We have not revealed anything about the story that developers want us to find out only when the product is over: what we can say, however, is that throughout the gaming session we breathed an atmosphere that can capture the spirit in full Lovecraftian.
The smoky and obscure twilight arias of the twentieth century, typical of Providence’s books, have been perfectly translated on the screen, as well as the mood and suspicion surrounding the small town of Darkwater Island to the point where it seems to be immersed in one of the macabre tales born from his pen.
From a technical point of view, good work has been done, especially since this is a small team. The game runs at 1080p, but we have not been told whether the final frame rate will stay on 30fps or 60fps: what we can say is that the game did not show any kind of slowdown during the test shown.
This does not mean that it’s all roses and flowers: character animations and details of their faces could be much improved and we hope developers take advantage of the time that separates us from release to work on these aspects. Another problem to work with is the synchronization of the audio, which in the video shown did not match any of the characters labia, a gaffe that we hope is resolved as soon as possible. Learn the craft
Call of Cthulhu is, in essence, a first-person graphic adventure that resumes the classic mechanics of the genre: we will find solutions to puzzles, gather objects, converse with characters in search of information and so on, to reach the head of the great a mystery that drives the whole story.
However, RPG elements have been inserted that make the game structure more complex; analyzing objects, completing missions, and so on, we will get experience points that we can distribute at our leisure in four areas: strength, social skills, knowledge and profession.
Respectively, these abilities allow you to: interact with certain objects or spin it into a collusion, unlock dialogue options, interpret clues, and ultimately improve your investigative skills (we have not been shown as). Not having enough points in a given field will mean that you will not be able to track a certain track in our surveys; in that case, we will have to find an alternative method that matches the abilities we have given to our protagonist. This could give the title a certain rewritability to see how the story would be happening if we only assigned our points in a different way. Our choices will also depend on the final outcome, which has a total of four variants.
During our surveys, we will always have a main goal, but we will also face secondary missions: these are useful to accumulate experience points, and even if fully optional, they will provide, according to the developer, interesting backgrounds on the story we are part of. But we should be careful of our curiosity, because it could turn out to be a double-cut weapon: exploring, in fact, we will come into contact with supernatural creatures that will endure the mental health of the protagonist.
As in the historical Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiemfor Gamecube, we will have a mental health bar that drops whenever our Edward will see something disconcerting. Unlike the title of Silicon Knights, however, lost mental health can not be recovered: we must therefore be very cautious in deciding what to do and, above all, trying to limit visual contact with monsters hiding on the island.
