The Call of Cthulhu Failure part 2: Small Game, Big Problems
Originally published July 2015.Last time we discussed the impact of H.P. Lovecraft's influence on story-telling and we started talking about how the video game that uses the title of his most famous story failed to live up to [my] expectations. This time we'll go into why.
Despite its rather [undeservedly] high score on Metacritic, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth fails for one fundamental reason: It tried to do too much. This game tried to do a lot of different things at once and, as a result, it stretched itself too thin. It tried to be an ultra-realistic survival-horror game based on fantastical stories about elder gods and fish people with first-person shooting mechanics, stealth mechanics, and health mechanics. None of them work very well.
Image: Bethesda Softworks
Where it Succeeds
I will say that the opening of the game is good. It's not perfect, by any means, as you still have to fumble through some puzzles that are rather obtuse. You also have very little context as to what is going on as you go from an insane asylum, to a house in the hills filled with violent cultists, to the asylum again, to Innsmouth within the first 20 minutes of the game (if you don't take too long to navigate the puzzles). There's a lot going on, a lot of which you might not catch if you don't stop and read the notes to add to the story. Some of them are written well enough to pull you in, while some aren't and drag with boring exposition. Read too many bad ones, and soon you're skipping a majority of the story that isn't being told through dialogue.
Image: Bethesda Softworks
Nonetheless, the first couple hours of Dark Corners of the Earth are relatively strong due to the atmosphere and two key parts of the gameplay:
There are no gun mechanics,
As your character sees more horrific things, he starts going insane, whispering to himself, and hallucinating.
There was a game with these same mechanics that came out after Call of Cthulhu, which managed to be much more successful and might sound a little familiar to you. Amnesia: The Dark Descent used the same mechanics that made the opening hours of DCotE so much better than the rest of the game. The developers of Amnesia also made the much smarter decision to keep it that way for the game's entirety. Not only did this work really well at making the players more tense about the situation, since they didn't have any way to defend themselves and they couldn't even look at the monsters chasing them without making things more difficult, but this allowed the developers to keep things simple. They could focus their efforts on perfecting the experience with this type of gameplay because they weren't adding on mechanics like shitty gunplay and over-complicated healing methods.
Where it Fails - Medic!
Image: Bethesda Softworks
I mean look at this. This was added all for the sake of making the game more "realistic." Yet, it adds nothing to the experience. It just makes me have to pick out the various pieces of my body that I need to fix with particular materials from the first aid kit, like cloth bandages, disinfectant, or a sewing needle for stitches. If you don't have enough materials, you can't heal that particular part of yourself. There are a few big problems I have with how all this works, aside from the fact that it is completely unnecessary.
For one thing, healing all of these various pieces of you through this ugly menu doesn't actually heal you. If you were gravely wounded and you wrapped yourself in bandages, you might expect that, by game mechanic standards, you would start to see an improvement. Not so in DCotE. Several times, after I had just cleaned myself up with the menu, the screen still faded to black and I died from my wounds. The reason this occurred is that there's still an actual health meter. However, that health meter isn't exactly clear either because they wanted to keep things abstract for the sake of realism. "How would you really measure your health condition? Would you do it on a 1-10 scale?"
I was never able to really read the health meter they provided, or tell what exactly I was looking at, I could only guess my health based on what was happening in the action. I think you can replenish your health using syringes, but I'm not sure because I never saw him use one. I also don't know how you would use it from the item menu where you heal everything else. The only way I could seem to get an instant improvement was using the quick heal method, because the game has two healing methods, for some reason.
Image: Bethesda Softworks | Explosive Femur Syndrome
This, as you can tell, creates a little confusion. If I'm stopping to take the time to heal my femur that shattered when a guy punched me in the face, why give me two different methods of dealing with the same situation? What's the benefit of one versus the other? They call the other method "quick heal," so we can assume that it takes less time to bandage yourself in the middle of a fight, but at the cost of being less effective. Yet, that seemed to be the only method I used where my actual health meter was replenished. There may have been a tutorial message I missed somewhere, but it still made no sense to me. Just give me 1 type of healing mechanic. If I have to go into a menu and fix every piece individually for some dumb reason, let me do that. If I have to press a single button on the keyboard for it, let me do that. There was really no way for me to see the difference in either method, I just assumed my health improved when the screen wasn't fading to black after I hit the keyboard, even though I still walked with a limp afterward.
The other big issue I had with the healing mechanic was the fact that I had to be concerned about the various materials for each type of injury I had. This is not the first game I've played that did this sort of thing, but each of the other games actually implemented it a little better with one simple change: the items you found had to be gathered individually. I don't recall ever finding needles and thread by themselves in Dark Corners of the Earth to stitch myself up. All the materials were found in medkits. Since you had a limit on particular healing items, if you kept getting the same type of injury, like exploding femur syndrome, you would have to search for medkits that would have this one item and you would basically discard everything else in it. Does this add anything to your experience? It didn't to me. It didn't make me stressed about losing materials in the medkits. It frustrated me that I didn't just use a medkit to heal myself like in, you know, every other video game!
Image: Bethesda Softworks | Might as well make use of this extra blood
So here's my revolutionary solution I have for the game. [If only the poor saps had me with them during development!] I have this ingenious bit of advice for how they could have improved their healing mechanics.
You remove the different partial injuries and make it a single health meter.
You get rid of all the different items inside a medkit and just make it a single item: a medkit.
You make the heal button use a medkit to replenish part of the health meter.
If the injuries are severe, in order to make the health meter full again, the player has to use... A SECOND MEDKIT!
Pretty good, right? Hopefully not too many game developers see this post, they might steal the unique healing mechanic I invented. I think I'll give my system a name so that if it's ever used by anyone in any other game, they have to acknowledge where it came from. I'll call it the Triple H system (not the wrestler) - Hippocratic Healing Hypothesis (copyright).
Where it Fails - Second Amendment
The other tacked-on mechanic that ruined the experience for Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was the gunplay. I know I mentioned it several times in the videos as I played it, but the moment guns became involved, the quality of the experience dropped substantially. That's not to say that the experience wasn't already failing; pretty much as soon as the residents of Innsmouth became hostile, the experience started to decline.
Image: Bethesda Softworks
Of course, there have to be enemies and people who want you dead in a survival-horror game, otherwise you don't have any tension. The issue though, makes me point back to the game that did it a lot better, Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
Amnesia was designed with the whole idea behind the gameplay to be a run-and-hide experience. You can't fight back against the stalking monsters, you can only run. If you don't have a method of defending yourself, then it doesn't make sense to have dozens of armed enemies capable of killing you quickly in the same area, you only need a small handful. Amnesia had very few enemies throughout the entire game, but that didn't keep it from being terrifying. Meanwhile, DCotE had tons of enemies with guns. They didn't need to have guns, they just needed to be a threat, but because it was designed with a shooting mechanic built in, the enemies needed to have some tools to kill you in the event you get the upper hand. If you give the players guns, the next thing you need to give them is something to shoot, after all. So, there's a plethora of enemies to shoot in Call of Cthulhu, but there's a problem: the shooting isn't good.
Using guns in Call of Cthulhu is bad for a variety of reasons. Not only should it seem pointless to anyone who's a fan of the Cthulhu universe because of the fact that guns are useless against the creatures people typically encounter, but it changes the dynamics of the gameplay entirely. The first few hours of DCotE were all investigation, sneaking around, and running from danger. This made for tense excitement, which is what you want out of a game like this. When the dudes started shooting at me, and I was without a gun, the tension was still there but without so much of the impending horrific dread. Plus, it was just frustrating to have to deal with my exploding femurs from being shot.
Image: Bethesda Softworks | This guy has a more severe case of exploding femur syndrome
When I got a gun and started firing back, the tension slipped away and I was left with just frustration. I was frustrated that this was how the game was going to be. I was frustrated by how unsatisfying it was to shoot the guns. I was frustrated by the fact that the damage, range, and accuracy of the guns were completely inconsistent. Perhaps this was another attempt at realism, as not every shot is perfect with a gun. Except this is a video game, and fun should be a priority, and it should be accurate when you're playing a first-person shooter, because if it isn't accurate, it's not very fun! You need to show me the reasons why a shotgun blast to the upper body from 10 feet away doesn't put down a guy who has the same skin and armor as another guy I killed with a pea-shooter pistol 20 feet away in the same general area.
If you're going to make a shooter, make a shooter. If you're going to make a survival-horror game where I have to sneak around to avoid danger, make that. Don't slam the two of them together haphazardly. This just forces your development team to spread their time out onto two separate things that conflict with one another. Don't worry if you're confused by this concept, though. I have once again come up with a brilliant solution. Here are 2 revolutionary suggestions I have:
Get rid of this game and go play Amnesia: the Dark Descent instead, because that game accomplishes the same goals and is much better.
OR, if this game must continue to exist and be played,
Reduce the number of enemies.
Get rid of guns altogether.
If guns have to be in the game at some point, give them to us for only a short period before removing them completely or giving us new enemies who are unaffected by them anyway to punctuate the change.
Improve your stealth mechanic so it actually works.
Image: Bethesda Softworks
I realize that I just mentioned yet another mechanic about the game that fails, but the developers couldn't be bothered to actually put stealth in their game, so I'll give it a similar treatment. I won't bother making an entire section about how it doesn't work, but I will ask, "What was the point of having a 'stealth mode' button that makes you just move slower than you already do with some grey filter around the edge of your screen?" Because if you were supposed to somehow become less visible while in that mode, it didn't work. At all! I have a feeling that this was a last-ditch adjustment they added to the game and didn't have time to actually make it work before releasing it. They realized it was much more tense when you were forced to sneak, started adding a stealth mechanic, got stuck dealing with how shitty their gun mechanics were, and forgot about the stealth mechanic altogether.
What Disappoints - Innsmouth
Why isn't this game called The Shadow Over Innsmouth? I'm not sure how much the game might delve into the actual Call of Cthulhu story by the end, but a majority of what I played took place in the town of Innsmouth and felt much closer to that story. Even a particular chase sequence was taken right out of the original novella.
Image: Bethesda Softworks
From the screenshots I've seen of later parts of the game, I'm not so certain we ever get away from Innsmouth, or into something any more interesting. I'm surprised to think that I would be so bored by the town of Innsmouth, since The Shadow Over Innsmouth is perhaps my favorite Lovecraft story. While the game manages to draw out some attachment I have to the story, much of the level design makes the town little more than a series of alleys for the Call of Dutythulhu experience. One of the most ominous and infamous towns in horror literature is reduced to the backdrop at a carnival shootout station.
There are very few stories that I have read that I felt legitimately tense reading them, in the way that you check behind you a little more often or don't like sleeping with the lights off after reading it. The Shadow over Innsmouth did that to me. Thus, I'm immensely disappointed with how it was handled here. It was good at first, I thought it was tasteful and tense. But once the developers started making their own story out of what was happening there, it started to fall apart. Obviously, they didn't have enough of their own ideas to make it work, they could only succeed at replicating someone else's. As soon as the chase out of the hotel was done and the game started using its own ideas, shit started going off the rails into Call of Duthythulhu territory.
When the "horrific" stuff starts happening, it just falls flat. Fish people just show up alongside the other people wielding shotguns, making them the same as everyone else; they're just the same enemy with a different skin. A weird tentacle sludge creature, aka a Shoggoth, that behaves like it was from Half-Life shows up in a factory out of nowhere and with no story build-up.
Image: Bethesda Softworks
It all just comes across as "another weird thing to see," as opposed to how these horrors were supposed to be portrayed. Fish people weren't supposed to be scary because they carried shotguns like mobsters in the 1920s. They were supposed to be terrifying because they were fucking fish people! Tentacle sludge monsters from another dimension shouldn't be reduced to the trash compactor creature from Star Wars. They should be so utterly horrific that the protagonist can’t even bear to look at them without unraveling his sanity. The game was willing, at times, to try to make certain things psychological hallucinations, but not enough good moments to make it count.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Even if I were to give this game a pass based on the technical limitations of the time, it still doesn't change the fact that the game was given a name far too big for it to handle. It couldn't even handle a town, let alone an entire mythos containing multiple universes and horrors. It's as though they put all their effort into the opening section and lost focus once they had to start making their own story and a game to contain it, due to a lack of direction.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth manages to evoke some quality survival-horror sensations early on, but quickly loses its grip on what it was trying to accomplish and devolves into a sloppy disfigured mess of a game that doesn't know what it wants to be. If I were to choose a mascot to best represent this game at its core, it would be this thing:
Image: Bethesda Softworks