Call Of Cthulhu Switch Review: Cthulhu Awakens On Switch

Though it’s deeply flawed and further held back by the Switch’s lack of power, Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhu isn’t all bad.

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Though not his longest or most robust work, the 1926 short fiction piece, The Call of Cthulhu, would go down as author H. P. Lovecraft’s most famous work. An epistolary tale of a man on a quest to unravel an otherworldly mystery, the prose and its eponymous entity have become the ambassadors of what would come to be known as Lovecraftian horror. Cthulhu himself would develop something of a cult following—no pun intended. In the nearly hundred years since Lovecraft’s awful deities first became known, The Call of Cthulhu has been adapted into hundreds of other short stories, films, and, of course, video games.

Based on the 80s tabletop RPG of the same name, Cyanide Studio’s, Call of Cthulhu, first surfaced around Halloween of last year to a fairly mixed reception. Though the title definitely worked to win over Lovecraft fans and replicated the author’s fictional world nearly to a fault, the title seemingly couldn’t decide on a central mechanic and felt oddly disjointed as it shunted its players from lengthy NPC interrogations to spot the hidden object puzzles to stealth sequences and brief first-person shooter sequences.

Life Anew

That said, a year later, the title’s publisher, Focus Home Interactive, deemed it necessary to port Call of Cthulhu over to the Nintendo Switch. It’s no secret that Switch games are in demand these days, and there’s a dedicated subset of fans who want to see just about every game imaginable make the jump to the console. With the 2018 release set to celebrate its first anniversary in about a month, a Switch conversion certainly seems appropriate, albeit a bit unnecessary.

The issue with this, however, is that the Switch really isn’t suited to titles of this nature. While a few first-party games on the system have managed to be visually dazzling, PC-first double and triple-A games are seldom converted to the console, and, if they are, their performance is significantly hindered.

With that in mind, Call of Cthulhu runs as well as you might expect on Switch. Most of the textures are muddy and ill-defined, and some of the more expansive areas—the port town of Darkwater, in particular—present a few framerate issues. It’s very much the experience you would expect to see on an underpowered laptop. Given the circumstances, the port is passable, though probably not what most would call ideal.

A Mystery Wrapped In An Enigma

The issue with Call of Cthulhu however, is in its aforementioned inconsistent nature. One part detective adventure, one part basic stealth crawl, one part RPG, it feels like an amalgam of concepts with no real sense of cohesion. Had the game wholeheartedly embodied any of its myriad influences, it may have been called derivative, but it would ultimately have made for a more compelling experience.

This disjointed nature is also prevalent in the game’s narrative; Call of Cthulhu wears its Telltale Games-esque “your decisions matter” mechanic on its sleeve, but it’s hard to know exactly to what your choices are building. Akin to reading a choose-your-own-adventure book cover-to-cover with no regard for the concept, Cthulhu more or less stitches narrative implications together in ways that aren’t at all decipherable. Of course, I did manage to achieve my goal of seeing the “bad” ending and summoning Cthulhu, and see him I did—for about half of a second right at the end of the game.

Lovecraft Fans Only

Though it’s deeply flawed and further held back by the Switch’s lack of power, Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhu isn’t all bad. It feels like a game by and for Lovecraft fans, and lovers of the mythos are likely to look past the release’s shortcomings and stick it out to see exactly what’s going on in Darkwater. However, those who aren’t already invested in Lovecraft’s work should probably look for another entry point, as this is far from the most captivating entrant in the author’s shared universe.

3 Out Of 5 Stars

A Switch code for Call of Cthulhu was provided to TheGamer for this review. Call of Cthulhu is available now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/call-of-cthulhu-switch-review/