Call of Cthulhu Previews

Focus Home Interactive and Cyanide has recently made an early build of their upcoming tabletop-based detective RPG Call of Cthulhu available to a number of media outlets, allowing them to play through the game’s opening sections ahead of the planned October 30, 2018 release. And if you’d like to read their impressions, you can find them below:

PC Gamer thinks that the game shows promise:

After the first three hours of Call of Cthulhu were over, I was pretty sure that I would be playing game. It was like a first episode of a TV series tailored for my brain: Calculated to draw me in, interest me, and keep me going for a bit longer until I’m fully hooked. “A bit longer” comes soon: the game releases on the 30th of October.

It actually took me almost four hours to play through what the developers called “the first three hours” of the game, since I reloaded a couple times to try out branching paths. Call of Cthulhu is going hard on statues of monsters, spooky cultists, and unsettling dreams. It’s not going to go too hard on the sense of cosmic unease or suspense, as you might expect from anything Lovecraft. That’s there, but instead Call of Cthulhu is choosing to focus on a horrid sense of place and gothic decline. For me, that’s two out of three on the Cthulhu story scorecard. That’s not so bad!

IGN talks about the game’s systems:

It’s at Darkwater that Call of Cthulhu’s gameplay loop becomes clear. Like the pen and paper game, you invest character points, gained through experience into your skill tree, which makes you a better detective. Putting points into eloquence, strength, medicine, psychology, ‘spot hidden’ and occultism all theoretically make your mystery solving job easier.

This is most transparent when talking to the various NPCs scattered around Darkwater. If you don’t have enough points in eloquence, for example, tough luck getting what you want from the bartender. Or if you don’t have enough invested in psychology, you’ll be rebuffed by a cop who you try to reason with.

You can also apply your skills while exploring. If you don’t invest enough in strength, you’ll theoretically struggle with turning a handle to open a trap door, and hidden objects will be harder to find without enough invested in the spot hidden skill. Ultimately though, none of this really seemed to matter. I still turned the handle with a low strength rating. I could still find enough clues to proceed without much invested in the hidden spot skill. Hopefully, as Call of Cthulhu progresses, there’ll be more transparency around how these skills work, and how you can use them more obviously to your advantage.

TechRaptor mentions the game’s lack of combat:

Call of Cthulhu is a strictly non-combat game. Sometimes you may have to threaten someone or throw a punch at them, but this is all done through dialogue. It’s also very much a role-playing game. I use this term because it’s based on the popular pen-and-paper series of the same name. Call of Cthulhu wants you to know this immediately, as it presents you with a character sheet.

There are seven stats on this screen. Five of them you dump points into, such as Psychology and Investigation, and the other two, Medicine and Occultism, improve as you find things in the environment. The game puts a strong emphasis on these stats, which influence much of what you do. There’s almost a Deus Ex-like feel to the way it tries to present multiple ways to tackle an objective. For example, you could talk your way through a situation, or find a way to sneak in the back and utilize other skills.

GameSpace notes that the game currently lacks some much-needed polish:

Then there’s the issue of polish. Lip syncing can be downright bad. Animations can seem wooden. Objects clip, like the lantern in the second picture of this preview, or simply glitch out. I also encountered a game-stopping dialogue bug twice in my first two hours where you simply choose an option or back out forcing you to reboot the game. With a month left before launch, it’s possible that Cyanide could clear all of these up, but it’s worth noting all the same: Cthulhu needs a nice layer of polish before being sent out the door.

This is a game to wait for a review on before buying. That said, after playing it for myself, I don’t plan on giving up on it quite yet. Despite being a bit shallower and on-rails than I’d like it to be, it’s also hitting a lot of the right notes too. I’m still waiting in that delightful dread to find up what terrible thing happened to the Hawkins family. I’m still primed and ready to face off against Lovecraft’s nameless horrors. If Call of Cthulhu misses a few gameplay and polish notes, it hits other mythos notes that leave me wanting to know more. Whether it will be worth seeing through is still an open question.

And Cultured Vultures praises the game’s ominous atmosphere:

Eventually, Pierce will make his way to the family’s mansion, which I won’t divulge the details of to not spoil things — let’s just say you aren’t in Kansas anymore. This is where Call of Cthulhu really starts to come into its own, the mansion dripping with character and every inch of it worth exploring. That’s what’s so captivating about this most recent adaptation of Lovecraft’s lore, that it nails the ominous feel without resorting to cheap tactics.

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Still, Call of Cthulhu only really needs a little more time in the oven as it’s already shaping up to be an unsettling descent into the darkness with plenty of tricks up its sleeves. Those wanting something deeper from their horror games may need to look no further.