Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

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.

The Good
The idea of an adventure inside Lovecraft's universe is always appealing especially to those of us who play games loosely based on horror novels like Alone in The Dark, Realms of the Haunting and Clive Barker’s Undying. Call of Cthulhu was in development for quite some time and the game shows why. The graphics and music are great; you can see there was a lot of detail to create great looking places and effects rarely seen in other games. The story is well written and if you have enough patience to proceed throw the game the cinematics will make an excellent job disclosing the plot.


The Bad
Call of Cthulhu has a lot of problems, the most important is that as an adventure is poor and you almost have no interaction with the environment, apart from pulling levers or switches. As a first person shooter is slow paced and boring the developers had a great idea to mix the different genres but they failed and the result is a bad hybrid.
Other problems in the game are: You can’t run, you either crawl or walk, this is very frustrating since the first levels of the game you don’t have weapons and you need to run for your life (Wait to be avoiding shotgun fire from five different enemies and you’ll know what it means to become a human target). Perhaps that’s why the IA has such poor aiming skills they sometimes miss when you stand still in front of them and sometimes they can hit you from far away. The game has a very innovative system where the player can suffer sanity looses when he is exposed to corpses or terrifying images, that is a great idea but the problem is that you can’t avoid most of them. Finally the player suffers from panic attacks that blur your screen so much you probably be dead by the end of them and also has vertigo which is a terrible thing that forces you to look up when jumping.

The Bottom Line
If you have a lot of patience (and I mean a lot) you might be able to forget the issues the game has and enjoy cthulhu for a while but I regret this is a game you won’t be playing ever again after you complete it, because when you close the story the large amount of problems cthulhu has as a game, will keep you from re-installing it.

The Good
It happens with many games that there is a big difference between the initial project and the final result. The "Dark Corners" game is a very sad example of this. The difference is so huge that the vision and the final version of the game are going to be my "The Good" and "The Bad" of this review.

We go back in time many, many years from now. I don't remember the exact year, but I think it was probably 2001. The guys from Headfirst present the idea of making a game or a series of games based on the Cthulhu Mythos. It wasn't to be the first one based on the Mythos, but they had a lot of new ideas about how to design a horror game. The main idea was to simulate the hypothetical feelings of the character and transmit them to the player. In addition to these, there wasn't going to be any HUD (to add realism), and the damage on the character would affect him depending on the hit point.

To show all these ideas they made some concept videos that you can probably find in the web if you search a bit. Those videos were pretty revealing. We could watch the character losing his lamp into a pit when scared by the shadow of a monster, accelerating his breath after facing a corpse, having hallucinations where a companion transforms into some monster, etc. And there were more interesting ideas like having to look the barrel of your pistol to see how many bullets you have or cutting a bridge to stop your enemies or block a door with a chest and the feeling that everything was interactive. In addition to all this, there were more interesting and original ideas. I remember reading about the character suffering from vertigo, catching a cold when getting wet, limping when shot in a leg or having bad aim when shot in an arm and probably something more I'm forgetting.

They also add up to the expectation with promises like "you can solve problems in many ways", "you can play twice and it will be completely different", "everything you do will change the course of the story", and so on. They even wanted to make it cooperative, just imagine, a multiplayer not thought as a deathmatch, how many story-following coop multiplayers are out there?, two, three in the history of videogames? Considering that they wanted the game to be an investigation game too this all sounded very well. Obviously, many gamer looked closely to this game.

The Bad
Well, first of, remember never to buy a game before having played it. If you are still young or haven't played too many videogames you maybe still enjoy them, but with time you will learn that nowadays most of the games are the same and that everything that the marketing guys promise with each new game is a lie. Yes, I'm really pissed off with this game.

Now, about this game.

The story of the "actual horror" this game brings began even before its release date. The multiplayer option was discarded many years ago (too good to be true) and from then on everything went downhill. After some uncertainty on the project, the company obtained the money from Bethesda in May 03 and the project was definitely boosted. Of course, the release date was postponed many times, until they quit trying to do a good game and, finally, October 05 was the date. The game was nearly done by then for the XBox and for PC. But one or two weeks before the release day the PC version was delayed half a year (!!), and exactly the same happened with "Oblivion" (for XBox 360), another game from Bethesda. It's said that the CEO from Bethesda also made hamburgers with his dog for the guys of Microsoft that day.

But, finally (this is the last "finally", I swear), in April (I think) 06, the game was released for PC. Let's try to be schematic now because there is to much to say. The game is painfully linear, every original aspect of the gameplay is wrongly implemented and nearly everything in the game can make the experience annoying.

What they have done with the original ideas they had to improve realism and empathy with the character (Jack Walters) is probably the most disappointing thing. First of all, your character has no body. Remember games like "Project Eden", "F.E.A.R.", "Operation Flashpoint" and many others where, even having first person view, you could see your own body? Was that real! This is not a serious mistake, but it was disappointing for me. But the feature most of the people hate about the realism in this game is the fact that you can't run! They probably implement this to increase the sense of horror in the game, but is surely the most annoying feature of the game. You have 4 speeds: "walking" (slow), "crouching" (very slow), "sneaking" (desperately slow), "sneaking & crouching" ("somebody shoot me" slow). You will learn avoiding the last two very quickly, but the programmers seem to want you to suffer. You know, when some marketing guy says "you can confront problems in many ways", it means you can kill your enemies or sneak through them. Well, this game fulfills this fact with the addition that you wont have weapons in some parts of the game, which will force you to go move in this "de facto" slow-motion. At least, this game is really easy as a shooter, so, as soon as you get a weapon, you will need to sneak no more. Most of time, I have just stay there in front of my enemies aiming to their heads to kill them in one (or two) shot, is pretty easy. Yes, the game has more difficult modes, but you can't play them until you finish on the easier mode, and only a loony would play this game twice.

About the physical health system. You have a like a health menu, where you can see the body of your character with all the wounds he has at the moment, which look always the same and are always in the same place. In addition to this, you have a table with 6 parts of the body (there is only 6 hit points) and their state, and all the medical stuff you carry. There are 4 types of wounds, light, heavy, broken bone and poisoned and you have all you need to heal them in a medikit. The poison is something very rare, as there is only one kind of enemy that poisons you, and it appears twice in the whole game. There is a different object to heal each type of wound and in each medikit you find there is a different amount of each. You will always have antidote as you never use it for anything else, so the poison feature is pretty forgettable. When you get hit in the legs or fall, you walk (even) slower and you can't jump and if you are hit in an arm, I think your aim get worse, but I didn't notice it really. If you lose to much blood I think the screen went black and white and previously, after severely wounded, your breath go faster. It sounds fancy, but it is not, really. If you have no weapons and you are hit in a leg, you are as sure as dead, if you have weapons, the praxis is like this. You go around killing enemies, if you are hit, you stop moving, kill all the nearby enemies and heal. If you breath to fast (or was it your heartbeat?), there is some risk for you to die, but not too much. The different ways of healing can be replaced by the "healing button", and, as the first gets annoying very quickly, you'll use the healing button. So, it reduces fast to pushing a button, the fast breathing is nothing new and the limping is just a slow motion. And you don't get cold at all.

About the psychic health system. All the promises of a complex sanity system reduce to two: you can go insane, you suffer from vertigo. The first one goes like this. There are certain scenes that will scare you, most of them involving corpses or limbs, and the big bosses scare you, but you wont be scare by nothing else, no matter if you are surrounded by enemies or in a very bizarre place, it's only about corpses (and stuff) and big bosses. If you get too scared by something, the heartbeat accelerates and the screen waves, then you suffer a mental collapse and the game just ends. When the screen begins to wave, is usually impossible to get sane again. The silly thing is that only big bosses can make your mind to collapse, as the creepy scenes are only some seconds and they are usually programmed so you can avoid them, but, if you avoid the creepy scenes, what are you playing this game for? So, that's how you play this aspect of the game: you try to watch all the creepy things you can (it doesn't matter anyway) and when you go crazy fighting a big boss even when you weren't doing nothing different from other times, you just reload the game for the fifteenth time to save some time. And, instead of hallucinations Jack has "visions" from the very eyes of his enemies. These are programmed to happens as intros loaded at certain points of each level, in a completely deterministic way. When you pass through certain point of a map you watch a vision, always the same vision. It is suppose to give you advantage on your enemies or just help to the mood of mystery and horror. And yet, it gets annoying. It happens that these visions can't be skipped, so, when you get stuck at some point of the game (something frequent) and there is a vision in at this point, you are going to have to fully watch this vision every time you reload. The intros are skippable, but the visions, for some reason, not.

And the vertigo feature gets also annoying! It works like this. If your are 4+ meter high and look down near an edge, the screen goes blurry. It basically means that you can't jump from platform to platform looking down, and this is pretty difficult in FPS games. And it has nothing to do with your sanity status at all, the guy just has vertigo. It's not a big deal, but there are some levels in the first part of the game where there are very narrow platforms involved, which you will need to repeat many times. The vertigo feature is another feature that makes the game more annoying than fun.

You'll notice very soon too that the game is very linear. So linear that you'll have all the time that sensation that everything waits for you to happen. Even when you meet NPCs, there is only one conversation possible, even when the scenario is wide and with multiple paths you will have a strict script to follow, even when you can or have to go back nothing new will happen unless you have made what you have to. Seriously, sometimes when you don't do what you are suppose to do, the game reacts stupidly forcing you to load a previous game. There is a place, for example, where you have to follow a straight path and climb some creeper at the end. But, a couple of "big boss" kind of monster appear when you reach this plant. Well, if you try to run away up the creeper, the character falls and say "I can't get out until I kill them", no matter if your sanity is high or low or if anybody in the world would run the hell out of there, you just have to kill them. In fact, the bosses in this game are highly scripted forcing you to play each usually 20+ times until you find that concrete action you must perform to defeat them. For example, there is a big boss that block the path with a tentacle, which also uses to hit you. You can't pass through until you do certain thing. Well, if you try when the tentacle is hitting you, it just appears in front in a realistic speed, because you MUST follow the one and only script.

And if all of this were not enough, the game has a plague of bugs. Probably one of the main reasons is the mentioned linearity of the game, the script of the game is so closed shut, that every time the player does something unexpected (and the programmers have very little "expectations" on the player) the script can just fail and you need to reload a previous game. But there are of all kind. Remember the scene with the creeper from the previous paragraph?, well, after trying many times to kill these annoying monsters I found myself stuck there because the game "didn't know" that I had kill these two monsters. And there are also some intros that you can only hear because the video doesn't load correctly. And I want you to remember that this game was released half a year after the version for the XBox, and they have done nothing about the bugs! After laughing at us delaying the PC version unnecessarily. But the funniest thing with this game comes at the end. Yes, I'm going to spoil it, if you still are going to play this game (no, seriously), avoid this part.

It happens that the final level of this game is about Jack escaping form an underwater temple that is falling apart. Of course, there is only one path to follow, and yes, the character escapes walking!!, how silly is that? This is especially exasperating because there is a really random bug in this level: when you reach a tunnel nearly at the end of the level, suddenly, everything collapses and you die, just like that. The level is so easy that you could do it at the first time, but, instead, you have to repeat nearly the whole level for a random number of times (it took me 6 times, but it can be much more) and you must do it walking!! And the final video can be buggy, too!!, and you can only watch this video if you repeat all the level again to see if you have luck this time. But that means another random times the last level!! I didn't even finish the game technically nor watch the final video!!, I hate this game!, it's horrible!!

The Bottom Line
The collapse of the FPS games reaches its climax in this game. Everything that can be done wrong, and, especially, that can be done annoying, in a professional FPS is in this game: constant loads in too hard levels, an offensive linearity, too many scripting, uncreative levels, hundreds of boxes, exasperating bugs, sneaking oriented situations that nobody enjoys, very unrealistic movements and a character with no body, unchallenging shooting, adventure aspects that add very little to the game, etc. The promise of a new concept of horror game, where realistic behavior of the main character and the simulation of his feeling were an important part of the game, and the very common idea (that never prospers) of "every interaction with the world will make a difference" when projecting games, has become into a great failure.

Seriously, games are suppose to be fun, not to feel frustration all the time. And it's even more frustrating when you wait for a game for years and everything that has been promised is a big fat lie. Will they learn something for the next games in the series or will they just do the minimum to make some money? Learned lesson: Never give your love to a videogame project, :)