Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Dark Corners of the Earth tries to buck the trend of traditional horror-adventure games and provides the gamer with a very sparse set of interface options. There's no HUD to tell you when you've taken encounter damage and no magical health packs lying around with which to tend your wounds. Instead, the gamer will need to pay close attention to the physical responses of Jack and act accordingly. You'll be able to bandage key vital areas of his body when he's hurt, but don't expect Jack to deal well with getting shot in the chest, as it's likely to have fatal results.

That said, Jack is an ex-cop and knows his way around various blunt objects and simple firearms. He's also smart enough to know how to sneak around in order to avoid detection from enemies -- something which seems to play an important role in progression throughout the early stages of the game. The whole exploration and investigative aspect of DCotE seems to be well done at this point. Chatting with the locals of Innsmouth reveals their hatred of outsider interference and soon enough you'll start to feel as though you are meddling in affairs that should be left well alone.


In terms of technical prowess, DCotE is somewhat in danger of being a victim of its own long development cycle at this point. Sure, the preview code was a little sluggish in places, and fine in others, and while the character models and environments are fitting, I get the feeling that it's all starting to feel a little bit on the old side. Last year's The Chronicles of Riddick and the upcoming Xbox version of DOOM 3 really take the visuals of Microsoft's console to new heights, but maybe DCotE could and should be looking more impressive by now. (We didn't have a PC preview version to play with, so we're unsure how the graphics in that version are shaping up at this point.)

Aurally, the game is shaping up well. The current batch of voice-over work feels good and not amateurish. Our preview still placeholder text for the dialogue and the odd sound bug which causes sound to be either repeated over and over again or lost completely, but on the whole, the 1920s American feel of the game is being pulled off quite nicely.

The deeper you go into the DCotE rabbit hole, the more intriguing and exciting the experience becomes. I'm literally going insane here -- no pun intended -- to get my hands on a more stable, complete version of the game because once the continuity and pacing aspects of the game are ironed out, I'm confident that even if the game doesn't look look better than those visual stunners already out on Xbox, it should be able to provide an invigorating alternative to the Resident Evil's and Silent Hill's of the world.


My advise to anyone interested in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is to hang in there and hope for the best. In the meantime, track down some of Lovecraft's short stories, and stay tuned for more updates on Headfirst's potential winner as the coming months will hopefully deliver a stellar trip into the mouth of madness.