Calling Cthulhu, part twoA while ago I tweeted that Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth posse

Calling Cthulhu, part twoA while ago I tweeted that Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth possessed several high quality moments, but was also an aged experience that exhibited the worst traits of early 2000s first-person shooters. Then I followed up by saying that I actually couldn’t finish the game, since the final hours became such an exercise in frustration that I was forced to watch the ending on YouTube. That is my experience with Dark Corners of the Earth in a nutshell. It’s certainly more ambitious than the last two efforts to bear the official license of Chaosium’s tabletop RPG, and you can see the respect that developer Headfirst Productions had for Lovecraft’s writing. But the wonkiness that existed within Shadow of the Comet and Prisoner of Ice is still present here, and with it we have all of the aforementioned bad features that existed in countless games made in the early to mid 2000s. Giant, drab levels in industrial areas with rooms that all blend together, seemingly created by developers who had yet to realize that bigger does not automatically mean better when it comes to 3D environment design? Check. No maps in said levels to keep you from running around in circles and getting a headache? Check again. Enemies that swarm you and poorly choreographed boss encounters that expect you to do certain tasks in a very specific way, forcing you to start from faraway checkpoints when you die? Check once more.  Dark Corners of the Earth also has one other major problem - the first few hours are the best, and those are the hours when the game isn’t a first-person-shooter, it’s a first-person-adventure. During those hours, the private investigator main character, Jack Walters, is weaponless and has to walk around the town of Innsmouth after he’s called there to investigate a robbery. You spend this time talking to civilians who clearly dislike you and sneaking around crime scenes, and while the stealth mechanics aren’t sublime, they are serviceable. Then the mutated fish folk of Innsmouth invade your hotel room and the experience turns quite gripping as you’ve got to run from them, bolting doors and ducking into shadows. It’s very easy to fail this sequence, as it’s heavily timed and the game will punish you unmercifully if you stop for a second or fail to sequester yourself in exactly the right alleyway away from prying eyes. Nevertheless, it’s easy to forgive this scripted, fail state-laden section, as the quality atmosphere is straight out of The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the Lovecraft novella that probably inspired this game the most, and Escape from Innsmouth, the 1992 Call of Cthulhu RPG supplement that served as a quasi-sequel to the novella. But then you get a gun, and everything begins to stumble south as the adventure transitions into a wannabe shooter, throwing those oversized levels your way with lots of respawning enemies and bosses that need to be defeated in a highly particular (and often poorly telegraphed) manner. As the environments and creatures that Jack encounters become more otherworldly, sanity effects like blurry vision also start to veer their head, and while these sound good on paper, when combined with the subpar shooting mechanics, they tend to just become annoying. Quickly, the game loses whatever goodwill it generated during its opening, and the feeling that it suffered developmental meddling that tried to change its adventure roots into FPS ones becomes impossible to ignore. This appears to be pretty much what happened, as Headfirst Productions’ journey to bring this project to fruition was plagued with cut features, technical issues and financial hardship. Dark Corners of the Earth was supposed to be a PS2, Xbox and PC game - and at the end of the day, the PS2 version was axed while the PC port nearly didn’t happen.Still, for all the clear signs of this game having suffered in development hell, there’s some stuff that undeniably works. In an inspired choice that lots of games mimic today, there’s no on-screen HUD, and injuries sustained by Jack Walters are actually communicated via gameplay - ie, if your leg is busted than you move with a hobble. The foreboding environment of Innsmouth is also excellent, and you could go so far as to say that even at its clunkiest, Dark Corners of the Earth radiates a sense of grim unease that’s very Lovecraftian. While Shadow of the Comet and Prisoner of Ice had silly moments, like transforming into a bird or dealing with a laughable time traveling subplot, Dark Corners of the Earth is fully rooted in dread and discomfort - almost depressingly so. By the end of his time investigating Innsmouth, Jack Walters has suffered the fate of most Lovecraft protagonists, with many of his allies dead and his own sanity in tatters. There are also revelations about Jack’s past which will make absolutely no sense to anyone unfamiliar with the Mythos (I’m talking about the Great Race of Yith and good ol’ mind-swapping, for anyone curious) but aside from one questionable sequence where Jack seemingly kills Dagon with a ship’s cannon, I’d say that the devs truly took their source material seriously. (And I guess one could argue that Jack just temporarily disabled the great Elder One of the oceans, kinda like how the all-powerful Cthulhu himself got rammed by a boat in the original Call of Cthulhu short story.) A perusal on the internet reveals that Dark Corners of the Earth is remembered well by people who experienced it upon release, though I suspect that these folks have fond memories about its atmosphere rather than its mechanics. In my eyes, it’s a product of its time best described as a game that tries, but like Shadow of the Comet and Prisoner of Ice, veers into infuriating territory too often for anyone other than the highly devoted Mythos fan to purchase in this day and age. I pushed myself to the very final level for the sake of making this series of blog posts as complete as possible, but at the end of the day, I wasn’t able to finish it…and the quest to find a licensed Call of Cthulhu video game with an enjoyability factor that isn’t overwhelmed by its jankiness continues. -- source link

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