Call of Cthulhu

Much of Call of Cthulhu is a perfectly competent adventure game built on firm, if uninspired, point-and-click traditions. And while it won't dazzle you with ambitious, creative puzzle-solving, its central story is as haunting and consuming as you want a good Lovecraft tale to be. But then, like some nightmare creature, an action sequence comes out of nowhere and ruins the experience.

Call of Cthulhu may not be fun to play, and often feels like an amusement ride that is just pulling you along, but succeeds in delivering a mind-bending story that lives up to the Lovecraftian breed of cosmic horror. In the end, I’m glad I played it, but for roughly five or six hours, I questioned why I was subjecting myself to it.

Cyanide did a pretty good job with this game, but it could have been much better if they’d done a little more, or perhaps even a little less. Either way, this is a good game that could have been great; a shell of something like Bloodborne, which established itself as a Lovecraftian narrative that had mastered its source material by meticulously crafting a game based on the -ian suffix that allows for innovation as opposed to replication.