Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth [Old game playthrough]

[DUHH]

Ossk: I actually played through Eternal Darkness six times. You see... I lost the save with the original three times.... And you know... I couldn´t have the game without a complete save, now could I?

I think Penumbra does a pretty good job of creating a Lovecraftian mood, although I may be mistaken because most of what I know about Lovecraft is from the games based on his work, a couple of his short stories and derivative work (such as A Night in the Lonesome October).

I have Penumbra installed, but haven´t gotten to it yet. I did play the demo, and it does seem somewhat Lovecraftian.

But there´s a lot of confusion in what should be called Lovecraftian. In my opinion very few of the authors who are claimed to be Lovecraftian actually are. They often pay homage to his dreamland stuff, which when Lovecraft wrote it was, as it is now, very Dunsanian.

Or they use the setting and the language, both of which are very Poe´ish.

As I see it... the truly Lovecraftian tale is a sci-fi horror tale, most often set in contemporary times, using the newest of science, and mixing in real-world events and objects with imaginary ones, in order to paint a convincing picture of nightmarish images where the futility and unimportance of human existence in the endless universe is put into focus.

Or at least that´s my two cents.

So, even without having read it, I can say that I don´t think A Night in the Lonesome October seems like something I´d describe as Lovecraftian. But then again, many of of Lovecrafts short-stories were not terribly Lovecraftian either, at least up until 1927 or so.

[Historical_Society]

I tried playing CoC back in February. I had a really hard time with it. Mainly because I kept getting motion sick. I remember having a bag of crackers and looking away everytime a cutscene came to try and reduce my motion sick got bad. Was I the only one that suffered motion sickness through that game?

[Erkki]

I started playing again today and this time I got past the chase sequence with only two attempts. Previously, I hadn't noticed a save point.

I really wish this game had a flashlight (or lantern, whatever)

[Churchy]

The one thing I remember from the bits I played of this game was that the save points looked like penises

[Erkki]

The game is pretty good, except for the savepoint placement. Often it forces you to watch cutscenes several times and redo some longish sequences. For example the warehouse near the docks: takes a pretty long way to get to a point without saves, then a cutscene plays and some guys will rush you. The game gives you no chance to hide, it's programmed into the cutscene that they will see you.

Also, the enemies constantly shouting and only varying between "Spread out!" and "Find him!" (or whatever the other exclamation was) gets annoying sometimes.

[Erkki]

Finished it yesterday. Awesome game!

A lot of the stuff shown in early videos was cut though, which disappointed me a little. The combat and stealth were not particularly good. Too bad Headfirst didn't make it, I would have loved to see what they came up with for the sequels.

IMHO, games like DCotE and Penumbra is where adventure games should have headed, instead of staying with the point&click formula (I still love Sam&Max though). I just played Overclocked: The History of Violence after reading about it in the Aggies awards feature at adventure gamers and while it did some interesting things with the story and structure, it felt painfully old-fashioned and even had gameplay issues that the best point and click games didn't have 10 years ago.

Edited March 15, 2009 by Erkki