60627084
theoutriderfp
fp_theoutrider25
Feb
Review: Call of Cthulhu - Dark Corners of the Earth
(German original and pictures)
“That is not dead which may eternal lie…”
After my visit to the nether hells, I am glad to be still alive, but nobody believes what I have to report. The fools - they don’t see what is going on in front of their very eyes; they’re too closed minded to recognise the things waiting for them just outside of their field of view which is so constricted by the blindfolds of their concept of reality. But I can understand… had I known the horrible, unearthly terrors that were waiting for me, I’d have turned back at once. And it all just looked like a game in the beginning…
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is the first part in a planned trilogy of games and tells the story of Boston cop Jack Walters and his encounters with the unseen things beyond our reality. It all starts out harmless, with his job being finding a missing store manager in the small coastal town Innsmouth. Walters soon finds out that there’s something more going on in the village - the inhabitants are uncooperative and hostile, rumor has it that there’s a bizarre change going on with them, and the whole town is overshadowed by an ominous religious cult. In first person perspective, the player explores the town and discovers its secrets, puzzle piece by puzzle piece. In the beginning, the whole thing is very much like an adventure game - you walk around, talk to the locals, find hints about what has happened to the missing guy and what’s going on in the town in general every now and then. Soon, the uncooperative behavior of the local folk turns into direct attempts at impede Walters’ investigations, and a bit later into a hunt aimed at getting rid of him once and for all.
Sadly, the gameplay follows this change: Dark Corners of the Earth takes a few hours, then mutates from a First Person Adventure to a shooter with adventure elements, which makes the otherwise excellent presentation of the nicely wrought plot suffer a bit. It’s particularly not very Lovecraft to have the main character shoot his way through loads of horrible creatures to advance the plot. Nevertheless, the latter part of the game still sports a brilliant atmosphere worthy of the Cthulhu title. The plot in general is also very fitting in its basic concept and execution, but still has a few points where it runs slightly to massively against the typical style of the inspiring tales. It’s hard to tell more about it without spoiling massive parts of the plot, which is why I’m not going to do so; uncovering the events is just as much part of the game as the gameplay itself. The inventory has a notebook used by Walters to write diary entries explaining his thoughts and feelings on the events and to collect the many small and bigger bits and pieces of information he finds. These are often relevant for puzzles, so they’re worth reading closely.
On top of that, Dark Corners of the Earth takes not necessarily new, but at least little-used paths even in the First Person Shooter department. There’s neither a gauge for the main character’s health nor a crosshair or an ammo gauge - the inventory shows how many bullets of every type you have in total, but you can only guess how many shots you have left in the loaded clip. To make hitting enemies easier, you can steady the weapon and take aim - but holding the gun in front of himself for too long makes Walters’ arms tire and start to shake. The physical health of the character is only indicated by various rough hints: his breathing grows ever more shallow, colours start fading to grey and his vision blurs slightly as he takes damage. Combat is rather deadly as it is already - even a single hit from a gun will usually massively hamper Walters’ agility, and three or four hits will more often than not put a premature end to his investigations. Wounds need to be treated with the contents of first aid kits, not unlike Metal Gear Solid 3 - if you leave them open, they constantly cost more health until they either heal by themselves after some time or Walters has bled to death. Taking care of your wounds also takes a moment in which you’re completely helpless, so there’s not really a way to heal up during combat. In case of emergency, the inventory also holds a syringe of morphine, which you can use to keep death at bay for a moment longer and which will suppress the shaking caused by injuries; using it does impair vision via a lot of blurring and tunnel vision though.
In addition to physical health, you also need to take care of Walters’ mental condition: he can’t just die of wounds, but also just go insane due to continued exposition to unnatural or just plain traumatising things. There’s no gauge here as well, just a couple of factors indicating his state. Normally, you’ll hear Walter’s heartbeat speeding up, accompanied by rhythmic vibration of the controller. Looking down from great heights will make him sway slightly and give tunnel vision. Examining a rotting corpse or looking at monsters for extended amounts of time will generally blur his eyesight and fill his surroundings with various weird noises. The effects aren’t executed in as much detail and creativity as in Eternal Darkness on the GameCube - which Dark Corners of the Earth has quite a few things in common with in general though - but fulfill their purpose by enhancing the atmosphere and giving the player an impression of the character’s mental state. Proper hallucinations or other concrete results of insanity sadly aren’t there; only occasional scripted visions that warn of potential attackers or just build more atmosphere.
From a technical standpoint, there’s a few less nice things to report: the game has quite a few bugs already known in the developer’s forums which have been encountered by a number of players - usually resulting in a deadlock of the Xbox and sometimes even reoccurring in the same place after loading the latest savegame. At least one of these is related to a certain save point and cost me my save during testing; after loading, the game keeps running for about a second more and then reproducably locks up at the same point, no matter what I do. There are a few other scenes that had some user reports of reappearing crashes - in general, the game is running stable and without problems, but apparently there’s a few places that have potential for fatal, game-breaking problems like this. Seeing as how Dark Corners of the Earth doesn’t use Xbox Live - for obvious reasons - at least the Xbox version probably won’t be seeing an update either. To make sure you won’t fall victim of such problems, I’d recommend using several save slots at all times. On the Xbox 360, the game is playable, but has two known problems in addition to the ones already present on the Xbox: the intro and epilogue videos aren’t shown, and the emulation will crash if one of the bosses uses a certain attack of his. The gameplay has little to criticise: some puzzles aren’t exactly obvious or depend on tiny details and need some trial and error or just plain and simple a quick glance at a walkthrough to find the proper solution; occasionally there’s also places that need some searching to find the next piece of the generally rather linear path through the levels.
Graphics: Hallucinogenic substances
The graphics in Call of Cthulhu are excellent both atmospherically and technically; while some of the character models seem a bit coarse at times, the game is quite pretty and the levels detailed and believable. Adding to this are all kinds of nice special effects: irregular glass will distort what’s behind it, there’s a moment of adaptation when moving between light and dark areas, sources of light don’t have any sharp borders, the usual bag of graphical tricks. The consequences of insanity on Mr. Walters’ eyesight are of note as well, as are the distortions and places of blurriness in his occasional visions. A bit more creativity in the hallucinations would’ve been nice, but they’re decent enough and create a nice whole together with the rest of the graphics work.
Sound: Smaller and bigger language barriers
For a game relying so heavily on atmosphere and horror like Call of Cthulhu, sound is particularly important. Headfirst Productions deliver an excellent performance in this department - the game sounds glorious, in quality and style alike. Proper music is really only there during menu screens; in the game its place is taken by mostly melody-free atmospheric instrumentation. Environment sounds vary heavily in amount and detail. Sometimes, the silence is only filled by the game’s replacement for music, at other times there’s not much to hear of that and the environment itelf is alive with all kinds of sounds - footsteps of people walking around, cultists mumbling in bizarre languages and other, weirder noises. On the whole, the sound in the game creates tension and discomfort quite effectively - and that’s what a game in Lovecraft’s world should do.
The language Call of Cthulhu is running in is being determined by the Microsoft Dashboard’s language setting - although this only changes the language of the subtitles; the voiceovers are always in their original English. Thus, if you’re not used to reading subtitles and aren’t very trained in English, you might run into some problems. On the other hand, players who speak the language well enough can enjoy the game completely in its original language by just setting the Xbox menu language to English. The translation occasionally changes the meaning of the original text and particularly struggles a bit when there’s idioms, but is understandable and fitting in all important parts. Seldom there’s also passages that were apparently overlooked as the game was translated and are still in English even if the language is set to German; while this is a bit of an annoyance and doesn’t exactly testify a thorough checkup of the translation, the lack of a German version of these passages shouldn’t prevent even players completely illiterate in English from getting ahead in the game.
“… but with strange aeons, even death may die.”
Call of Cthulhu may not be quite what you’d expect from a game set in the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, and it isn’t what the first couple hours of gameplay might make you hope either, but in spite of quite a few flaws in both areas a title of good quality both technically and in content and a refreshing change from the usual “hey, let’s send some monsters through the windows with a lot of noise all of a sudden and give the player as little ammo as possible” material in self-proclaimed horror games. Personally, I hope that Headfirst will get the chance to continue their trilogy and pick up and improve upon the points of criticism the first game has. It remains to see whether the PC version - which is still without a release date - will iron out the technical problems or if we’ll be seeing a direct, unchanged port of the Xbox release.
Tech Specs
Platform: Xbox
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Headfirst Productions
Genre: Shooter/Adventure
Release: Xbox already released (26.10.2005), PC announced
Web: http://www.callofcthulhu.com/
Age rating: 18+ (PEGI), M (ESRB), 16+ (USK)
MSRP: EUR 39,95
