Call of Cthulhu – Dark Corners of the Earth (PC)
I’ve been a fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s eerie tales since I was fourteen years old. His particular brand of creepiness appeals to me, for some reason. His fiction generally centers on the concept that man is just a very small part of the universe and there are things out there which are simply to hideous/vast/old/evil that the merest glimpse of them would shatter a man’s delicate sanity and send him scampering back to the trees.
So, perfect material for entertainment, don’t you think? There’ve been a few attempts to move Lovecraft from print to film (directly, I mean – Lovecraft has influenced every single horror author and screenwriter from 1922 onwards) – Stuart Gordon’s black comedies based on the ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ series, a dubious mid-eighties gorefest called ‘From Beyond’ and a bizarre but entertaining take on ‘The Unnameable’.
Call of Cthulhu – Dark Corners of the Earth, appears to span a range of tales based around the Cthulhu Mythos – that is, those stories which share a common central lore and a concept of ‘Great Old Ones’ biding their time till they can return and reclaim the earth.
DCoE is a first person action adventure, with the emphasis on the adventure aspects. There are a variety of period weapons available throughout the game, but I haven’t found any yet, so am still wandering around unarmed. One notable aspect is the inclusion of sanity effects – a little more subtle than those in Eternal Darkness, but a lot more effective for it. Witnessing disturbing sights or being attacked causes a slight blurring and fading of the display, which can be quite alarming. Lovecraft’s idea of the boundary between sanity and the mad, capering horrors that live beyond as a thin veil is well supported here – the first mutilated body discovered in the prologue has a notable effect on the character’s vision. A nice touch is that there’s no heads up display to remove you from the story.
So – I’m playing a private investigator with a six year gap in his life following finding some nasty things in the basement of a New England cult. After a stint in Arkham Asylum, I’m back on the street and have been asked to find a missing person in, of all places Innsmouth.
I have to say here that the recreation of Innsmouth is absolutely perfect. From the strange ‘inbred’ locals, to the architecture, tone, everything – it’s quite obvious the designer has a real love of the subject material.
So there I am – I’ve arrived at Innsmouth. I attempted to sneak into the missing person’s place of work but was caught by the police and unceremoniously ejected. I’ll have to try a bit harder. Which brings me to stealth. The stealth aspect (I hate stealth games, incidentally) is very well done. It’s not about following a specific path to get past the bad guys, but more like ‘Thief – The Dark Project’. It’s about staying hidden. Once spotted, there was a mad dash through deserted rooms, shoving furniture in front of doors to give me more time to investigate.
One thing worth mentioning – it’s obvious the PC version is a back port of the Xbox version. The graphics are much nicer but inventory screens and pages of text have been scaled up from the xbox rather than re-rendered for the higher resolution of the PC. A small complaint, but it would have been nice to get things that little bit clearer.
So – only half an hour in but:
Innsmouth + Lovecraft + Bethesda + Videogames == THE WIGGINS.
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