Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

aka: Call of Cthulhu: Mroczne Zakątki Świata, Call of Cthulhu: Temná zákoutí země
Moby ID: 20705
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Description official descriptions

Detective Jack Walters arrived in Innsmouth to solve a case of a missing person. But soon he finds himself confronted with terrible mysteries older than humanity, and with ghosts of the mysterious events that led to his incarceration in a mental hospital years ago.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a first-person action-adventure survival horror game, based on the H.P. Lovecraft mythos and his short story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

Initially, CoC: DCotE plays like an adventure game, but soon it gains elements of a stealth game and of a first-person shooter. Notably, the game does not feature an on-screen HUD (not even a crosshair); Jack's health is hinted at by visual cues; as for ammo, you need to remember how much you have left before you'll have to reload.

The health system used in the game is uncommon. There is no "hit points" system; rather, Jack receives minor or major wounds in specific parts of the body, and if he breaks a leg he's slowed down. To heal himself and prevent death from bleeding out, Jack can pick up medikits which contain bandages, splints, sutures and antidotes, each of which is used to heal a specific type of wound. Ill effects emerging from the wounds can be temporarily suppressed with a fix of morphine.

Jack's sanity also plays an important role. When Jack looks at disturbing things or finds himself in alarming conditions, his vision blurs, he begins hearing voices and talking to himself. If this gets too bad, Jack may go insane or commit suicide. Also, Jack suffers from acrophobia, and looking down in high places will cause him vertigo.

Spellings

  • 邪神的呼唤:地球黑暗角落 - Chinese spelling (simplified)

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94 People (91 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

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Critics

Average score: 77% (based on 57 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 72 ratings with 7 reviews)

Cthulhu Is Calling Me...And Making Me Write This Review!

The Good
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. And the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."-H.P. Lovecraft-

Call of Cthulhu, has been in development for a long time. Too long. Perhaps like the elder god himself the developers were just waiting for the “stars to be right”. More likely the long delay was a direct result of the game having no publisher until recently. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners on the Earth, is based upon the works of American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.(The 20th Century's successor of Poe.-MM-) It is the first and hopefully not last game based on his work from Euro developer Headfirst. Sure there have been other games inspired by Lovecraft, such as: Alone in the Dark, Shadow of the Comet, Prisoner of Ice, and the excellent Eternal Darkness. This game is like nothing seen before in survival horror gaming.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange eons even death may die."-The Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazard-

In CoC:DcotE, you assume the role of Jack Walters, a Private Investigator, whom has recently had some luck cracking difficult cases. The game begins with what will be his most difficult yet, and lead Jack to confront The Great Old Ones. Years later Jack is released from Arkham Asylum, as he rebuilds his life, he receives a call that will send him to Innsmouth, a decrepit village only spoken of in hushed tones. And should be well to familiar to any Lovecraft reader. The investigation will soon have Jack running for his life in some of the most exciting sequences in any game. And will draw him deeper into the abysmal horror that exists just beyond the veil of reality. I will not divulge any more of the plot. It is the games strongest suit, and will keeping you playing even as the game gets exceedingly difficult, but more on that later.

"Out from ruins once possessed fallen city, living death"-The Thing That Should Not Be, Metallica-

The Graphics are quite good, and I found that the screens do it little justice. The use of lighting is pure genius, as is the grain filter, which helps Innsmouth look dilapidated just as it should. The only downside would be that the sanity effects can be quite annoying at time and incredible at others.

The Sound and Music excels as it should in any horror game worth it’s salt. Creepy sound effects heighten the experience especially during the Jack’s decent into madness. Music is scare but all of the tunes are memorable, particularly one recurring tune with lyrics.

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."- H.P. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu-

The Gameplay, is different from typical horror games in a good way. Firstly the P.O.V. is entirely in the first person, which helps draw the player into the game, as well as alleviates, bad “cinematic” views in which you cannot see what you are doing. Resident Evil I’m looking at you. And healing wounds is not as easy as quaffing a potion, you must treat each wound individually. With bandages, splints, and stitches. The sanity effects heighten the experience, hearing voices, hallucinations, and vertigo are all common place. The effects can get in the way particularly the vertigo, and panic attacks. This game is truly an adventure game with combat, as most of the game is spent collecting items and solving puzzles. Mostly you avoid combat, yet the combat itself is functional, and enjoyable, there’s nothing like blowing away an evil hybrid. This game is not for children, as just about everything that a game can receive an Mature rating for this game has.

The combat can take some getting used to. As the FPS with no cross heir is non-existent. Once you obtain a gun, a few hours into the game, you can finally fight back. However that is not an invitation to blow everything in sight away.

When using guns there are two ways top fire. Normal fire, which is less precise. And aimed mode. In which you can target certain body parts. The head, of leg or arm, etc. However if you hold the gun in aim mode too long, Jack's arm will start to shake and make your shots less accurate.

Targeting has other benefits as well. Head shots, of course will deliver instant death to any foes. While shooting the arm of an enemy will make it harder for them to shoot you. If you shoot them in the leg, they will limp and be easier to kill or escape from. Be warned however as they can do the same to you!

The Bad
The Shadow Over Innsmouth

This being said this one is far from perfect. As mentioned certain sanity effects can complicate things. The game can also be frustratingly hard. The game is actually very liner. That is to say that you have to accomplish events an exact way, and you may fail often until you find it. But it will be the excellent plot that keeps you coming back for more.

At some points in the game there are endless hybrids. This is a gameplay flaw. It is annoying. And often you will not realize that the foes will not stop. This also contradicts the short stories, from which the game is based. As in those we learn that Innsmouth has only about 100 people. Where as in the game it can seem there are 10 times that.

In the later stages of the game save points become less and less common. Which means you will end up playing some of the same parts over and over.

The Bottom Line
The Shadow Out Of Time

Any fan of Lovecraft’s “Weird Fiction” as he called it, should check this one out. They probably already have. So anyone who like horror games, or adventure games should also check it out. In the end this game shows how inferior other older horror games are. Headfirst is working on two more Cthulhu games here’s hoping it does not take as long to come out this time. If they ever come out at all. So heed Cthulhu’s call and try this game.

Xbox · by MasterMegid (723) · 2007

A fantastic game, if not broken to the point of being almost unplayable.

The Good
Before I started playing Call of Cthulu I had no idea what the big deal was with H.P Lovecraft. I had never read any of his stories or watched any of the poorly made college films based on his source material. Part of the reason I avoided his work was because it was a popular thing for "alternative" teenagers and to a lesser extent, adults, to latch onto. They would look at you with disgust if you didn't know who Lovecraft was, yet they knew little about the mythology beyond reading one of his short stories in between writing bad poetry. There are also those who genuinely love Lovecraft's work and appreciate how instrumental he was in horror becoming mainstream.

Headfirst seemed to come from that second camp. They appreciated his work, resolved to treat it with respect and ended up creating a fine game. They were not pretentious though, the game doesn't rely on you having scrutinized Lovecraft's entire body of work. Call of Cthulu is a license done right, and to see this happen always gives me a warm feeling.

A large portion of Call of Cthulu is based on a pen and paper RPG. You play a private investigator who, after losing some of his life to period of darkness, resolves to take on a missing persons case. He travels to the town of Innsmouth and after some investigating is almost killed by the inhabitants. The rest of Dark Corners of the Earth is centered around his journey to discover what happened to himself and what happened to Innsmouth.

The artistic direction in Dark Corners of the Earth is to be applauded. Innsmouth itself is moody, faces peer out of windows and doors close as Jack walks past. The inhabitants are twisted and loathsome, watching Jack with suspicious eyes as he walks past. It's all definitely scripted, but it adds a degree of depth to the atmosphere that is missing in many survival horror games.

Because in the end, above all else, Dark Corners of the Earth feels like a survival horror game.

The gameplay is a combination of FPS action and stealth elements with a degree of investigative puzzle solving thrown in here and there. Jack relies on fire arms and more silent bladed weapons to fight the various twisted inhabitants of Innsmouth however most of the time it is better to avoid fights whatsoever. If Jack is injured instead of the standard "health kit" items the player must apply certain treatments specific to the injury sustained. For instance if his leg is injured it must be splinted, if it isn't he will hobble and his jumping will be compromised until the injury is taken care of. The gameplay in general is fantastic, Jack controls flawlessly and sneaks and jumps intuitively. Firing weapons relies on a steady hand and in a refreshingly realistic dynamic enemies can be killed with a single well placed knife thrust instead of requiring a barrage of slashes.

The variety of environments is remarkable and Headfirst seems to have mastered the art of backtracking. In many games, backtracking is employed as either a way of extending the length of a game or artificially convoluting puzzles. Backtracking in Dark Corners of the Earth feels natural and how it is employed here relies on you keeping your wits about you and watching for things that could potentially be useful later on. It isn't simply "I need to go back down 8 hallways to use red key on red door" it is more "I walked past a broken valve a little while ago, maybe I can use this valve handle there?"

The environments look good as well, which is a blessing. Each crumbling building sits with moody light being cast on it from a dirty bulb. Most characters look good, some don't, typically they do though. The weapon models contain decent enough detail and environmental effects like heat haze in the refinery and chill air linger around Jack as he explores.

The sanity mechanic introduced in the game transcends the foundation laid by Eternal Darkness as a launch title for the Gamecube. In Eternal Darkness your sanity was drained when enemies were nearby and if your sanity ran out the game would simulate odd things happening to either your character or your television set itself. In Dark Corners of the Earth your sanity doesn't break the fourth wall, it is there to make you want to keep Jack alive. If you don't keep him away from corpses, odd sculptures of things Cthulu can channel the screen will blur and Jacks world will warp and deform. If his sanity drops too low he will take his own life either by beating himself to death or shooting himself.

The Bad
Dark Corners of the Earth shines in its opening moments. The chilling cinematic nature of these, the feeling that you're simply part of something much bigger and grander is lost as you progress through the game and it becomes essentially nothing more than a corridor shooter. There is little technique in how you play beyond repeatedly using trial and error to either tediously log a mental path for yourself or risk jumping out guns blazing to face hordes of respawning enemies.

O.k, say that's a bit of an exaggeration. This game never turns into a twitch shooter, but it also doesn't do a good enough job of keeping its fires stoked to consistently scare and intimidate you.

When you've come to terms with what the game demands of you you begin to realize that you don't get enough healing items to compensate for the vast amount hits you will take from enemies when you are forced to engage in combat. They are insanely overpowered and can take a lot punishment, while you can only take a few hits before being rendered critical. Additionally, if you take too much damage to one particular body part you will find yourself consistently running out of that one item you need to heal it.

The monotony of environments begins to take its toll after a while as well. I don't know whether or not it's simply because I can't stand dank, boring tunnels and generic stone temples but past Innsmouth the environments lack character or anything interesting for that matter. The dynamic, claustrophobic nature of Innsmouth contrasts greatly against generic mansion A and generic industrial building B.

What didn't I like about the game? The engine. The engine is one of the most unrefined and bug riddled ones I have ever encountered. Whether it was dropping frames or stopping the game from advancing there were so many occasions where something potentially game breaking happened that I almost lost count. I got stuck on ladders, stuck behind ladders, stuck in a vent, the ship scene wouldn't end, enemies wouldn't stop respawning when they were supposed to, events wouldn't trigger etc. etc. It wasn't just one or two things, it was just an endless procession of bugs and glitches that ruined any suspension of disbelief that I had built up. I mean, I have never had to start a game from scratch because of a fault left in by the developer but I had to do it twice with Dark Corners of the Earth. Frankly, I'm embarrassed for Bethesda having released such an unfinished game.

The Bottom Line
Dark Corners of the Earth is a compelling game full of frightening elements that consistently surprise the player. The sanity system is pure genius and the driving, cinematic nature of the opening moments is simply nail biting. The gameplay is solid and the combat is violent and visceral. Having to heal your limbs independently from one another is, at first, a cool concept and the rendering of environments is beyond reproach.

It's a shame then that the game becomes a boring slog during the second half that displays none of the creative flair that the beginning of the game exhibits. The health system becomes a problem when you come up against waves and waves of ridiculously respawning enemies and the sheer glut of game breaking bugs that riddle the package are inexcusable.

While I enjoyed the presentation of the mythology and the gameplay when it worked, Dark Corners of the Earth becomes a tad too mediocre and broken to recommend.

Xbox · by AkibaTechno (238) · 2010

A truly unique gaming experience... Which might or might not be a good thing.

The Good
In a true Lovecraftian style, DCotE opens right at the tragic ending of the story. As in 97% of the infamous author's work, the voiceover of the main character -in this case one Jack Walters; locked in a padded cell- rambles on about how whatever it is he experienced drove him nearly insane, and how lucky are all of us who don't even suspect about the horrors that are lurking at the bottom of the seas, inside our closets and under our beds, and how he would've killed himself long ago, were he not so afraid of the dreams that might come with that sleep of death.
Today, however, is the day Jack finally decides to take that difficult step --the one that kicks the chair back.

Game over, your character's dead.

Who ever thought that putting a chair and a rope in the cell of a delusional maniac depressive would be a good idea? Boy, someone's gonna hit the unemployment line before the day's over...
Kind of a short game, isn't it-- Oh, wait, we're rewinding.

OK. It's 6 years ago now --September 6, 1915 to be exact; which means the previous scene was about 90 years ago, review-on-website-wise. Jack Walters, who happens to be a respectable detective working with the police, arrives to a manor of sorts, where the members of some cult are having a healthy firefight with the law enforcement. The leader of the cult demands to speak with Jack, so our hero gets in the manor commando-style. Only he doesn't take a gun with him. Good call there, detective Gandhi.
Anyway, (some other) mistakes are made, the slippery slope, and eventually our man is handed his first taste of otherworldly horrors.

Fast forward and we're back 6 years into the future, minus 10 days. Tell me if all this time-travelling makes you sick, don't go puking on the seats, please. Jack is a freelance detective now, and apparently he's not been in his best shape for the last 6 years. We do know he'll be much worse within a week and a half, though, so I guess it's all relative.
While he's mumbling to himself about his fragmented memories of these 6 years, during which he happened to spend some time in a mental hospital (apparently he goes in there from time to time, then), he receives a call from some guy who wants his services. Our man doesn't like to be interrupted when he's pinning about his lost memories and his season at the madhouse with senseless crap like, you know, work and stuff; so it is with much reluctance that he ultimately reaches into the case files cabinet (A.K.A. the trash bin) and takes the envelope his client sent him God knows how long ago, with money and the stuff needed to kick off the case. Jack is to find the manager of a grocery store at the coastal town of Innsmouth, who's gone M.I.A. The local newspapers and authorities say the guy ran away with all the money, but his boss suspects something else is going on. Like, he probably didn't run away as much as he drove away in one of the company vehicles. Or maybe someone killed him and they're covering the whole deal. They're some pretty grim fellows down at Innsmouth, I can tell you.

This way, the adventure proper starts; the entire first stage being a free adaptation of the short story The Shadow Over Innsmouth. For the casual Lovecraft sympathizer (namely, me), it's a damned fine homage, from the very beginning with the travel as the sole passenger of the one bus that stops into town daily, to later that same night, when after a whole day of nosing around making tempers slowly flare, things go haywire and an unarmed Jack is chased through the rooftops and streets of the accursed town by the strange, xenophobic locals. I do know of hardcore Lovecraft fans that have quite a few complaints to make about the way the mythology's been treated, but hey, if you're a hardcore fan of this kind of literature, you can't be all that well up in the head, so who are you to talk.
Anyway, I recommend reading the story before playing the game (Come on, don't be such a lazy ass, it's about 50 pages long, man! And it's like 100 years old already, which means it's available for freely, 100% legal downloading everywhere.) to properly enjoy the joke.


This game has been in the making for no less than 7 years. During the process some stuff was added, some stuff was left out, promises were made that never even began to become a reality, people came in, people went out... The usual story. The one thing that's been a constant throughout the entire tortuous process was the promise of bringing the gamer a unique style of gameplay that would provide an extremely realistic experience. And this, they sure have achieved.

First things first, the technical aspects all hover around average-to-above levels. The graphics themselves look dated, with most of the characters' faces being rather inexpressive and the scenario textures being poor, small-sized and painfully given away especially when tiled --you can see the repeating patterns in any given street or wall too easily, which makes it look much less like a real street and much more like a dull wallpaper.
That said, characters are nicely animated, and they did pack in a bunch of special effects that more than make up for any criticism there could be made graphics-wise. For starters, they're using the most awesome jaggies-inhibiting effect I've ever seen; even if you set the game down at 640x480 with no antialiasing, you'll have to squint to see any jagged edges, and whatever it is they're doing, it has no major impact in the game's performance. It probably has to do with the dimly-lit, misty atmosphere present throughout the whole game, so it wouldn't probably work for, say, a GTA game, but it does work fine for this game, so there's that.
But graphics-wise, the main course is the protagonist's insanity: I'll get into detail further ahead, but for now let's say the visual effects are literally mind-bending, you'll truly feel the shocks the protagonist feels, the tension, the vertigo, and the almost palpable feeling of the sanity loss --reflections, refractions, motion blur; every little trick your video card can do to distort an image is put to work here.

The sound is split in half: On the one hand we have a soundtrack that -while not particularly memorable- does a perfect job to support the atmosphere (especially during the most stressful scenes) and believable sound effects, both the real ones (like the gunshots) and the unreal ones (like the monsters' grunting); and on the other hand we have the most painfully amateurish voice acting I've heard in years. We'll deal with that in time.


So, let's get into what makes this game so unique; which is, well, its uniqueness. The game is played from a first-person perspective, but it's FAR from your average shooter. Jack has to do a lot of sneaking, but it isn't a proper stealth game either; the game won't tell how visible or not Jack is, there are no noise level indicators, no cameras showing enemy positions... you're left to your own devices to judge which shadow is the darkest one, whether or not you're making too much noise, and so on, which is, well, just like it would be were you try to sneak on someone in the real world.
By the way, in the 100% pure stealth missions the AI is surprisingly good, and as long as you use your best real life discretion in order to sneak by, the enemies will perform greatly. Their field of view is expertly calculated, and you need to be very good at hiding to fool them. The mere fact that you're standing in the shadows doesn't make you invisible, Sam Fischer.

Anyway, we were saying there are no indicators. In fact, there's no "Heads Up Display" on screen at all, no superimposed text, nothing that stands between your character's eyes and your own. Every single thing presented on screen is strictly related to the story in motion, the way Jack sees it. Whenever you need to read the documents you pick up, manage your items, or check Jack's health status in detail (as well as heal his injuries) you go to a separated inventory screen while the action is paused. The HUD-less interface works so amazingly well it makes you wonder how come we ever got convinced that we needed to see a health bar or a bullet-count on screen at all times.

The management of the character's health is one of the things that stand out the most. Jack receives localized damage, which is not only visually represented in a schematic of his body in the inventory screen, but can also be felt during gameplay. Take a wound on your arm, and your aiming will be impaired, take a wound to the head and bloodstains will hamper your vision (This is, if you survive such wound --a head shot can be as deadly to you as it is to your enemies), take wounds to the legs and you'll feel Jack's pain as he limps and moans in pain.
The injuries you can take are of different types, and health kits provide different types of treatment for each one of them; which makes for some light strategizing, since you have to be careful with the management of your supplies, of which you can carry a limited number. For example, a heavy bleeding wound is quickly taken care of with sutures, but then these are way too scarce. You could choose to just wait until the injury turns to light bleeding and treat it with (widely available) bandages, but then you'd be walking around injuried until that happened, with the risk of being weaker and, depending on where the wound is located, having different abilities impaired.
Also, while healing an injury makes it disappear instantly in a very videogamey fashion, the healing process does take up to a few seconds depending on its complexity, so it can only be done once Jack is in a relatively calmed spot. In case of an emergency, the inventory also has morphine shots that give Jack a little speed boost and help numbing the pain, but then his vision will be blurred, with the obvious consequences to his aiming capability; not to mention that repeatedly abusing the drug might end up being fatal. You know, stay in school and all that.

During the first few stages of the game Jack goes around unarmed, a perfect victim to his enemies, his speed and wits at running from or sneaking by his captors his only chances for survival (Again, Innsmouth's chase has to be one of the best parts of the game, if no THE best part, even with all the frustration it can bring.); but then he eventually gets a hold of a weapon (and 3 or 4 more later on)... which doesn't exactly make things that much easier.
Like I said before, this game is not a shooter. Our man is simply too clumsy to ever make it into Quake's cast, but the odd thing is, his awkwardness at handling weapons doesn't feel like the product of a faulty game engine, but rather the carefully planned effect of a very capable one. Like it's supposed to be this way. Unlike every other game where you handle weapons, in DCotE you actually get the feeling of the thing having weight, like you would probably feel when using a real weapon. There's no crosshair on screen, so you can either take your chances with a blind shot from the default position or use the "aim" button, which puts the weapon right in front of your eyes, so you aim with the weapon's own sights, as it's supposed to be done. It's harder than it sounds, but it's also quite rewarding once you get the trick, it's like you're actually learning how to shoot properly.
It's a good thing Jack Thompson probably won't ever hear of this game, or you can already imagine the lawsuits that phrase alone could spawn...

By now you're probably wondering whether so much reality in a videogame won't end up being a bad thing, like, won't such a complicated healing system turn firefights into an infuriating experience?
Well, here's the thing. It does get annoying a lot of times. In fact, to be honest, there are quite a few spots where it gets videogameishly annoying (more on this in a minute); but for the most part, the whole system works. I was annoyed several times, but I couldn't help but admitting that it would've been just how things actually would have played out in reality, so it was only fair. Like it isn't the developers' fault, but rather reality's fault for it not being more like a regular videogame.
For example, I'm walking on a thin wooden beam, a couple stories high. Below me, several rabid folks are on the lookout, so at all times I'm risking being spotted and promptly shot down. In a very videogamey fashion, I look down to monitor their behavior, and whoOooOOOoa!, the whole world starts spinning around me!! So walking forward suddenly becomes a pain in the neck for some seconds, as it turns really hard to tell what's forward and what's what.
I could choose to make the whole walk looking up to avoid the vertigo, but I wouldn't see where I'm stepping, with predictable results. So, the secret is to try and walk calmly, staring straight ahead at all times, not looking down no matter what happens, and pray that noone below thinks about looking up.
In a regular videogame, you wouldn't ever expect having to be so careful in such a situation, but doesn't it sound just like you would act in real life?


There are dozens of small details that enhance the immersion, like when every time you use an item or interact with the scenery, you actually see Jack's hands at work (In fact, his hands were supposed to show up even when you opened a door or picked up an item, but that was left out as it came out quite buggy); but hands down, the most outstanding feature of the game is the aforementioned sanity system.
We know Jack Walters is a regular at the local mental hospital, and he's about to be confronted face to face with stuff that's supposed to be buried deep beneath the oceans for ever, so his sanity is at stake at all times. The more he comes in contact with disturbing imagery, be it a human corpse or a Lovecraftian monster, his pulse will accelerate and his perception of the world will be distorted in one of many possible ways. For every time the game makes you jump off your seat with a scary image or sound, you get to see Jack suffering the same experience, tenfold. Sometimes he'll even need to take cover in a safe spot to catch his breath and wait for the scenery to stop dancing around in a nausea-inducing fashion. It's the first time, as far as I know, that a horror videogame character reacts to the situation he's living like a real human being would.

The more exposed to disturbing imagery Jack is, the closer to a massive sanity failure, which means game over.
Keeping Jack sane is kind of tricky, especially since certain character dies because of him, and from that point on he's permanently haunted by ghostly visions fed by his own guilt, and they can show up anywhere. These visions -as almost every disturbing events, actually- can be avoided in order to minimize the overall sanity loss, but the scary scenes are the exact same reason why we play horror games, so sanity be damned, I went to get as many as I could. Poor Jack.

In this regard, there's a huge amount of delicious scary moments. Sometimes they're your typical "Boo!" device, placed in plain sight, like when you open a door and get a shockingly effective shot at the half-decomposed corpse of a hanging woman; but the truly memorable ones are more subtly placed, and they're sort of a sadistic reward to your curiosity --you can actually miss many of them if you just rush through the levels.
At a given point, I was walking down the street and passed by a house with street-level basement windows. I crouched to peek inside, and the exact moment I did it, I just managed to see a door slamming shut. It was as simple as it was great. The incredibly precise timing they got there is commendable.
Often during the game, the perspective will switch for a couple of seconds from Jack's eyes to something else's eyes, something that comes rushing through halls, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, and even crawling on walls and ceilings, always seemingly just seconds away from Jack. So, I was walking up this flight of stairs and I saw a window. Suddenly, I switched to the eyes of something that came leaping on the rooftops, and I noticed it was (which is to say, I was) watching into the very window at the end of the stairs that I (Jack) was about to reach! So when I regain control of Jack, I rush upstairs, I turn to the window, and I manage to get a glimpse of... something. It was definitely there, but it managed to jump out of my sight too fast, before I could tell what the hell it was. It was amazing. I've read descriptions of such carefully timed almost-close-encounters in horror stories and such, but I can't remember having seen them this well crafted. Certainly not in videogames.



The Bad

WOW!! With all that, this has to be, like, the best game ever! Right?
Well, not quite.

First, as I said, the graphics look definitely dated. While all the technical tricks I've mentioned do make up for them to a certain extent, and what we do have is enough to craft an effective horror atmosphere, some things are just wrong; like the fact the textures seem to use only 16-bit color. You might not tell for the most part, but if you look at the sky in outdoors Innsmouth, you can't help but noticing something's definitely not right up there. It's ugly, and there's no way around it.

Then we have the sound. More specifically, the voice acting. It's terrible. Actually, it's beyond terrible. "Terrible" could be applied to Silent Hill. This is atrocious.
Jack Walters is kind of average, which is not exactly a good thing for a guy we'll be hearing throughout the entire game, but hey, it could've been worse. Then we start the game and we approach the manor with the cultists, and we meet the first few NPCs --OH DEAR GOD!!! --OK, that guy is pressing his nose between his index finger and thumb while reading his lines.
How could this slip into the final game? I haven't made even 5 minutes into the game, this is the part where you present your product! People might uninstall the whole thing just because of the massive hit to the game's overall impression that such an awful acting means.
If you really couldn't escape from having to cast the producer's talentless nephew, at least push him back into some obscure, worthless character in the second half of the game, but don't make him the very first person the protagonist speaks to!

The voice cast seems to be comprised of some 4 people, for no less than 8 relevant characters, and dozens of extras. So, like the one above, you have an endless line of failed attempts at faking voices. It's the most painful cast I had to endure in recent memory.
There's a particular "Don't let him get away!" voice track that every third bad guy would play, that made my skin crawl in horror; not because it sounded particularly threatening, mind you, but because it made me ponder on the fact that someone actually got paid money for such a lame-ass line delivery. I mean, most of the cast of the Legacy of Kain games is probably unemployed now, couldn't they get at least a few of them? Was this cast so much cheaper?
Well, it does sound like it was.


Next, he have plot-related screw ups. One of the worst ones is Jack's personality, or rather, lack there of: He's constantly changing, it's really hard for anyone to identify with him. Usually he's this self-centered, reasonably smart guy, but every now and then he becomes a snotty prick you would smack right in the middle of the nose, and the change often happens right in the middle of a conversation, just like that.
There's a point at which he's looking for this woman, and he breaks in a house and, what do you know, he finds a woman who looks quite scared, and seems to be hiding. So, does he take the cue and realize here's his girl and tries to calm her down? --Nah, why would he? Let's better get all cocky and yell at her about how she's breaking into private property (excuse me?) and be the prick of the year to one of the three people in the entire town that doesn't seem to be ready to stab him in the back the moment he turns around.
His soulless, artificial voice acting doesn't make things any better, going to the extent of completely ruining a couple of otherwise intense scenes.

The storytelling is plagued by inconsistencies and plain stupidities that, while not terribly bad on their own, tend to undermine the big picture little by little. Like the names they gave to the levels/chapters; whoever it was that suggested the impossibly lame "Attack of the Fishmen", should've been fired at once.
Then again, it probably was that damned producer's nephew again. Damn his guts.

While it is true that some really picky Lovecraft fans complained about things that noone else would possibly notice, mythos-wise there are some details of the plot that can't be forgiven. One of the bigger ones being that, halfway into the game, you kill Dagon.
YOU. KILL. DAGON.
In case you're not familiar with the name, Dagon's one of the Old Ones, the unholy creatures around whom the entire Lovecraft mythology turn. Their groupies and hanger-ons like to refer to them with chants like: "That is not dead which eternally lies. After strange aeons hence, even death may die". That's a pretty daring motto to have, for a creature that takes 5 hits in the face to kill. Sure, those are torpedo hits, but still, the U.S. Army spent way more firepower in Bin Laden, and they never even found the guy.


All that said, however, the really important thing to criticize is the gameplay. While it is quite original and enjoyable once you get comfortable with it, and it's the very thing that makes the entire game stand out, it's also plagued by problems for which there's no excuse.

Jack can't run. He can walk, walk even slower while sneaking, and crawl while crouching. And that's it. That wouldn't be that much of an issue, if it wasn't for a few stages in which there's no other choice than to get away from some massive threat --the kind of threat you wouldn't leisurely stroll from, as much as you would sprint the hell away from.
In fact, there's been complaints in the official forums about the last stage of the game, where Jack escapes from a crumbling building, since a lot of people are getting stuck, unable to complete the final portion of the game because Jack's default speed prevents them from beating the stage's timer. And it is known to be a a problem with the speed, because you can alter the walking speed by hacking into the main .exe file, and any value above the default one solves the problem automagically.
Oddly enough, a little fiddling into said file reveals a variable called RunningSpeed, which defaults to a noticeably higher value than WalkingSpeed. Yet, as I've just said, there's no "run" key in the game. What the hell's that about?


The AI, while great in the stealth missions, is terrible in combat. Enemies rarely go for cover, they won't take any advantage of their numerical superiority, an they'll always fall for the most silly and obvious forms of ambush you can pull out. Many times you can actually bump into an enemy and he'll simply stand still with a blank expression and maybe fire a shot every two seconds while you fill him full of lead.


If you followed the game hype during the early years, you might remember Andrew Brazier speaking about the physics engine: «Our advanced real-time physics will be an essential part of the gameplay and atmosphere creation. [...] In terms of gameplay, this has far-reaching implications as it means there will be a number of ways to solve any particular puzzle That was January 2000, and that did sound like a promising feature back then. Today, 6 years later, the version 3.0 of the stunning Havok physics engine is out there, which made things look even more promising since, in the worst possible case, the DCotE team could still go an license it. There was no way they could not fulfill their promise.
However, neither the physics engine nor any of that gameplay goodness it was supposed to bring are anywhere to be found in the final game.

First, not only interaction with the world is hovering dangerously near zero, but whatever gimmicky physics-related problem-solving device there is, gets used only in the particular stage it is introduced, and never again. Once you learned using a given ability, your only chance at leveraging your experience in it, is a second playthrough. After that particular level is done with, you can just as well forget what you learned, for all it matters.
For example, while being chased in the hotel down at Innsmouth, Jack can (he actually has to) push furniture around to block doors behind him, thus slowing down his foes. However, that's the only stage in which he's gonna do that. He can't push a single thing during the rest of the game, just like that. Go realism.

On the other hand, along with the physics engine, gone are the promised multiple ways to solve problems. And, to quote my friend Andrew up there, this has far-reaching implications. You see, DCotE plays a little like a shooter and a little like a stealth game, but the overall feeling is that of an adventure game, where you need to figure the right way to beat each challenge. And this is a very bad thing.
You can find alternate ways to solve a given situation, but whenever you stray from the predefined path it becomes painfully obvious. You might succeed (though chances are you won't), but you get the feeling that you're not doing things the proper way, you either missed or screwed up something, and ended up having to do things this other way, which simply doesn't feel right. Rather than taking an alternate path, it feels like you're exploiting a design flaw.

Thus, much in the same way adventure games are meant for smart people, but only if they are smart in the exact way the developers were smart when planning the puzzles, DCotE is realistic, but only for the exact reality the developers had in mind when designing it. A game with so much emphasis on its realism should have had a much more open-ended gameplay. It was mandatory. Having to solve the game on rails as it is, sends all the realism down the drain.

Adding insult to injury, you can't quicksave. I did speak against the overuse of quicksave in the past, and I stand by that, but some games just beg for this feature.
DCotE not only plays like an adventure where you have to solve problems in the exact way the developers meant it, it plays like a really awful adventure where most solutions can only be found by trial an error. In an adventure game, this would translate into a dull exercise in pixel-hunting or use-everything-with-everything. In a game with this much action, it translates in repeatedly dying until you figure out the way to go.
Needless to say, if this happens 10 minutes away from the nearest savepoint, it gets downright infuriating.


One final annoyance has to be the fact that, despite all the realism these people have going on here, us players couldn't escape from having to endure, once again, a number of bad cliches, including but not limited to -ready those rotten tomatoes, people- jumping puzzles.
Can it be possible?
Dear game developers: JUMPING PUZZLES DON'T WORK IN FIRST PERSON PERSPECTIVE GAMES. WE ALL HATE IT WHEN YOU DO THIS, WE'VE SAID IT ABOUT A GAZILLION TIMES IN THE LAST 7 YEARS, AND IN FACT YOU NEVER EVEN SHOULD'VE NEEDED TO BE TOLD SO IN THE FIRST PLACE!! IT'S F'ING COMMON SENSE, GODDAMNIT!!!!

And when a game that revels in its uniqueness pulls them out, it's twice as bad.



The Bottom Line

So, what do we do with this one?
To be quite honest, I'm still no sure whether I love or I hate this game.

DCotE is one of the most vividly realistic experiences to ever exist in the form of a videogame. Applied to a horror game, this translates in a recipe for awesome, in any language. Some other games might or might not do a better job to make you jump off your seat with their "Boo!" techniques, but I don't think there's a game that captures and transmits the true feeling of tension, shock, vertigo, pure, genuine fear, and the dreadful sense of being slowly descending into madness like this one. You do feel every little thing your character experiences as if it was happening to you, and your character does experience the things he's put through, unlike most horror games' protagonists that simply see them pass by.
The game features plenty of sneaking and shooting, both things we've done countless times in the past, but it manages to do them in an oddly realistic way that makes them feel like a total novelty. This amounts to equally high levels of enjoyment and frustration, so make what you will of that.

On the other hand, the game can get impossibly annoying at times because of a number of bad decisions, bad storytelling and acting, inopportune resorting to awful videogame cliches, and -worst of all- the most painful form of linearity, in which not only you can't stray from the path intended to solve each situation, but you actually have to randomly guess what the developers had in mind in each case, which is usually much harder than it sounds, since while at it you can get killed too many times, being forced to replay some stages until you learn to honestly hate them.


All that said, the first thing I did once I finished the game was starting over again.
That was about a week ago and, even though it still gets annoying at times, I'm enjoying it like a degenerate maniac. Maybe even more so than the first time through.

Windows · by Slug Camargo (583) · 2006

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Trivia

Details

When playing Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth pay close attention to your surroundings, especially during the first hour or so of playing. Look on rooftops, peek through the occasional cellar window and so on. There are a lot of little "details" in the environments and you might catch a glimpse of something you didn't expect, and it might even be a bit disturbing. These can range from quick glimpses of some inhuman horror as it passes by a window to seeing a dead body that's been hanging from the ceiling for weeks.

Development

The March 27, 2006 release date of the PC version ended a six-year cycle of development hell. Headfirst began developing Dark Corners of the Earth for a German publisher named Fishtank. Fishtank was taken over by JoWood and JoWood wasn't interested in the title. Headfirst continued development while searching for publishers. Bethesda ended up with the publishing rights, but they wanted it as an Xbox title, not a PC game.

The Xbox version was released in October of 2005. Shortly after that, Headfirst entered into financial difficulties which affected their ability to pay their employees, leaving many of them to find employment elsewhere. Headfirst was forced to sell their Simon the Sorcerer license to Silver Style and put their offices up for sale. The remaining Headfirst employees completed the port of Dark Corners of the Earth. As of 2006, plans for additional Call of Cthulhu games, Destiny's End and Beyond the Mountains of Madness seem to be dead.

German version

The Xbox version (when having the console set to German) misses all blood effects when hurting enemies. All other blood effects are untouched.

References

Take a look at the posters of Brian Burnham, which are scattered through the game, on these he has a striking resemblance to H.P. Lovecraft.

Usenet

The development of Dark Corners of the Earth can be traced back to a 1999 Usenet post where Headfirst's Andrew Brazier asked alt.horror.cthulhu readers, "What would you want to see in a Cthulh (sic) computer game ?"

Awards

  • GameSpy
    • 2006 – Level of the Year (PC) (for Hotel Escape)

Information also contributed by MasterMegid and Robstein

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Dwango.

Windows added by Kabushi.

Additional contributors: Terrence Bosky, Unicorn Lynx, n][rvana, Alaka, UV, Eltahriel, Patrick Bregger.

Game added January 23, 2006. Last modified March 15, 2024.