“Far too soon it starts throwing betentacled monsters at you”
Can CALL OF CTHULHU satisfy my unnatural hunger for the mythos?
THE MYTHOS IS ALWAYS MOST EFFECTIVE IN GAMES WHEN IT’S USED WITH RESTRAINT
After enjoying Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened so much this month (see my review on p72), my appetite was whetted for Lovecraftian horror. Hazily I remembered a game from a few years back with a pretty similar premise: Call of Cthulhu. Just as I had the thought, it popped up at a deep discount on Steam.
Call of Cthulhu, based on both Lovecraft’s work and the board game, is a pretty classic mythos tale. A private detective is hired to investigate a death, travels to an isolated community to investigate, and finds himself drawn into bizarre events that sap his sanity.
So far, so good, and indeed the game makes a great first impression. My introduction to the crumbling fishing village of Darkwater is wonderfully grotesque and creepy – surly fishermen and threatening bootleggers making me feel anything but welcome, everything tinged a sickly green by overcast skies, a dead whale washed up on the beach, covered in unexplainable wounds.
But what so many Lovecraftian videogames are bad at is knowing when and how far to ramp up the weirdness, and Call of Cthulhu is no exception. Far too soon it starts throwing betentacled monsters at you, showing them in intense close-ups that destroy any sense of mystique – and you just can’t come back from that.
MONSTER MUSH
I won’t claim the original stories are all subtlety and nuance – let’s not forget that in Cthulhu’s first literary appearance, he’s defeated by the protagonist ramming a boat into his head – but the mythos is always most effective in games when it’s used with some restraint.
The weird thing is that, at the same time that Call of Cthulhu seems so over-eager to indulge in Lovecraftian tropes with its monsters, cultists and forbidden tomes, it also struggles to trust in them for its horror. There are key themes that make the Mythos uniquely scary – existential dread, fear of the unknown, the terror of losing your mind – but as if trying to hedge its bets, the game throws in a load of other horror ideas too.
As I crept around a hospital run by a mad scientist, discovering piles of body parts and gore in every other room, I couldn’t help but feel the game had lost the thread of what could have made it unsettling. A disembodied torso doesn’t make me think about my insignificance in an uncaring universe – it just makes me think, “Ew, gross.” But, it has to be said, subtlety and focus are not generally the strong suits of bigbudget videogame storytelling. My search for another great Lovecraftian detective game continues.