A look back at - Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (2006)

Well, I've been playing a whole lot of my old favorite survival horror games recently, and I came across this gem that had totally slipped my mind. No idea how it did because it is such a great landmark, even if people don't know it, in the survival horror genre. Let's begin shall we?

Call of Cthulhu : DCotE was released, for PC, in 2006. Developed by Headfirst Productions and published by our favorite publisher Bethesda Entertainment, this game was a buggy gem just waiting to be grabbed by a horror fan.

The Cthulhu mythos is an amazing setting to have a horror game. I mean come on guys, cosmic Gods who slumber in the sunken cyclopean city of R'yleh and are corrupting every man they possibly can to help them rise out of the sea and destroy the Earth. I mean, you can't get more doomsday-ey or horror than that.

Anyway, the plot for this game is very loosely based on the short H.P. Lovecraft story titled 'Shadow over Innsmouth'. We play as a detective by the name of Jack Walters, who was recently released from Arkham Asylum (not the one from Batman), which shows he is a bit unstable in his head.

Jack soon gets a new case in the 'sunny' little seaside town of Innsmouth, where a web of intrigue and pure horror starts to unravel as he learns of the towns dark secret and the nightmare that will never end... ehm yeah. This game goes a little overboard with it's plot, however, it is a generally good plot.

GAMEPLAY

The gameplay is fairly strange in this one. You play in an entirely HUD-less first person view, this concentrates the level of intensity to maximun capacity. making the player that little bit extra jumpy. This game is very survival based. Meaning, if you break a leg, you have to stop and fix it. This get's incredibly annoying after a while but it does show what developers are willing to go to when trying to keep to their genre.

Oh, and by the by, if you were hoping to blast your way through Innsmouth, well then you are in for a bad time. The game doesn't even give you a weapon until about 3 hours into the game. And by this time the entire town has already started hunting you down after the inn keeper fails to kill you in your sleep. There is a rather lengthy rooftop/building chase scene which is intense as it is hard.

Once you do get a weapon, the game get's no less intense or even easy. If you get spotted, your dead. Every man and his grandma will come at you with shotguns and try to wipe your soul from the Earth. This is where the game gets a little bit more insane. However, I shan't go on about this anymore.

This game does get fairly buggy at times, on the PC version without an unofficial patch. This means that on certain levels, things commonly disappear. There's a level called Devil's Reef, and you have to blow up five guys who are creating a giant storm. However, the rushed PC version denies sight of these guys altogether, so you are left shooting in the dark.

Anywho, I could go on for hours about the bugs of the game, but that's not what I wanted to talk about. This game is a brilliant mish-mash of insanity and horror with Lovecraftian settings all rolled into one giant explorable, although not sandbox style explorable, world. If you have not played this game, then I think that you should.

You know how I get at the end of a post. GO PLAY THE DAMN GAME NOW!

See ya next time folks.


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