Utterly Mad

My Thoughts on Call of Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth since I finally beat it:

I wanted to like it, honestly. I'm a fan of HP Lovecraft ever since I found out about his creatures and monsters. And the first two chapters were great, I liked exploring Innsmouth and I liked the raid on the Marsh Refinery.

But Goddamn after that boat chapter the game became unfair, difficult, and made me feel like the game was crafted by Cthulhu's own evil hands. Bugs fucking everywhere, to the point where I had to download a speed-cheat just to beat the ending: Basically you're escaping a city being destroyed by torpedoes, you're also on a very short timer. So in the Xbox version Jack ran faster, that means you could always escape in time... well in the PC version Jack runs like his feet have bowling balls strapped to them. So you can never beat it in Vanilla unless you get really-really lucky and managed to speed your way past the fallen debris.

So after a great 5 Hours worth of gameplay, you get another 7 hours worth of bugs, glitches, bullshit trial-and-error gameplay, and a load more stuff that makes you feel more frustrated then helpless. There is some charm to be had though, playing it reminded me of the games I used to rent from Blockbuster or Hollywood Homevideo; where the game would be fun and easy, until you hit a threshold and have to rewatch the same cutscene over and over again until you beat it (IE: Kingdom Hearts, Pitfall for Gamecube, God of War, SOCOM, Final Fantasy 10 was notorious in my neighborhood for that fish boss bullshit), then you either get lucky or you rage quit.


Eitherway, it taught me how Bethesda still made buggy messes of a game even in 2006.