Whale of a Time (Call of Cthulhu)

Game: Call of Cthulhu
Platforms: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Windows
Played On: Xbox One
Price: £34.99 (Although massively cheaper second hand)
Available on Xbox Game Pass: No

Yet again I’m taking the cheap way out and playing this months Games with Gold available with Xbox Live (what’s a guy to do, gamings an expensive hobby) and I’ve picked up Call of Cthulhu, available free till mid-March. This is the 2018 release developed by Cyanide and Saber Interactive and published by Focus Home Interactive and is based on the short by H.P Lovecraft. As always there might be a few minor spoilers.

Now this is billed as merely a survival game but to me, this is a horror game but that is purely based on me being a whimp (I’ve been looking at Outlast on my Xbox for well over a good few years) But also there’s some obvious tropes as we load up the game. We are greeted with the classic brightness menu with a scary symbol we need to keep barely visible, we have epic art with the options as dark, brooding music serenades us. This game has horror tones and it’s obvious. But we’ll be brave and we’ll hit new game.

First thing’s first, we have a long wait. There’s no other way to say this but if you’re playing on a regular Xbox One, you have time to answer a few emails before you’re ready to play. But we eventually fall into the game, and literally fall we do, straight into a ‘dream sequence’. It gives us a very big nautical clue about the game as, rather unpleasantly, surrounded by dead fish we have to get through. But once we’re through we wake up and we’re in an office. This is where we discover who we are and what we’re doing. You are Edward Pierce, a private investigator with a drinking problem and no cases. About to lose his license we accept the case of the mysterious death of the Hawkins family. That leads us to our main setting, the island of Darkwater.

Once there we get our next horror movie trope, grey... lots and lots of grey. But this sort of kills the graphics some what. Now I’m not really one for caring about graphics, gameplay (and we’ll get to it) and story are far more important in what makes a good game for me, but the lack of colour seems to just drain away some of the character. Sometimes it works and I can see why it was used for this game, but personally I think it just shows off what the game is lacking visually.

Now the story is obviously there, and it’s portrayed well, the game gives you a nice mix of puzzles and straight forward progression which is a nice mix, especially as the puzzles aren’t too hard yet are very rewarding when you complete them. The gameplay is mostly smooth, I do have some issue when it comes to lock picking, as this is an random. There’s no mini game and it’s just luck which is very frustrating as the game saves immediately after a successful or unsuccessful try, and once you’ve been unsuccessful you can’t try it again so it can be very annoying, but mostly the game plays very well.

As I said the story is good but it is a slow burner and will take sometime to ramp up. It does feel like it’s dragging before the games begun so you will have to stick with it, but if you’re into that sort of game then you’ll enjoy it regardless, so some patience is required. It wants to be a horror game but doesn’t quite reached horror standards. Is it tense?? Yes. But I can’t class this a a horror, (even as scared as I always am). A thriller however, absolutely.

Overall we have a very solid game here and it’s well worth a play. The game lasts about 10 hours if you’re looking for everything and every pick up, so at £34.99 on Xbox Store it’s up there in price, I’d say finding this game for around £15 would be fair, so grabbing it while it’s currently free is a must. Again it’s not ground breaking but you won’t regret playing it.

7.5/10

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