Can you give me a synopsis on that game Dusk?
Yes I can~ For the obvious, it is a game inspired by Lovecraft. It's called Call of Cthulhu, but that's more of a marketing thing, as Cthulhu actually plays a very little role in the title. The game is more about a few of Lovecraft's other novels, the most notable one being Shadow Over Innsmouth. However, if you don't know the difference between a Cthulhu and a Dagan or a Xa'ligha, that's okay as the game doesn't expect you to know these things, as you play as a character who knows nothing about these things either.
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a first-person horror-adventure game. It has elements of a first-person shooter, an adventure game, and a survival-horror game. It's also a really tough cookie, it's not an easy game, and there is a legitimate survival element, as well as a few tough puzzles, and some pretty fantastic atmosphere and scares.
You play as a man named Jack Walters, who's a detective. The game starts with a prologue section when Jack helps a local police force he's acquainted with break into the house run by a group of cultists. They're shooting-up the police.. However, when Jack infiltrates, the cults don't seem to be hostile towards him like they are to the police, but actually welcome him with open arms, as they commit a mass-suicide ritual. And when he enters the basement, he witnesses something, and everything quickly becomes a blur. He becomes conscious six years later, when he finds out he spent the last six years in a mental asylum. He has no memory of this time, and to him he was just at the cultists house. He of course is really curious about this time, but tries to resume his detective agency. He receives a letter and takes on the requested case to investigate a missing persons report of a Brian Burnham, a man who tried to start a grocery store chain in a nearby coastal town of Innsmouth. He goes to investigate.
Gameplay has a lot of variety, but fantastic pacing for the most part if you can accept it moves a bit of a slow-burn type of game (which benefits it rather than hurts it, I feel). The game has sections of exploration and interaction with townspeople. You actually have a big portion of the game at the beginning when you're defenseless, and have to master skills of stealth, evasion, and survival with taking advantage of the environment and lowly tools you have that are hardly murder weapons. There's puzzles, both in the on-the-fly gameplay sort and the 'need to solve this puzzle to continue' variety. And the game isn't full of scripted scenarios either (though a few do exist), so a lot of the survival has to be taken from your own wits and cleverness.
Survival is important. Gun bullets don't graze you, they can seriously damage you. The game has a mechanic where you bleed when shot, as well as where you are shot effects your damage reaction to being shot. You heal it with limited healing items you get, some to stop bleeding or mend wounded appendages, others to recover blood and health. You also need to be careful as some weapons can inflict poisoning on you to recover from. Eventually you do get a gun though, but the game hardly becomes a run-and-gun, you have to be really strategic and know when to let-go of being undetected to fire, and which enemies are really worth taking out. You have limited ammo, and the enemies can seriously kick your ass if you're not careful.
But the game isn't all about combat and stealth. There also are areas and levels with almost no enemies at all, and some fantastic horror scenes, strange sanity moments, and just some atmosphere and sequences that go in very different directions. The character also has a sanity feature, which makes it so the more he's around unpleasent things, the more weird things may become for him. Certain areas, imagery, and the like help his sanity, while others break it.
The game also has some memorizing music, graphics are obviously a bit outdated but do the job, and as the game continues, situations open up a lot more to how you can approach them. And the game continues adding new elements, additions, and set-piece like moments all the way through to the end to prevent it from becoming too much of the same, and leaving you to continually wonder what might be coming next. It's pacing can be argued is slow, but I think works very well for the title and what its trying to achieve.
I also can mention that this game I would label as a scary game, it is absolutely tense a lot of the time, and some segments legitimately scared the crap out of me. But part of the way it pulls this off is that they're not over-abundant or consistent, and don't rely on the same few tricks or overly on cheap scares.
There is some jank here though, with some bugs, sometimes you may be detected by enemies when they really shouldn't of detected you, and there's a few frustrating parts of the game that are kind of trial-and-error, where basically you need to do what the game wants you to do or you'll die. Some of these issues the patch I posted before address, though, namely the bugs and helping the trial and error sections be less trial-and-error.
It's not perfect, but I do think it's a good horror title, and worth checking out if you either have interest in horror games or Lovecraft mythos (as its mine and many others personal favorite Lovecraftian-based game). It does require some patience though, but there is an excellent experience here if you enjoy this sort of thing.
