The gaming industry has seen quite an adept collection of fear-oriented titles recently. What with Condemned: Criminal Origins being a leading Xbox 360 title (which is also now on it’s way to PC), as well as hits like Resident Evil 4 and of course the Silent Hill series, there’s a lot to dabble in for fans of the “survival horror” genre. One new addition to this lineup which caught my eye however was Call of Cthulhu, a release from famed mega-monster Bethesda Softworks (popular for a number of reasons any intimate fan of the gaming industry will recognize). I effectively jumped into the game blind, not sure what to expect behind general “scariness”, but my motivated search for a decent horror-driven game led me into enjoying Call of Cthulhu quite immensely. Sadly, it’s very far from a “perfect” game, but I feel those of you out there who love staying up until three in the morning with the sole objective of becoming fully immersed in whatever you are playing will definitely want to investigate this game further. Read on to find out what gives Cthulhu that extra-special flavoring.

The game, interestingly, takes place in the early 1900’s. The protagonist: a fellow named Jack Walters, is a self-employed private investigator. Following a tragic incident at a large house run by a local religious cult just outside of Boston, Jack was left mentally and psychologically scarred, forcing him to be committed to a mental institution for several years. Eventually, he inexplicably returned to being a perfectly sane person, but has since set out on a near-obsessive quest to try and determine what happened. One day in 1922, Jack receives a phone call regarding a kidnapping that had occurred in a small, inward-looking town of Innsmouth. A store manager has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and Jack is asked to go in and investigate, in spite of unhelpful locals and, of course, an ominous sense of impending doom.

Cthulhu presented quite a refreshing opening experience, in fact – primarily thanks to the creative use of engine-rendered first-person cutscenes that really help with the immersion factor. It’s obvious that an excruciating effort was put forth into making the game as immersive and spooky as possible, and this is reflected in the visual effects and artistic style. One example cutscene has Jack recovering after a surprise attack by some form of mutated beast in an otherwise-innocent household. After the monster breaks the door down, you see Jack’s vision fade as he crumples to the floor. He then wakes up some time later, and you get to watch from the first person as he drags himself back down the stairwall, step by step using blood-stained hands until he finds the grotesque image of a father cradling the tattered remains of his daughter, ripped apart by the surprise assailant.

This is but one example, as first-person visual effects and flair are used to a great degree during the game to help induce the feeling of fear. Because Jack hates heights, any time you find yourself walking precariously over a deep abyss, Jack’s vision will start to become stretched out and his movements will become difficult to control. Take a leg wound, and Jack’s movement will suffer – you’ll even hear this bone-sickening crunch and a brief grunt of pain with every searing step he takes until the damage is healed (which can be inconvenient when running from hordes of enemies, to say the least). The game even went to the effort of implementing a complete “sanity” system, which monitors Jack’s mental condition based on the amount of paranormal activity he witnesses and the kind of horrors he experiences – this in turn can result in any number of distracting sensory side effects that can come back to haunt the player in increasing intensity as he advances through the levels.

This ultimately leads up to one undeniable fact: Despite offering an assortment of weapons and a nifty “iron sights” aiming system to boot, Call of Cthulhu is clearly not a combat-oriented game. The game is literally focused on survival to an extreme degree, almost to the extent that some players may find themselves frustrated with the limited options the game provides to get through some areas. Granted, I absolutely loved how the first part of the game had absolutely no combat involved whatsoever, and it’s a surprisingly long period of time before you even get your first weapon to use – but following this, the game starts getting progressively more difficult. For one, ammunition is incredibly limited in the game, and the player is primarily encouraged to use stealth to sneak by whenever possible. That’s all fine, but previous experience has taught me that, barring one or two noteworthy exceptions (Thief), first person shooters make terrible sneaking games. Cthulhu is no real exception, and while this may in part be due to my inner desire to just break loose and shoot wildly at anything that moves in most games, I often found myself preferring to just take a run-and-gun approach than endure the frustration of stealth.

Which brings us to another problem. Combat in the game is cool, no question – there’s locational damage for both you and the hostile entities you engage, and (as was briefly hinted on earlier), Jack can suffer a number of damage-related injuries which will negatively affect his ability to see, aim, or even move until healed. There is also an integrated inventory screen where players can assess their exact damage, examine inventory items, as well as view Jack’s journal of events (which includes a surprising amount of background information for players to read). This entire system is really nice and adds a good deal to the game’s sense of immersion and detail, but the issue lies in the game’s realism. Jack can only take a few hits before he dies, which becomes very infuriating because the game relies on a clunky “save point” system for storing progress. Expect to repeat many minute-long segments during the more difficult parts of this game. This huge flaw alone almost killed the game for me at several points, simply because I became so sick of having to do things over and over again.

At the very least, the game has a reasonable length attached to it and quite an engaging storyline (where the “horror” aspect is very much there, and I will admit that the checkpoint-based save system ties direct into the immersive fear factor in some cases), so the game shouldn’t be completely discounted on this basis. Just be prepared to bang your head against the wall trying to get through some segments of the game.

Though I touched briefly into the game’s chosen style of cutscene direction and graphical “flair” earlier, I feel the graphical aspect deserves a little more praise. Because this is a dedicated first person title, the animations are exquisitely designed to take advantage of this aspect. In terms of overall texture detail, the game rates from a “passable” to a “high” – the artistic level and resolution are quite passable, but there’s still a good deal of room for improvement. Engine-wise there are still certain elements that make it painfully clear this is a multi-platform release, such as the game’s unfriendliness to alt-tabbing (not as much of a major issue unless you happen to have a quirky router that boots you offline at random, causing ICQ to minimize your games with an error message) and the fact that enemy corpses disappear after barely a couple of seconds. Still, the technology used given the scope of the gameplay is more than sufficient to convey an immersive environment.

Finally, I should also touch on the sound aspect, an integral part to any horror or survival game. I could in all possibility get away with stating that the sounds and ambience are “what one would expect” for a game of this nature, but some of the noises I heard while moving through the game were just downright creepy - and not in a bad way either. The sensory hallucinations Jack will suffer during some of the more traumatic periods of the game really add a sense of paranoia to each corner you turn, and whether it’s the ragged and heavy cries from the infested townsfolk of Innsmouth who are out for your head, or the accusing, ghostly remarks from apparitions of characters seen killed earlier in the game, there really is a lot of sensory stimulation to keep you on the edge of your seat.

As far as horror games go, Call of Cthulhu is quite a good offering – I’ve certainly seen a lot worse. If somebody pointed the question of “What would make this game better?” at me, I would probably comment that letting me save whenever I please would have been a huge bonus – but for all the frustrations incurred during combat and trying to deal with the saving system, I still took from this game an exciting and very deep experience that I will fondly remember for a long time. Providing you have the guts and dedication to make it through the game’s more challenging parts, (and aren’t one of those aqua phobic gamers who broke down crying during the underwater scenes in the original Half-Life - you know who you are) Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is definitely a game worth looking into.