Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game

If you are a fan of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, The Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game (apparently its full title) will hold some appeal to you. While familiarity with the source material is not required, it probably helps, but I can safely recommend this game to any fan of the cosmic horror genre. There are some rough edges, sure, but it’s well worth the journey overall, especially around this time of year.

Call of Cthulhu is back on Nintendo Switch, with a very good porting: get ready for an adventure inspired by the tales of Lovecraft.

Ultimately, it feels like the developers at Cyanide knew the strengths of the game, but still wanted to add a bit more variety while still not distracting from the core experience which I found incredibly fun and compelling. One more round of fine tuning in just about every area of the game would have been beneficial, but I still thoroughly enjoyed the game.

Call of Cthulhu on Nintendo Switch succeeds with strong storytelling and captivating choices, but poor graphics and gameplay.

Ifyou have already played the PS4/Xbox One/PC versions of the game there’s no need to consider this Switch porting, unless you’re interested in playing it on-the-go.

It’s hard to recommend picking it up on Switch if you have a another console or a decent PC sitting around, unless you really want to play it in handheld mode. But tiny text may put a downer on that for you.

This Focus Home Interactive game clearly offers an interesting approach to the Lovecraft story. The title creates a quite remarkable atmosphere, but fails to implement the mechanics correctly and accidentally ends up being more a walking simulator than a narrative adventure game. The video game is not bad and could be brilliant, but the study needs to improve the gameplay.

The title is the same as it was a year ago (eternal uploads included, unfortunately): considering that the starting material, from a technical point of view, was certainly not a miracle, one could almost say that the game is more at ease on the hybrid Nintendo.

Call of Cthulhu brings to the Nintendo Switch the horror and madness of the game developed by Cyanide a Studio, with a great port that maintains all the ups and downs of the original launch.

After some very good first hours of play, Call of Cthulhu runs dry with few interactions and poor stealth sequences. The Lovecraft atmosphere is here though, which may appeal to whoever can be indulgent with the game’s many flaws.

At best, this is just a very gimmicky adventure game. Each level having its own thing is a bit refreshing from always having to pixel-hunt for objects, tying simplistic stats into the mix adds some planning, and the way this title forces players to commit to their actions is nice. Sadly, as the journey reaches its half-way point, the story unravels in a very unsatisfying manner. Characters are built up and don't get the proper pay-off, while some disappear entirely. Given the hallucinatory nature of the story, it can be difficult to discern what is real and unreal. This was by design since you can't have a Lovecraft story without people losing their minds, but Call of Cthulhu needed to "wow" people in the endings, not betray them.

Call of Cthulhu manages to deliver a game that’s ripe with atmosphere but is built upon tried-and-true tropes of the genre that never really manage to evolve beyond the scope of what’s already been seen and heard before. Paired with some technical hiccups, we can say that Call of Cthulhu is only really for truly dedicated fans of Lovecraft; everyone else is advised to look elsewhere for their entertainment.