Review for Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game. Game for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 30/10/2018
In the wake of the success of critics and users recently received by Vampyr, Focus Home Interactive tries to consecrate itself to a publisher of the highest prestige after years of attempts made of good premises and excellent intentions, however never materialized in a massive and recognized title. The occasion for reconfirmation shortly after the excellent work on the equally gloomy atmospheres of the vampire Jonathan Reid manifests itself with the appearance of the most loved polyp of all time: Call of Cthulhu re-proposes the homonymous and famous board game in a videogame version, which reached its seventh edition in 2014, thirty-three years after its first publication.
The goal of the transposition? To mix survival horror elements with a high psychological impact characterizing the bibliography of HP Lovecraft (visionary mind and author of the famous cosmology of horror) with those elements with an RPG flavor of the original board game: an undertaking that is not in itself simple, repeatedly undertaken by many in the past with mixed results. When dealing with the Ancients, on the other hand, fate tends not to smile and the failure rate skyrockets: for those who do not know him, the cephalopod-like God Cthulhu is not one of the benevolent ones and also this time it helped to make the road to the gone day arduous and impetuous. Coincidences?
The year 2014 runs when Focus Home Interactive announces loudly that it has invested the Frogwares team in the development of a title based on the stories of the Providence Solitaire, just in time to spread the veil of silence for over two years, which then lifted only in 2016 when Focus surprisingly returns to talk about Call of Cthulhu: the burden of concluding the ambitious project, which in the meantime induced rampant hype among the thousands of fans of the tremendous Lovecraftian cosmogony, falls on the French development studio Cyanide which promises its release in 2017: the more tumultuous handover than expected, certainly thanks to an unfavorable astral coincidence and a reformulation of the initial project to find confirmation in the great expectation generated, thus giving us the title with a year delay.
All is well that ends well, and Call of Cthulhu thus arrives on our shelves ready for put a strain on our perception of reality and its dimensional planes: will we be able to thwart the rise of the Ancient One without giving up our sanity altogether?
Nightmare investigators, to me eyes, joypads and ears! We are in Boston, it is 1924. It is Edward Pierce, a veteran of the First World War now a private investigator, who receives the attention of astral forces greater than him: depressed, at the mercy of post-traumatic stress that finds relief exclusively in ' alcohol, Edward is approached by a renamed art dealer whose daughter Sarah Hawkins was a victim along with her entire family of a mysterious fire that hit their villa located on the island of Darkwater, a few miles from Boston.
We reach without delay the small and inhospitable island, surrounded by deep dark and threatening waters where we will be able to give vent to our investigative skills: in this first phase of the game we will explore a small portion of the Darkwater pier becoming familiar with the game mechanics and immediately testing investigative skills of our detective.
As in the paper game, in Call of Cthulhu the growth of the character is linked to the distribution of skill points obtained by continuing in the game and completing precise actions on a total of five categories (Investigation, Scent, Strength, Psychology and Eloquence) to which are added knowledge in medicine and occultism, which can only be perfected by finding and collecting relevant in-game objects. Each of these skills will come to Edward's rescue in specific situations: the higher their value, the more likely it will be to unlock their use in a given dialogue with consequent profit.
Alongside the evolution of the skill tree there will be the pressing and inevitable index of madness resulting from the horrors to which Edward will be constantly subjected. In the choices we are going to undertake, special attention will always be placed on the level of sanity of our unfortunate person, on pain of the ever more uncontrollable loss of perception of reality, a fact capable of heavily influencing the outcome of our adventure.
In some situations it will then be possible to activate an extraordinary investigation mode called Reconstruction: Edward will go into a kind of investigative trance, the edges of the screen will blur and your task will be to discover the cause and effect by reconstructing the ghosts of the past of a certain place, interacting with the objects present and passing skill tests.
The advice, predictable considering the nature of the title, is to spend the right time to talk to all the suspicious and superstitious islanders you will meet while exploring the more terrifying and insane areas of the island. Check every corner, every room, every drawer to gather as much information as necessary to unlock new dialogue options, thus guaranteeing you a more detailed overview of the situation: simple but effective setting of the game menus, inside which you will find well organized and divided chapter by chapter the clues recovered on occult places, people and situations, in addition to the detail of your inventory and Edward's precious diary, which will be automatically updated with each new discovery.
As it was on the other hand intuitive Call of Cthulhu presents a total of four different endings, which they share that bittersweet aftertaste in perfect harmony with what is the production of HP Lovecraft: however, given the multitude of options and turning points present in each of the 14 chapters that make up the title, a greater effort towards further additional endings would have been desirable.
Originally intended to break up the multitude of investigative sequences, set in a different semi-open scenario of Darkwater Island for each chapter, the Cyanide boys have included passages of a stealth and vaguely action nature, which are however of poor technical realization and that fail. in bringing a breath of fresh air to gameplay otherwise deliberately very linear but of excellent workmanship.
The different distribution of skill points on Edward's characteristics will also allow you to better appreciate the complex branching of game scenarios, impacting considerably if not so much in the final result of a given action at least in the means and methods of achieving the desired effect. , often without giving us the immediate perception of the goodness or the level of success of our choices. An appreciable factor and which should have ensured sufficient replayability of the title. And instead the Cyanide team there binds by limiting the adventure to a series of autosaves (moreover overwriting the previous save) in predefined game points which represent the only way to memorize our progress: with a system of this type we would expect the possibility of replaying, if not during the first gameplay, at least at the end of the first run, every single chapter, resuming the progress of a certain moment inheriting the choices of the previous ones.
However, none of this is possible: if you want to relive a certain passage, or simply try different game approaches, you will be forced to create a new slot and start inexorably from the incipit of the first chapter.
If on the one hand the color palette used where green and black mixed in skilful and evocative opacity in addition to good ambient music and a well-made dubbing enhance the immersion of the title and convey the growing sensation of madness and incipient horror to wonder, on the other hand an unfortunate technical realization will make us turn up our noses from the very beginning of the game. Since the first chapters of the game we will have to deal with an insufficient fluidity of movement, forced to live with what turns out to be more than a walk / run of our paladin, a jerky first-person camera.
In the same way we will not fail to note how the facial models of the secondary characters and NPCs are poor, characterized by an asynchronous lip sync, by cumbersome movements and animations that make them in some situations more similar to mannequins than to humans. Good graphic rendering of the interiors, with a level of detail that will allow us to appreciate the care in the reconstruction of the scenarios despite the repetitiveness of some polygonal elements, the glance on the external environments or the background to the buildings of the island is less successful, thanks to the lack of the HDR option and the bare graphic settings.
If you are a lover of HP Lovecraft literature and in particular of the Cthulhu Cycle, Call of Cthulhu is undoubtedly a title that you cannot ignore. In case you have never heard of the Cult of the Ancients, run immediately to your trusted physical or digital library and give yourself a gift: you will be ready to immerse yourself in the gloomy and nefarious settings of Darkwater and appreciate the pressing frenzy of a linear but highly dreamlike investigation and excellent realization. Will you be able to thwart the rise of the one who waits dreaming in the abode of R'lyeh or will you succumb to horror during the dozen hours spent on the foul Pacific island? In both cases, Call of Cthulhu will entertain you with a dark-toned adventure that will test your sanity, forced to wander through multiple dimensional planes in a psychological horror characterized by a convincing and never banal narrative!
► Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game is a Horror-RPG-Survival game developed by Cyanide and published by Focus Home Interactive for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, the video game was released on 30/10/2018
