Rising from the deep

You may not know Cthulhu, but Cthulhu knows you.

Written in the 1920's and 30's, H.P. Lovecraft’s obscure stories about Cthulhu and the Old Ones have somehow infiltrated modern culture. Authors like Clive Barker and Stephen King cite the stories as a primary influence; references to the likes of Arkham, Miskatonic, Yog-Sothoth, and the Necronomicon all stem from Lovecraft’s writing; and as far as gaming goes, everything from Alone in the Dark to Eternal Darkness and World of Warcraft has been based directly or in part on the Cthulhu mythos.

Strangely though we’ve had few videogames actually identified as Cthulhu titles. Prior to Dark Corners of the Earth the only ones that had been released were two adventures, Shadow of the Comet and Prisoner of Ice, neither of which will even run (easily) on current computers. Dark Corners itself was in production for seven years, going through a number of mutations before it landed on the Xbox late last year. It was originally supposed to be a PC exclusive - so in many ways indeed, this port has been a long time in coming.

In his house at R’lyeh

Though Cthulhu is on the marquee, Dark Corners takes its biggest cue from the short story ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth,’ in which Cthulhu is hardly mentioned. Your character is a private investigator who travels to Innsmouth for a missing persons case but finds it a lot less friendly than he was hoping. The fishing village is literally falling apart, and most of the residents are outright hostile towards the outside world. It isn’t spoiling anything to say you’ll soon be fleeing creatures capable of driving a man insane.

Much like Eternal Darkness (which borrowed the idea from Lovecraft), sanity is the centerpiece of Dark Corners’ gameplay. Some sights are too much for your character to bear; these include dangerous heights, gruesome deaths, and otherworldly beings. Staring at enough of these things will cause you to hallucinate, go mad, or even commit suicide if you’re holding a loaded weapon. So while the game looks like a first-person shooter, it’s impossible to face every enemy head-on. It’s usually wiser to sneak around or run away.

Gunplay is in fact the least important element of the game, though you’ll have a fair share of guns to choose from. Puzzle and stealth sequences occupy the bulk of your time. That may be disappointing to some gamers, but it is in keeping with Lovecraft’s universe, in which most of his terrors are supposed to be unstoppable to begin with. Sure enough, a lone villager with a pistol packs enough punch to kill you.

Part of the reason for this is that injuries can give you plenty of grief before you die. Your character bleeds at a rate depending on the number and location of wounds, but a grazing bullet can finish you off if the hole isn’t eventually bandaged with a health kit. Similarly, limbs can be broken and will affect aiming and movement unless you can find a splint, or else give yourself a quick shot of morphine. The morphine is only a temporary reprieve of course, and it has to be used sparingly in order to prevent a lethal reaction.

I had doubts about whether the damage model could work, but it does. Its main purpose is to make you fear your enemies, and in that sense at least, there’s no question that some moments in the game can scare you witless. More importantly, the game fudges its realism just enough to prevent it from becoming (overly) dull or difficult. I’ll pick up this thread again shortly.

Getting back to the puzzles, the game does a fairly good job of integrating them into the plot. The standard locked door/broken machine puzzles are there, but then there are puzzles which involve piecing together disparate clues from the story, or finding ways of escaping those unstoppable terrors. The designers have also thrown in false leads to discourage dumb luck; some of these are harmless, while others are dangerous to health or sanity. Before trying something, be sure that your actions have a goal.

Louder, Cthulhu

This is where Dark Corners starts to stumble. Although you’re usually pushed in the right direction (figuratively or literally), there are times when it feels as if you’re not given enough information on what needs to be done. Alternately, it may turn out that information you’ve been needing in the present was only mentioned casually earlier on. I’m referring specifically to the combination of a safe in a grocery store, but that example made me realize that less egregious incidents can happen throughout the game. I haven’t had to consult a walkthrough so often in years.

In practice enemies are simultaneously more and less dangerous than they ought to be. When death comes, it’s too often because you’ve triggered an ambush you’re ‘supposed’ to flee, or simply that you haven’t been given adequate time to heal. Neither situation feels very fair. Ironically, meanwhile, the AI touted on the back of the box is subpar. I’ve had enemies fumble around right next to me and refuse to attack. Half-Life 2 this is not; the best I can say is that the pathfinding is competent.

Graphics are a mixed bag. To the developers’ credit, many of the animations and special effects are fantastic - the hallucinations are genuinely disorienting, and I was floored by moments like a storm sequence at sea. Character design, so important to a horror title, holds up next to the best games out there. These achievements are undermined however by poor lip-synching, low polygon counts and low-resolution textures, all clear signs of how old the game is. I’m tolerant mostly because there was only so much that could’ve been done without scrapping the entire graphics engine.

It’s amazing then that the game suffers from the bugs it does. It’s stable overall, but I’ve had it crash or lock up on multiple occasions without any obvious cause. That wouldn’t be as significant if the game weren’t dependent on a checkpoint system, meaning that you can crash between points and lose important progress.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Dark Corners is redeemed from its flaws mainly by capturing the spirit of Lovecraft so well. From the outset the game is structured like a new Lovecraft story, complete with foreshadows of an inevitably dire ending. All the themes you could hope for are present, and as events escalate you may really begin to fear what you’re going to witness next, if just because it may kill you.

Despite Lovecraft’s wide cultural influence, there’s a distinct atmosphere to Dark Corners that’s difficult to find elsewhere. Being set in Massachusetts during the 1920's definitely helps, as does the explicit focus on sanity. Beyond anything else though, I think it’s unusual for horror games to treat their enemies as more than expendable. How many games have us blowing away demons and zombies without a thought? Dark Corners obeys the principle that people are most afraid of the unknown or the indestructible. As a result, it’s probably one of the scariest games released in the past five years.

I should add that for all its frustrations the game is still plenty of fun to play, and furthermore, it’s long. Extremely long by current standards. At a point when I expected to be two-thirds through, I discovered that I was less than halfway. I would estimate an average completion time of 20 hours, which is a far cry from some of the 6-hour wonders marketed at the same price.

Waiting dreaming

If you’re a Lovecraft fan, you’ll want Dark Corners of the Earth because it’s great service to a fanbase that’s rarely treated this well. Any of the game’s problems can be overlooked considering what’s being given in return.

Matters become more complicated if you’re a general horror fan or merely someone who doesn’t object to horror in search of a good game. With titles like Resident Evil 4 and Condemned: Criminal Origins available, the horror fan might want to stick with those games unless he’s already played through them, or perhaps developed a sudden curiosity about Cthulhu.

The ordinary gamer is in more of a bind. Since he likely won’t care about anything Lovecraft stands for, I can’t recommend Dark Corners to him over other games, and he might as well search for ones with better ratings. That’s a shame - it’s a decent game that could’ve been a spectacular introduction to the Old Ones, or just plain spectacular.