Infinitap Games

In this dev diary, I talk about the good and the bad of the game Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. They do some really cool things, but the game design itself seems fatally flawed. If you are curious as to why, watch my video!

Oh yeah this is the game I think about buying every year during the winter Steam sales, but then I look at my growing list of other old adventure games I thought I'd totally get into but still haven't played and decide against it. Good to know I don't seem to be missing much, all the other things I've heard about it have been mixed too.

I hadn't heard about the new Frogwares game yet. I'm not sure about Frogwares, people seem to like the Sherlock Holmes games (Awakened is supposed to be a Lovecraftian horror game) but I just couldn't get into them, and I don't think they've aged well by now.

Have there been many horror games directly inspired by Lovecraft? I can't think of any other than this one.

I liked this game overall, but it is a bitter pill to swallow. The stealth was terrible, and especially since it comprises such a large chunk of the game. There's no indicator of how visible you are, and once they spot you, there's essentially zero chance to escape. Once you're spotted, you can't just load from the last checkpoint, because the only way to load from a checkpoint is to die, so you have to stand around and let them kill you, and while in normal, moment-to-moment gameplay it seems like you're so fragile, for some reason when you just stand there and let them kill you, it takes fooooreeeeeeeever for them to beat and shoot you to death. On top of that, the game tells you that you're less visible in shadows and when you're crouching, but it never seems to work, and there's a sneak button that doesn't seem to do anything other than make you move slower. So, I would go so far as to say that the stealth mechanics were non-existent, because they just flat-out didn't work.

And it's buggy as all hell, too! I was stuck on the beginning of the chase sequence for a really long time because one of the doors was glitching and I couldn't close it. I've heard that in the original PC version (fixed in the steam release), there's a bug that slows your movement speed based on how high your resolution is, and on resolutions higher than, say, 800x600, the final escape sequence is literally impossible, and there's a fairly common game-breaking bug in one of the action sequences towards the end of the game that modders have been unable to track down.

Another thing that they really dropped the ball on was during the later part of the big, epic chase, when they corner you in a burning bank building and you have to balance across some wooden beams and go out the roof, and then do some more first-person platforming (ugh.) on scaffoldings and balconies and whatnot. I looked down to see where I was going, and the camera would start getting fuzzier and wobblier, I started moving slower and slower, the controls started getting touchy and unpredictable, and the colors and audio faded, leaving only a heartbeat sound. At first, I thought it was some kind of balancing mechanic, since you're balance-beaming across the wooden planks, but it would still be in effect when I wasn't balancing. Then, as I got past that section, it stopped, and I thought well, maybe it was because of the fire? They're striving for realism everywhere else, why wouldn't they factor heat and smoke inhalation into it? But then when I left the building, it started up again on the next platforming section, which wasn't anywhere near the fire. So I got frustrated, since other than the controls getting all tipsy, you slow down to the point where you can't build up the speed necessary to make the jumps. So, I assumed I was missing something or doing something wrong, and I consulted a walkthrough. I got to the section I was stuck on, and the first thing it said was "Now, [what's-his-name] has a fear of heights, so don't look down." and I was like "oooooOOOOOooooh, I get it! Gee whiz, that's really clever! Wait, what? Fear of heights? Since when?" It would have been nice for, you know, the game to clue us in on our player character's apparently crippling fear of heights at some point! I love the idea, don't get me wrong, I think it's a rather simple and elegant way of telling us about the main character through game mechanics, and I don't think it was implemented poorly, just introduced poorly. But for one thing, they, deliberately and with malice aforethought, made the decision to include first-person platforming, and then decided to make a game mechanic that makes it harder? There wasn't a better way to do it? And secondly, one help box! That's all it would have taken! He could've said one line of dialogue, something like "I hate heights...just don't look down..." or something like that, and one box could pop up and tell us not to look down from great heights, but they just didn't? Did nobody playtest this game?

Ugh.

Anyways, they did a lot of stuff really well, though. The atmosphere and the H.P. Lovecraft lore is great, obviously, and I think crude graphics make games scarier. I loved being able to just walk up to stuff and hit a button and the player character would make a voice-acted comment about it like an adventure game (although he always uses that same calm, measured tone of voice, even when shit is really going down and his non-internal dialogue is fearful and panickey). I loved that they sort of tied together all the insanity parts by using the little girl you inadvertently kill as a sort of pyramid head-like figure, always showing up and leading you to danger, and how they convey you losing sanity by having the main character whimpering things like "She was just a little girl...if I hadn't come here, she'd still be alive..." and such, it really helped flesh out and humanize him, whatever his name was. I loved the long, slow build up to the Yug Shaggoth that lasts basically the entire game. I loved the shooting mechanics, even though enemies needed just a little too many hits to kill, and I loved that they tried to make a chase and pursuit sequence that lasts like a quarter of the entire game, although it could have been designed better.

And lastly, and this is just personal for me, but I love how ammo conservation is a big deal, and yet they still let you reload your gun at any time, even at a full clip. I'm not sure if I've brought this up before, but I have OCD as well. In games where you carry around a handful of guns at a time, I sort of make it a habit to switch between all of them and reload them all right after a fight, or occasionally switch between them and hit the reload button just because, so the fact that they enabled me to obsessively over-reload all my guns all the time gave me a sort of safety blanket during the more intense parts of the game. So. I liked that part. But that's just me.

So despite the game's many horrible shortcomings,I feel like it did more than enough things really well to make up for it. And it sucks that Headfirst Studios shut down, because it's one of those games that you can tell was a labor of love from top to bottom, and the studio planned on this being the first in a series of games that mish-mashed H.P. Lovecraft's works into single stories, one of them being a sequel to At The Mountains of Madness. But, for reasons I don't know, Dark Corners of the Earth was planned to be released in 2001, but didn't release until 2005. The development cycle was so long that they actually started developing the next two games in the series simultaneously. They got Bethesda to publish Dark Corners of the Earth, but got into a contentious relationship with them since they were basically out of money by that point. Half of the team left, and the remaining devs desperately tried to keep it afloat by porting the next game to next-gen consoles, but by 2006 they had failed to secure a publishing deal and went bankrupt. There are still some leaked screenshots of their next game, Call of Cthuhlu: Destiny's End floating around the internet.

Wow, Grabthehoopka! Your write up was much better than what I had to say about the game. I had forgotten a lot of interesting things they did.

I suspect it was one of those projects where they were a bit too ambitious for the team, so it ended up being late and having to be released before it was properly polished. I've been there before! We all wanted "The Incredibles" to be a much better game than it ended up being, but we had a hard release date, so we had to shove the game out the door.

"The Incredibles" didn't have a lot of good ideas in it, so I imagine it was even more difficult to shove a game with a lot of cool features out of the door when it isn't finished. I'm sure the financial pressure made it even worse.

The publisher funded game business is REALLY challenging from a financial standpoint because you basically have to have another project lined up in the wings, or you have to lay off most of your staff. There isn't a really good way around this unless you have two projects on at all times and move people back and forth, but getting one contract is hard enough. Having two is a lot harder!

It is definitely sad that Headfirst shut down because perhaps they could have refined what they created in Dark Corners and put together a really terrific game.