Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet

The Good
Shadow Of The Comet would have been a pretty standard point and click adventure game ala the old Sierra King's Quest line. What makes it stand out is the atmosphere. It perfectly creates the sense of creepy tension that the best Lovecraft stories convey.

There's all sorts of things going on 'just beneath the surface' of the story. When you talk to most of the characters in town, you'll see a nicely rendered portrait of them. In a nice little throwaway touch, most of these townsfolk are based on people from old scary movies. In the course of your adventure, you'll run across cameos by Vincent Price, Jack Nicholson (watch out for him!) and even H.P. Lovecraft himself. There's many others. I just can't remember them all now.

The voice acting for Parker is very good. The rest of the cast is at least decent. (Except for that nurse. Most wooden voice acting ever.) They did a very good job of making you feel that they were hiding something without making it too obvious or over the top. Everybody oozed the sense that they were thinking 'You've found what you want. Now leave!' while being polite to your face.

The Bad
While the gameplay is pretty straightforward and the puzzles are amazingly logical for an adventure game, there's one point at which EVERY player WILL GET STUCK.

There's a part where Parker receives a map (if I remember correctly) and needs to look at it to move on. Simple enough. Unfortunately the only way to look at the map is to head back to your rented room, sit at the desk and view the map. There are no clues suggesting you should head back to your room or any good reason that that should be the only place to view it.

Simply having Parker saying he didn't feel safe viewing the map in public or something along those lines would have been a huge help.

Also, the maze full of monsters, while not terrible or even out of place wasn't quite as good as the rest of the game.

The Bottom Line
Aside from the one TERRIBLE 'puzzle', Shadow Of The Comet is a great adventure game. The puzzles are logical and the atmosphere is fantastic.

If you're a Lovecraft fan, you owe it to yourself to pick it up.

Followed up by Prisoner Of Ice, though it isn't as highly recommended as Shadow Of The Comet.

The Good
Well, at least your protagonist will get a stroke or two. And that's only a minor spoiler, since the plot of this wonderful adventure is so multilayered and so twisted, that it will keep surprising you till the end.

Shadow of the Comet is one of the most lovingly designed horror games, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft or not. Since it IS inspired, this, of course, helps to build up a strong storyline based on a rich universe. It starts simple enough, in a year 1910, with an American photographer John Parker arriving in a small port town of Illsmouth in order to take pictures of Halley's Comet passing by. He also has a diary of a madman in his trunk, who dared to do the very same thing 76 years ago, but that's a secret, so please keep your mouth shut!

Actually, this skill - keeping some stuff to yourself - will become useful very soon, since you'll meet many suspicious characters immediately after your arrival. Some of them are friends, others are involved in a sinister plot. Act carefully, think twice and save often, as they used to say. Or die a horrible death.

The gloomy atmosphere grows quickly on you, and the wonderfully disturbing music helps a lot. Yet it is the story that builds tension. You will spend 3 days and 3 nights in Illsmouth, but the game is so cleverly designed, that you'll never feel like going around in circles in order to trigger some stupid event you've no idea about. Parker will get access to new town areas every now and then, search a nearby forest, travel to a few islands. There's always a lot going on, and if not - look closely, follow suspicious characters and read your journal! This was one of the important innovations, since in early 90s games didn't keep track of your progress. Well, Shadow of the Comet did, and did masterfully, without turning into a step-by-step walkthrough.

The puzzles vary from easy and logical to complex and hair-pulling, so don't count on the journal much. Sometimes it requires you to think out of the box, sometimes it's just a straightforward inventory puzzle. The game also futures several not-quite-arcade sequences in a sense you have to watch your step and not be eaten. This adds adrenaline to an already nervous experience.

While Shadow of the Comet doesn't follow any particular novel, it manages to deliver the general atmosphere very nicely, with creepy environment, familiar life stories and a number of references, starting from a diploma of Miskatonic University on the wall and ending with ancient Gods in person. The developers were so obviously into Lovecraft and horror genre, that even characters are portrayed as B-movie horror stars and Lovecraft himself! Seriously, it can't get any better.

The Bad
It can get worth though - for some at least. You really should find and play the CD version that came out in a year after the original one. Not only it adds voices (some nice work done there), an intro and a short tour around 'The Lovecraft Museum', but, more importantly, removes the dead-ends and invents mouse support! Since the diskette version was keyboard-controlled, it led to some brave experiments and frustrating path-finding.

The same can be said about the graphics: not everyone's cup of tea. While the cut-scenes and close-ups are beautifully stylised, the main playground looked nothing special even back in 1993, with Sierra and LucasArts overshadowing the picture in every aspect. This is probably the reason why the game was robbed of the public attention. But should one care about it today?

The Bottom Line
That wasn't a question for me! The story had so many memorable moments and shocking details, that I couldn't care less about the dated graphics. And you shouldn't too, since there are very few horror games of such caliber out there. Even the official sequel - Prisoner of Ice - that came out a couple of years later, made by the same talented team using the same license, was nowhere as good as Shadow of the Comet. A highly underrated and deeply involving classics made by fans for fans.