Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

aka: Call of Cthulhu: Mroczne Zakątki ƚwiata, 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

  • é‚Șç„žçš„ć‘Œć”€ïŒšćœ°çƒé»‘æš—è§’èœ - Chinese spelling (simplified)

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

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 77% (based on 57 ratings)

Players

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

Great idea, bad game.

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.

Windows · by Shin_Akuma (15) · 2006

Scary and enjoyable game

The Good
The story from start to finish is executed very well. There's a lot of stories to uncover and although it doesn't match Lovecraft's writing, for a computer game it's one of the better, if not the best.

The interface without any indicators also helps the game to be more realistic (injury is indicated by blurring of the screen, broken leg by limping, and so on).

Atmosphere is very dense and scary, escalated by creepy sounds and occasional but very fitting music.

For Czech language version - only texts and subtitles, but very expertly translated with perfect grammar and without lost of meaning.

The Bad
First of all, there's a big bug in some versions of the game (looking at forums it seems like a very common problem) - it is the place where you need to shoot with cannon at mages on the Devil's Reef. The problem is that you can't see them so you don't know where to shoot. There's three solutions to this: 1) Patch - The official patch is non-existent and fan-made unfortunately doesn't work for all versions (mine, for example), 2) Search through forums for saved game after this scene but you lose your Statistics, 3) set the sight on the exact coordinates - also can be found on internet (YouTube).

The movement and control is a little clumsy. There is no run, only walk, so don't count on escaping from any shootouts. The reloading of weapons is not very precise so sometimes you have to push the reload button at least twice. Auto-reload would be better solution I think.

There are different ending according to the Grade you receive (taking in account several Statistics), if you don't have a Grade good enough you will only see a shortened version of the outro. Not a good idea.

The Bottom Line
Call of Cthulhu can be described as an action adventure, or better - action game with adventure bits. You take the role of Jack Walters, a private detective who is hired by a store owner to investigate a case of missing employee of grocery store in Innsmouth (a village regarded as haunted by many). The story comes from a board game (which I'm not familiar) with. It's a mixture of several better known works of H.P. Lovecraft, most notably The Shadow over Innsmouth but also including events, creatures and references from short stories and novellas Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time and At the Mountains of Madness. All of them recommeded read after finishing the game.

Not including the scary prelude of the game (I don't want to give out any spoilers), you start in Innsmouth, a dark town with unfriendly faces all around. You don't need to be a genius to know that they don't like strangers around there. Your first steps are to look for whereabouts of the missing person, but during your search, you'll made a great deal of horrifying revelations. The game changes from adventure, to stealth, to action very rapidly and there won't be many friends to help you. Eventually you pick up a variety of weapons to defend yourself and you have to decide which is better - to sneak by enemies, to fight them or to run away. New clues and events will be added into your diary but not until the very end you will be able to understand what's going on (and maybe not even after that, see column The Bad).

On inventory screen you will see everything you need - the items, ammunition, diary, medicaments and health. There's more than one type of injury - some lighter ones will heal itself eventually, some you must heal, broken bone must be fixed with split, poisoning must be treated with antidote. Injuries can be healed manually by picking the places to heal or automatically by clicking the button. Healing process itself takes a few seconds when you can't move so better hide yourself before you use it. You must also look after your psychical health, it means if you encounter too many scary events in quick succession, you start to feel dizzy, mumble to yourself and in the end commit suicide.

Looking at items and operating them is done by Use button. Using items in inventory on something is very easy, just by clicking at them, there is no combining of the items in inventory.

For the shooting there are two modes - quick shot and aimed shot, the latter being recommended as there is no crosshair to aim at. But don't aim too long or your hands begins to shake.

At last I recommend to play only at night because the game is VERY dark and the atmosphere and horror is greatly increased.

Overall Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is an enjoyable game that is moderately long and can absorb you for a few weeks with a lot to think about during that time.

Windows · by Sun King (1555) · 2016

One of a kind; deeply innovative; scary as hell.

The Good
I'm scrambling along the wall of a warehouse while the yokels inside are blasting away blindly, shooting out the windows above my head and showering me with glass. Diving into cover and applying bandages to stop the bleeding from grazing shotgun pellets. Miraculously, none of my bones were broken after jumping off the loading ramp and out the window.

I am Jack Walters, and I really feel like all of Innsmouth wants me dead.

Of course, I know it's all in vain, ultimately: I've seen Jack die, hanging himself in an insane asylum some time from now. But yet I want to find out how it came to be, to see it through to the end. And that pretty much sums up how Dark Corners of the Earth does a better job than practically any other Lovecraft-themed derivatives at being Lovecraftian — there really is a feeling of being powerless, naked and afraid in the face of unspeakable horrors, and yet crawling along as best you can.

The thing that emphasizes this nakedness the most is the HUD: there isn't one. In fact, this game makes the very notion of a heads-up display seem downright ridiculous, like a remnant of 80's arcade machines. Instead of cute little icons telling you that You Have Activated Sneak Mode, the visual field broadens to give the impression of heightened wariness: when you're near death from blood loss, color drains from the world.

The game consistently never mentions 'hit points', only blood loss. If you caught the early marketing hype, you may have been given the impression that the simulationism went one step too far, with your character being able to catch pneumonia. That didn't make the final cut, probably for the better. Instead, the game implements localized damage to the head, torso, arms and legs. Locations can suffer heavy or light bleeding, poisoning, or broken limbs; different wounds require different medical treatments. This has tactical implications, as for example heavy bleeding requires the short-in-supply sutures, deterring you from getting too close to shotgun wielders. (To make sure the game is still playable, Jack has the metabolism of a hummingbird; he'll heal within a minute if all wounds have been treated, however untreated poisoning will kill him within four.)

It's also true to the Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying system in that fighting is fast and deadly. Don't expect your "circle-strafing" skills to be much use, you need to concentrate on shooting abominations in the head before they can reload. That is, if you have a gun.

...you don't have a gun. You were, after all, just going to a quiet backwater fishing village to investigate a missing grocery store clerk. And no, there aren't guns just lying around for you to pick up. Those things are dangerous. What do you think this is, some sort of game? Nor are you in possession of Garrett's ability to magically fade into the shadows; you're just a private dick caught unaware.

See, calling this game "survival horror" gives people the entirely wrong impression: it's come to denote a very particular style of gameplay, to the point where a game like Disaster Report, which is not a horror game, gets called "survival horror." That's not Dark Corners of the Earth; it's inventive to the point of practically being a genre of one. There really is little today that resembles it — the easiest comparison would probably be to Alone in the Dark of 14 years past, and that is again largely because of the general feeling of style and genuine frights.

This style is evident from the very beginning of the game: when the first cutscene ends, you may not realize it, the transition is so subtle. Walking along, you can sense Jack's footsteps. No, not "head bob," his footsteps. Go into the house and in the door on your left. Peer into the darkness. "It's too dark to see anything, but from the rotting smell, it's probably a food store," Jack tells you. Outstanding. There should be (darkened) demo booths of that intro sequence, it'd probably make it up in shifted units.

All of this inventiveness goes towards lending the game gravity, making you forget that you're playing a game. You know, immersion. That thing games are supposed to be all about. This holds true to such a degree that at one point, going back to try and make it through a section with more medical supplies felt like I was violating the story. It happened that I had been scoping out an area and just happened to look up, and— well, that would be spoiling it. Suffice to say, things that would just be "look, scary thing" in a less inspired game are lovingly crafted in Dark Corners to sneak up on you when you least expect it.

Oh, and the music: you don't notice it. You only notice what it does to you. It's brilliant.

The Bad
This game is meant to be played in the dark, and they mean it. Fiddling with the brightness will give you a genuine feeling, when appropriate, of stumbling about in a darkness where things are vaguely sensed rather than seen. This also means that you simply can't play during the day.

Looking at the minimum specs, you might think this game was outdated long ago; that's more of an artifact of the game's long development history, but yes, the graphics are a bit two-years-ago. However, it puts newer graphics cards to work on dynamic lightning, subtle visual enhancement and the effects that give the impression of being groggy when you've just woken up, queasy when in a room with a corpse, scared out of your wits or high on morphine.

There's little point in running the game at higher resolutions than 800x600; you're better advised to spend the horsepower on antialiasing instead. The thing is, and I realize this is a clichĂ©, it moves beautifully. I could spend all day, or rather all night, looking at that old geezer in the poorhouse as he gazes out the window. Half-Life 2 might have super-detailomatic ReActor(tm) technology or whatever; in Dark Corners of the Earth you're talking to people—really talking with them—who are brought to life within the story.

Okay. In all honesty, there is one thing that detracts from the game later on: dead bodies simply fade into the air. If there was one thing about the game I could change, that would be first on the list.

The Bottom Line
Look a couple of paragraphs above. "Queasy when in a room with a corpse." Have you seen that in any other game? Is there anywhere else you've played a character with enough humanity to actually be a bit dizzy in the face of death?

You need to play Dark Corners to see that a game can do things previously unthought of. And you need to play Dark Corners to be Jack Walters, scurrying along the streets and rooftops of Innsmouth, trying desperately to stay alive.

Windows · by Ola Sverre Bauge (237) · 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.