Any time you're doing any kind of platforming, you need to avoid looking down. If you look down, Jack gets dizzy and his vision blurs horribly. It gets to the point where you really cannot see a thing around you, which is bad when there are ledges and bottomless pits about. Once again, kind of neat, but damned annoying.

There was a good amount of sneaking in the game too, but it's not implemented half as well as many other games do. I'd compare it more to sneaking in Oblivion than I would to sneaking in Thief or Beyond Good and Evil. But the game did have the best chase sequences I've seen. Not many games do a good job of implementing running away. The only one that comes to mind is fleeing the satchel charge in Half-Life. In Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, you're often fleeing foes, blocking and bolting doors behind you to slow them down, and trying to get a window open before your foes break the door down. The chases are actually really well done. I'd probably say they're the best part of the game. Of course, at that point in the game, you're unarmed. And speaking of Half-Life, the sequence where you're battling the Shoggoth reminds me quite a bit of the battle against the tentacle in Half-Life.

The last thing I've got to mention is the voice acting. The freakish occupants of Innsmouth and the members of the Esoteric Order of Dagon speak with a gurgle that makes their voices all but incomprehensible, which becomes a problem when they're saying things that tell you what you need to do next. Also, Jack is a character who spends the majority of the game on the verge of insanity, and yet his voice sounds incredibly matter-of-fact, even when he's facing a room full of dismembered corpses, and experiencing madness-induced blurred vision as a result. I'd have liked it a bit more if his voice matched his apparent mentality.

So all-in-all, the game did have a lot going for it, but I'd caution you not to buy it. There was just way too much frustration. But if you'd like to take a look at the gameplay, Gamespot has a really nice video review.