Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This game has a lot of good ideas, and implements a number of them surprisingly well. In fact, almost everything innovative that this game tries, it succeeds at. Going insane feels like you're going insane, bolting doors and shoving bookcases in front of them to stop pursuers is adrenaline-pumping, having to treat the proper injuries that result from different ways of taking damage makes sense within the game, and the creepy atmosphere is so pervasive that you're practically suffocating on it throughout the entire game.
Where it goes wrong is the most trivial, inane, annoying details.
Checkpoint's frequently come only before extensive cutscenes (upwards of several minutes), or before long walks or tough obstacles, so if you make one mistake, not only have you lost all the progress since the last save, but you frequently have to repeat the same lengthy cutscene or retread the exact same long hallways over and over.
Frequent hard-to-see insta-kill traps often leave me wondering exactly why I died, which compounds the problems of the last point.
The game frequently mistakes an intent to bolt a door as an intent to open a door; trying to close a door behind you, oftentimes the door will catch you and push you into whatever is chasing you; for the game to register your attempt to close the door, you have to be standing just so, which can be very hard to do when you're trying to protect someone that's following you.
Then there's the glitches: if you run the game on Vista, a certain segment involving the artillery guns of a naval ship won't work right, and you'll have to download a save game just beyond that point. Also, the final segment in the game is almost literally impossible without some extremely precise bunny-hopping, and I ended up having to cheat to beat it.
In short: this is a very, very good game, much better than I expected, but you have to be able to stomach more questionable design decisions, poor scripting, and buggy interfaces than it's reasonable to expect of any player. A supermodel with headlice, right next to Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

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