Call of Cthulhu Patient Review (No Spoilers)

This game has a pretty interesting premise with a story centered around cults and the Cthulhu legend. I don’t know much about either so I was intrigued and since I received this game in a bundle some time ago, I wanted to give it a shot. The game is narratively focused so I’ll talk mostly about theme, art, and story as I go.

I’ll start with the look and feel of the game by saying that I have middling opinions on how this game looks. The textures are good for the most part and convey the atmosphere pretty well. The game falls apart though when it comes to animations. Everybody moves and expresses themselves worse than cardboard. Remember the canned talking animations of Skyrim? It’s that but in a narrative focused game and worse. The characters need to be believable but when someone is talking in a relaxed way while their hands do frantic motions or are frozen in front of them, it breaks a lot of the illusion. However, the rest of the art, atmosphere, and lighting looks pretty good.

When it comes to story, I won’t claim to be a narrative expert. In my playtime, I didn’t get hooked by the story at any point. The characters are trying to do that thing where they provide little detail and are therefore mysterious. That didn’t track well with me and instead they felt dull and shallow. It sucks because some of the dialog is really good but there isn’t enough of it to carry a narrative game. The best bits of story are told to you in cutscene form and this game almost seems like it’s better suited as an FMV game or similar. The biggest benefit to the story though is the multiple choices. I felt my choices were impactful and they don’t let you exhaust dialog for other options. You have one conversation and there is at least an illusion that you could’ve had many more discrete conversations.

The RPG skills are another middling feature as they help a lot of the exploration and conversational aspects of the game out and yet they’re paper thin at the same time. The game has you assigning points and yet I don’t feel that it would’ve played any differently than if I’d just picked skills at the start and nothing afterwards.

Lastly the sound is another 5/10. Sometimes it really sells the horror of a scene. But a lot of the time the same repeated music tracks take me out. And the compression used on the voices is embarrassingly bad. It harms the performances so much that I began tweaking my setup because I thought I had audio issues.

To wrap it up, I wanted to like this game and I still like aspects of it. It’s maybe worth playing if you catch it on sale or get it in a bundle. And since it’s a short experience, some of these gripes aren’t dealbreakers. I just found it to be a disappointing use of the setting and theme and I wish more could’ve been done to immerse me in the game.

If you’ve played it, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it!