• Story

  ◼️ Game story writing You follow the plot stream by giving choices and reply to the characters you’ll encounter. All the story is told by the events that develop around yourself and the island of Darkwater. The land is an unsettling place, and you’ll feel its oppressive atmosphere as soon as doing the first steps ashore. The story looks like split into two distinct sessions, the first part is a pure detective story where you have to investigate the “murder” of the Hawkins family, the second part is an acid trip into madness. I liked a lot the first part, less the last. I was hoping for a more subtle introduction to the Lovecraftian horrors but the game gives you a direct kick into the blackness void. ◼️ Characters Edward Pierce is a private investigator in Boston that’s self-medicating the trauma he suffered during the first World War with alcohol and sleeping pills. After the brief introduction, you will meet a bunch of fishermen, cops and local mobsters. Everybody will glance at you over glasses of whiskey. Nobody trusts you and will have to develop a relationship with them by answering in the right way at their questions or request. Overall the character developing is poor. You’ll understand some of the reasons why they act in a way or an another...but the story doesn’t give you a real background at all. ◼️ Dialogues The writing lines are average and forgettable. Not a single time I had the opinion that the dialogue between characters was poor or rich of content.

• Gameplay

◼️ How it plays The game plays in first person, the detective Edward Pierce is always defenseless and helpless to the human and supernatural entities. You’ll walk, you’ll run, you’ll hide, you’ll take objects and use them to advance. Usually, the plot gives you one straightforward way to clear an objective, sometimes you can choose different paths, the ending is the same. ◼️ Features Like every good detective, to find clues, you have to walk around searching and examining whatever book, photograph or bloodstain you have come across. You can also reconstruct the past in certain situations, activating clues one by one to build up a silhouetted version of events. Other than that, during the story, you will earn and assign skill points to a collection of stats that let you tailor Pierce's detective expertise towards investigation, psychology, eloquence and so on. These stats affect both the dialogue options and the ways you can interact with the environment. ◼️ Overall difficulty The game doesn’t let you choose between different difficulties. Overall I find the game kinda easy with the exception of boss battles that are kind of confusing and unclear.

• Graphic

◼️ Art Design Overall the art design is majestic for the environment and the world-building. Buildings, panoramic visuals, objects are expertly inspired by the Lovecraftian folklore. Beautiful and creepy to see, walking by the streets or entering a building is like successfully jumping in the occult. ◼️ Characters Out of the last century era, the dev tried to recreate clothes, hairstyles in a pulp/noir way. Overall the design is poor and disappointing. Animations and body movements feel clunky and fake. The worst thing of all is the facial animation, like something from the early 2010s games era. ◼️ Effects The labyrinth illusions during some exploration, the use of dark colour palette, light and darkness create the impression of a real fall into madness. It’s like a spiral kaleidoscope of cosmic horror effects that follow up your steps, starts slow but becomes inescapable near the end.

• Soundtrack and Audio

◼️ Audio effects The creepy background noise and sound effects will make you jump from the chair at each passage near a squeaky door and chair. ◼️ Music 1920s music and esoteric themes, the soundtrack is nice but without a spark. ◼️ Voice Acting Quality is good but not stellar. Voice actor miss a lot of pathos in some cut-scenes.

• Extra

◼️ Scaryness level Overall my scare meter never touched the degree of “put the game in pause and get a relaxing herbal tea”. Recommended to pals with a sensitive bladder like me. ◼️ Replayability For what I saw there are a lot of different options and choices that the game gives you indirectly. Nonetheless, I am pretty sure that in the end, the story is straight forward in its epilogues. You have four different endings, two are harder to get and needs different choices in the walkthrough. ◼️ Game length Around 10 hours, maybe a little more if you get stuck on some puzzle or (like me) at the boss fight. ◼️ Achievements 49 achievements, more than half achievable during the main quest. A lot of them are missable and need different choices for each run.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2224908358

◼️ The story has a lot of illogical points and everything falls in a nightmarish Lovecraftian tale too fast, it feels like a rushed plot where the dev didn’t know how to fill the gaps between chapters, give a good background and evolution to characters and close some of the story arches.
Other than that when you make certain choices or perform certain actions the game gives you the message “this will affect your destiny”. What's never clear, however, is how your destiny has been affected. There isn’t a review at the end of the chapters, there's no recap to crucial choices you made.
◼️ The boss encounter, area puzzles long corridors that you have to walk in the dark, a claustrophobic cat and mouse game with a true Lovecraftian horror, is wonderfully atmospheric and very tense, but so obtusely designed that it was difficult to ascertain what I had to do to progress.
◼️ Overall the characters design is incredibly weak, animation and body movements are clunky and look silly. During the play, you will see a lot of cutscenes, those are terrible, bad made and useless, they kill the mood. The dev should have made all the game in first person without the “cinematic” portion.
◼️ Gamepad vibrations are kind of fake, I felt the pad vibrate rarely.
◼️ Bugs & Issues:
All the time between choices the dialogue and audio clips freeze for a second other than that I had some minor bug after loading a checkpoint, like missing items or gear. You just need to reload the save to fix it.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2224908153

Call of Cthulhu is a weak detective story of cosmic horror. Nonetheless, the mystery and the intriguing gameplay of some sections make it kind of special. I don’t lie, in the final big decision I just no longer cared about the output. What I cared and what I enjoyed most is the Lovecraftian subplot and worldbuilding, a unique and evergreen theme that influences the game artistic style and keeps me playing. So don’t buy it at full price and enjoy its surreal moments.