When you walk around your office, points of interest are marked, and you can interact with whatever object is there, like a drawer, a newspaper or other objects that catch your eyes. It all starts with Pierce having some disturbing nightmares that keep him from sleeping properly and also serves you a great spoon of foreboding.Īs you wake up, you are thrust into an introduction of the main gameplay mechanics. Pen and paper game, which constantly had you play as any number of Lovecraftian or noir archetypes. He is as cliché a protagonist as they come, but at the same time, there is something endearing in the way the developers, Cyanide Studio, leans into the trope. You play as Detective Edward Pierce, a down on his luck and grizzled survivor of The Great War with a crippling drinking problem. Thankfully, Call of Cthulhu manages to preserve the Lovecraftian sensibilities well and does a really good job at creating a creepy atmosphere despite its shortcomings. Lovecraft might write about the futility of fighting certain forces, while video games have you kill them and win. Lovecraft hints at a grotesque and horrible monster but might never fully show it, while games make you fight it.

It is hard to properly translate the tales made by good old H.P.L since so much of his writing relies upon things being implicit, while video games tend to make things more or less explicit. Over the years, there have been a few, mostly disappointing, attempts to directly adapt Lovecraft’s stories. I had high hopes for Call of Cthulhu when it was first shown off since I really liked playing the pen and paper version back in the day.

Call of cthulhu video game