Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth
Review
Despite being flawed, this game is a rare thing of grisly beauty
by darksun
reviewed on PC
They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer -- probably I am mad
Combat evolves very slowly in Dark Corners of the Earth. You are not immediately given a gun with which to solve your problems; You must use haste and intellect until such a time that these tools are no longer adequate for the job. Eventually, the weapons reach a staggering potency, but they start off simple - a crowbar, a knife, a revolver.
Fighting, however, is not always the best solution. Nietzsche wrote, "He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby becomes a monster", and so it is in this game. Fighting with monsters can cause sanity loss; which can lead to blurred vision, hearing loss, the hearing of voices, panic, shaking, dizziness, slow down, and in extreme cases a messy death at the business end of whatever weapon Jack is holding. Sanity loss can also come from viewing horrific scenes or simply encountering strange enough creatures. Minimizing these encounters goes a long way to keeping Jack sound in mind and body... for now.
"...no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace"
The main draw, and biggest selling points, of Dark Corners of the Earth are its story and immersion. After starting to play this game, I was compelled to play it - I felt needed to uncover these secrets myself, to know what lay just beyond sight and lurked in the spaces between worlds. The story builds slowly, laying crucial foundation at the outset, and builds brick by brick a structure of insane proportions. Jack's world is turned on its ear repeatedly, and he is forced to face that which man was not meant to know. Several of Lovecraft's classic creatures make appearances through a hybrid tale, part derivative work, part new material. But that which is new passes the test, and the entire work could have been written by a more modern Lovecraft. Start to finish, it is his world in which you are playing, and the player does well to remember that.
"Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
Sadly, it isn't all perfect. Dark Corners of the Earth falls into the typical survival horror quandary of requiring some rather esoteric actions to advance the plot - which results in some reliance upon a walkthrough, which is difficult when the game doesn't support alt-tab. Saving is done in the typical console fashion (showing its Xbox origins) of limited locations (marked as 'Elder Signs'), which while heightening the suspense is rather inconvenient. There are also a number of bugs, including sometimes getting stuck on architecture - which forces a reload. This wouldn't normally be a big deal, but the varied locations of the save points can cause this to be an infrequent problem.
Worst among these was a certain spot in the Factory level, where it took me several dozen attempts to finally step into the moving ore cart. Unfortunately, worst of all is that Dark Corners of the Earth is a slightly imperfect console port - in that the resolution you run at directly affects your run speed. This isn't really a problem, except for one part of the game - when I had to download a third-party utility to maximize the character's speed. That was an egregious oversight that never should have made it to a retail game.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents"
Despite being flawed, this game is a rare thing of grisly beauty. The suspense is excellently maintained, and has some actual occurrences of real horror. And while the bugs are not ignorable, they aren't enough to miss the well-told tale. If you seek the dark thrills of survival horror, this game can be for you - just make sure you have the fortitude to withstand that which comes along unexpectedly.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
