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Cyanide's Call of Cthulhu - "RPG-Investigation" game based on tabletop ruleset

glass blackbird

Learned
Patron
Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
664
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
They keep showing off the first area exclusively. I know, yes, spoilers, whatever, but I want to make sure it doesn't collapse into bullshit like Dark Corners did!
 
Joined
May 8, 2018
Messages
3,535
As we near the October 30 release of Call of Cthulhu, we’re taking a closer look at the game’s development through a series of Devblogs, each presented by a different member of Cyanide Studio’s team. Today, we’re joining Lead Artist Rémi Mennerat as he explores Call of Cthulhu’s artistic direction.

My name is Rémi Mennerat. I have classical art, architecture and interior design training and have been working in the video game industry for 25 years. I'm Lead Artist and Environment Art Director on Call of Cthulhu. This means I'm responsible for the overall visual aspect of the environments, in cooperation with the designers and story tellers, and in charge of a team of talented environment artists to create in-game sceneries, props, vehicles, buildings, and other architecture.

Call of Cthulhu is set in the 1920s on an isolated Island that has been cut off from the rest of the world for quite some time. We did a lot of research in order to be as accurate as we could and provide an exciting game experience. The player is immersed in a rich environment with a lot of new interesting things to discover.

Above all Lovecraft stories revolve around worlds that are beyond our own, worlds that cannot be understood by a human being, and are therefore beyond description. In his own words: "When we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown (...) we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold"

Fortunately for the artists who have to show Lovecraft's universe the glimpses of info are revealed in diluted form in his stories. The narrator's descriptions are always very evocative but often amorphous. The things witnessed are so horrible that the description is outrageous, making us doubt the reliability of the description itself.

The challenge was to make 3D and 2D graphics showing these "almost impossible to describe" perceptions.

In Call of Cthulhu, you play as Edward Pierce. He’s a hard-boiled detective, alcoholic, and a loner. Do not expect a bright and shiny world. As the story unfurls don't expect things to improve either - get ready for some creepy discoveries!

As soon as Edward Pierce sets foot on the docks he is dwarfed by the peaks of Darkwater Island. The sharp rocks surrounding the bay make the place look like a trap. The buildings are falling apart - it is obvious that a lot of strange things are going on here.

Much more questions arise than what brought our private detective here in the first place. Just taking a look at the environment opens up new mysteries: the buildings look like it used to be a place teeming with life. What happened here? Why do people live in such an obviously unfriendly place? What is this dead orca lying on the docks? What are these green lights?

If you are making an immersive investigation game, you should not use props just because they "look great". Every good artist can make a cool prop. What you want to avoid is a mishmash of "cool looking" things that don’t end up saying anything.

Each time we created or used a prop in an environment we asked ourselves a lot of questions: What is it doing here? Who brought it here? How long has it been here? Does its state of decay tell something about it?

For example, the trees in the mansion garden are gnarled and twisted, they seem to have been there forever. They are leafless, but still seem to be firmly holding on. The creaking, menacing old mansion itself is crying out to be explored. It is uninhabited but really looks like it is hiding some dangerous secrets. In real life you would certainly would not want to visit such a place - in a game it's exciting to do so!

Lovecraft’s works are all about hidden details. As reality is always veiled in some places, what you see is not always what you think it is. When you build a Lovecraftian environment, you are always juggling between showing or hiding things.

Film Noir movies have a method that does this in order to convey mystery. It is a lighting technique called chiaroscuro: the use of strong contrasts between light and dark. It makes volumes stand out and creates dramatic moods. To add even more mystery, there is a lot of smoke and fog in Film Noirs - we use them a lot as well. It also served the gameplay because light and dark are a very important of the game design.

We used specific colours for each environment and the colour palettes are not random - they also tell stories. In an almost monochromatic picture a brightly-coloured object will stand out and be very dramatic.

When Edward Pierce arrives at the docks, the mood is very heavy. The sun is muffled, colours make everything look sick and it makes you feel uneasy. It is a harsh contrast with his warm daylight Boston office he just left.

If you want to make artists happy just ask them to produce crazy stuff! Creating crazy environments is the fun part and we sometimes had to remove some of them because they did not serve the story. A lot of crazy 3D work didn't find its way into the final game.

You can see glimpses of the turned down mad environments in some of the paintings you will come across. As a matter of fact, you will find several Easter eggs hidden in the paintings.

Depicting madness is also a challenge because it often requires coordination with all the different fields of work of the team: animation, post production, animatics, sound, special effects, programming etc...and all this for things that sometimes appear for just a few seconds on the screen!

Lovecraft's books are our base but his descriptions are literary and he did not have movies or video games in mind when he wrote them. For the lighting and the moods, a lot of movies with good photography and paintings have fed our work.

Orson Well's "Citizen Kane" and Riddley Scott's "Blade Runner" make good use of the chiaroscuro technique. Painters like George de La Tour, Rembrant are also good references for this technique.

The overall dramatic aspects of the island and landscapes are strongly inspired by 19th century romantic landscape painters, especially Caspar David Friedrich.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" was referenced for the idea of a menacing Victorian mansion on top of a hill. This setting was pure genius and it has since been used countless times in horror movies. Victorian mansions have almost become synonymous to haunted houses in movies (he was inspired by the Addams family House from the television series and an Edward Hopper painting for that setting).

Apart from the mansion, we have tried to avoid as much as possible any gothic inspiration. Partly because they are at risk of seeming corny, as we have seen them countless times in horror games and movies. Another artist that comes to my mind for his crazy stuff is Zdzisław Beksiński.

And last but not least: nature. The real world is of boundless inspiration for all artists and no human will ever match such creativity!

The most important thing about Call of Cthulhu is that we have managed to create our own stuff. The artists from the team often brought lot of inspiration to each other. It was very pleasant to always have fresh visions each week and we used each other's ideas for our own work.

What we have created has an identity of its own, it is something new and, who knows, it might inspire other people in the future!

https://forums.focus-home.com/topic/30925/call-of-cthulhu-devblog-2-artistic-direction
 

vota DC

Augur
Joined
Aug 23, 2016
Messages
2,258
They keep showing off the first area exclusively. I know, yes, spoilers, whatever, but I want to make sure it doesn't collapse into bullshit like Dark Corners did!

Office , village island, mansion. They may add something like a cave but there won't be many places to visit to solve that murder. I don't expect Pierce going in Spain to fight Dalì that is using Cthulhu's cult to forge the painters mafia so he ordered the death of the first island's lady and must be stopped because he want to freeze time melting all clocks to conquer the world.
 

glass blackbird

Learned
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Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
664
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
They keep showing off the first area exclusively. I know, yes, spoilers, whatever, but I want to make sure it doesn't collapse into bullshit like Dark Corners did!

Office , village island, mansion. They may add something like a cave but there won't be many places to visit to solve that murder. I don't expect Pierce going in Spain to fight Dalì that is using Cthulhu's cult to forge the painters mafia so he ordered the death of the first island's lady and must be stopped because he want to freeze time melting all clocks to conquer the world.
Sure, I don't expect them to shock us with amazing locations, but they definitely said there's going to be some stealth or escape sequences, and damn if those couldn't turn out to be truly awful in the hands of a bad developer
 
Joined
Jan 17, 2015
Messages
781
Office , village island, mansion. They may add something like a cave but there won't be many places to visit to solve that murder. I don't expect Pierce going in Spain to fight Dalì that is using Cthulhu's cult to forge the painters mafia so he ordered the death of the first island's lady and must be stopped because he want to freeze time melting all clocks to conquer the world.

Reminds me of that time I fought Hitler while he was using the power of Nyarlathotep and had the spear of Longinus

I am not making this up
maxresdefault.jpg
 
Self-Ejected

Harry Easter

Self-Ejected
Joined
Jul 27, 2016
Messages
819
Did Cyanide's games get any better than average? I have them saved as the people, that develop "nice" (meaning: not good, not bad) games on a low budget. So, did Focus put some money in this? I hope so, because Ctullhu is kind of hard to make playable, not only because Lovecraft wasn't a good writer (seriously: those adjectives in every sentence are the real horror).
 

glass blackbird

Learned
Patron
Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
664
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Did Cyanide's games get any better than average? I have them saved as the people, that develop "nice" (meaning: not good, not bad) games on a low budget. So, did Focus put some money in this? I hope so, because Ctullhu is kind of hard to make playable, not only because Lovecraft wasn't a good writer (seriously: those adjectives in every sentence are the real horror).

There's been a lot more marketing than they've ever had before, so if nothing else Focus seems more confident with this release than previous ones.
 

Steezus

Savant
Patron
Joined
Jul 7, 2018
Messages
759
Wow, some of those review quotes are honestly encouraging.

Game has gone gold, whatever the hell that means in this day and age.


Eh...

"In the second level, the atmosphere is amazing, but the game fails to reach those heights ever again."

"I truly loved the dectective system. It's a shame that Call of Cthulhu isn't as well thought out in other areas."

Don't make the mistake of reading too much into those types of quotes without any context.

With that being said, I hope it's not a fluke.
 
Joined
May 8, 2018
Messages
3,535
Here are all the devblogs.

As we near the October 30 release of Call of Cthulhu, we’re taking a closer look at the game’s development through a series of Devblogs, each presented by a different member of Cyanide Studio’s team. Today, we’re joining Lead Narrative Designer Pia Jacqmart as she dives into Call of Cthulhu’s narrative and storytelling.

My name is Pia Jacqmart and I am the lead narrative designer on Call of Cthulhu. This means I’m in charge of telling the story through dialogue, cinematics, and also environments. My goal is to make you believe in the world of the game for as long as you’re playing it.

In Call of Cthulhu, you play as Edward Pierce. He’s a detective, hard-boiled, alcoholic, a loner. One day, a man comes into his office and asks him to investigate on the circumstances behind his daughter’s death. The dead woman was a well-known painter named Sarah Hawkins. Years ago, she moved to an island called Darkwater after marrying Charles Hawkins. No one has heard from her since.

Pierce takes the case, ships off to Darkwater, and begins asking questions. He soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy filled with cultists, lies, strange paintings and dreams of ancient beings. Playing as Pierce, you will meet the inhabitants and discover their personal stories.

We wanted to create a world you could believe in, while staying true to Lovecraft’s style. We worked a lot on the story and characters to make them strange and mysterious, but still plausible. Of course, that doesn’t mean everything has to be realistic. For example, some characters may have a particular affinity with the occult, meaning they might even be able to summon what appears to be “magic”. What makes you believe in them is their agenda: what they want, and why they want it. It’s that simple, and that difficult!

We took inspiration mostly from the Lovecraft stories The Shadow over Innsmouth and The Call of Cthulhu, but our game tells its own original tale (the title comes from Chaosium’s iconic tabletop game, this isn’t a direct adaptation of the Lovecraft story). Of course, members of the team each have their favorites. For example, our lead environment artist really likes Herbert West-Reanimator, and you cannot miss it in the game!

Call of Cthulhu doesn’t rely on jump scares to scare you. Instead, we worked a lot on the atmosphere, via the lights, sounds, dialogues, characters. It works so well that one level keeps scaring me even though I played it hundreds of times.

We believe that the interactive dialogues are a large part of the game and as such, they must create situations, and deliver information worthy of reaction. They say something about the story and its themes: the inevitability of fate, the dilemma between learning the truth at the cost of madness, or staying safe in ignorance. You will see that your choices during interactive dialogue can not only change the outcome of you adventure, but shape the personality of your very own Pierce.

One of the most difficult things with storytelling is that it never works as a placeholder. You have to trust yourself, and wait until the voice actor is reciting to know if some lines work or not. I remember one specific line - everyone on the project kept asking if I really wanted to keep it. I fought for that line and told them to wait, that they would see how brilliant it was when read out loud by an actress. When the actress, during the voicing, told us she didn’t even know how to pronounce some specific words properly, I understood I totally failed on that one! The team kept joking about it until I cut it.

Today, we’re joining Lead Artist Rémi Mennerat as he explores Call of Cthulhu’s artistic direction.

My name is Rémi Mennerat. I have classical art, architecture and interior design training and have been working in the video game industry for 25 years. I'm Lead Artist and Environment Art Director on Call of Cthulhu. This means I'm responsible for the overall visual aspect of the environments, in cooperation with the designers and story tellers, and in charge of a team of talented environment artists to create in-game sceneries, props, vehicles, buildings, and other architecture.

Call of Cthulhu is set in the 1920s on an isolated Island that has been cut off from the rest of the world for quite some time. We did a lot of research in order to be as accurate as we could and provide an exciting game experience. The player is immersed in a rich environment with a lot of new interesting things to discover.

Above all Lovecraft stories revolve around worlds that are beyond our own, worlds that cannot be understood by a human being, and are therefore beyond description. In his own words: "When we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown (...) we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold"

Fortunately for the artists who have to show Lovecraft's universe the glimpses of info are revealed in diluted form in his stories. The narrator's descriptions are always very evocative but often amorphous. The things witnessed are so horrible that the description is outrageous, making us doubt the reliability of the description itself.

The challenge was to make 3D and 2D graphics showing these "almost impossible to describe" perceptions.

In Call of Cthulhu, you play as Edward Pierce. He’s a hard-boiled detective, alcoholic, and a loner. Do not expect a bright and shiny world. As the story unfurls don't expect things to improve either - get ready for some creepy discoveries!

As soon as Edward Pierce sets foot on the docks he is dwarfed by the peaks of Darkwater Island. The sharp rocks surrounding the bay make the place look like a trap. The buildings are falling apart - it is obvious that a lot of strange things are going on here.



Much more questions arise than what brought our private detective here in the first place. Just taking a look at the environment opens up new mysteries: the buildings look like it used to be a place teeming with life. What happened here? Why do people live in such an obviously unfriendly place? What is this dead orca lying on the docks? What are these green lights?

If you are making an immersive investigation game, you should not use props just because they "look great". Every good artist can make a cool prop. What you want to avoid is a mishmash of "cool looking" things that don’t end up saying anything.

Each time we created or used a prop in an environment we asked ourselves a lot of questions: What is it doing here? Who brought it here? How long has it been here? Does its state of decay tell something about it?

For example, the trees in the mansion garden are gnarled and twisted, they seem to have been there forever. They are leafless, but still seem to be firmly holding on. The creaking, menacing old mansion itself is crying out to be explored. It is uninhabited but really looks like it is hiding some dangerous secrets. In real life you would certainly would not want to visit such a place - in a game it's exciting to do so!



Lovecraft’s works are all about hidden details. As reality is always veiled in some places, what you see is not always what you think it is. When you build a Lovecraftian environment, you are always juggling between showing or hiding things.

Film Noir movies have a method that does this in order to convey mystery. It is a lighting technique called chiaroscuro: the use of strong contrasts between light and dark. It makes volumes stand out and creates dramatic moods. To add even more mystery, there is a lot of smoke and fog in Film Noirs - we use them a lot as well. It also served the gameplay because light and dark are a very important of the game design.

We used specific colours for each environment and the colour palettes are not random - they also tell stories. In an almost monochromatic picture a brightly-coloured object will stand out and be very dramatic.

When Edward Pierce arrives at the docks, the mood is very heavy. The sun is muffled, colours make everything look sick and it makes you feel uneasy. It is a harsh contrast with his warm daylight Boston office he just left.

If you want to make artists happy just ask them to produce crazy stuff! Creating crazy environments is the fun part and we sometimes had to remove some of them because they did not serve the story. A lot of crazy 3D work didn't find its way into the final game.

You can see glimpses of the turned down mad environments in some of the paintings you will come across. As a matter of fact, you will find several Easter eggs hidden in the paintings.

Depicting madness is also a challenge because it often requires coordination with all the different fields of work of the team: animation, post production, animatics, sound, special effects, programming etc...and all this for things that sometimes appear for just a few seconds on the screen!

Lovecraft's books are our base but his descriptions are literary and he did not have movies or video games in mind when he wrote them. For the lighting and the moods, a lot of movies with good photography and paintings have fed our work.

Orson Well's "Citizen Kane" and Riddley Scott's "Blade Runner" make good use of the chiaroscuro technique. Painters like George de La Tour, Rembrant are also good references for this technique.

The overall dramatic aspects of the island and landscapes are strongly inspired by 19th century romantic landscape painters, especially Caspar David Friedrich.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" was referenced for the idea of a menacing Victorian mansion on top of a hill. This setting was pure genius and it has since been used countless times in horror movies. Victorian mansions have almost become synonymous to haunted houses in movies (he was inspired by the Addams family House from the television series and an Edward Hopper painting for that setting).

Apart from the mansion, we have tried to avoid as much as possible any gothic inspiration. Partly because they are at risk of seeming corny, as we have seen them countless times in horror games and movies. Another artist that comes to my mind for his crazy stuff is Zdzisław Beksiński.

1538562748008-rfhwdui.jpg


And last but not least: nature. The real world is of boundless inspiration for all artists and no human will ever match such creativity!

The most important thing about Call of Cthulhu is that we have managed to create our own stuff. The artists from the team often brought lot of inspiration to each other. It was very pleasant to always have fresh visions each week and we used each other's ideas for our own work.

What we have created has an identity of its own, it is something new and, who knows, it might inspire other people in the future!


Today, we’re joining Lead Sound Designer Swann Ménage as he tells us more about Call of Cthulhu’s sounds.

Hello! I'm Swann, Lead Sound Designer on Call of Cthulhu. I work for a company called G4F, which is specialized in sound design for video games. I'm in charge of the audio identity of the game: sounds, music and voices.

What we wanted to do with Call of Cthulhu is to creep you out with sound. One of the key ways to achieve that is to primarily keep things realistic, so you feel safe - until we add an unnerving sound that frightens you! However, we’ve tried to avoid ‘horror movie scary spooky’ sound design and jumpscares. We aimed at an oppressive atmosphere.

Some parts of the game are really diegetic-based, meaning that everything you hear comes from what you see. We also tried to mess a bit with how music and diegetic sounds blend together. Sometimes, you won't really be able to tell if what you're hearing is something from the environment, a music, or a hallucination. We hope that players will sometimes ask themselves "did I really just hear that?"

Here is an extract of what we created for the Hawkins mansion with regards to sound design. Some of what you hear is really happening - thunder, wood creaking, rain, etc. - while others are there to freak you out a bit.



This entire soundscape is randomly generated: wood creaks from within the manor, weird unknown sounds spinning around you, lightning strikes with the sounds of thunder following on a random delay, and more.

We tried a lot fun stuff, especially when Pierce is dreaming or gets hallucinations. During one sequence, you'll hear something I named the "Dream Generator". A lot of dream-like sounds spawn randomly all around the player, creating a weird threnody.

During the first dream of Pierce, in the introduction, we tried to play with the boundaries between his dream and reality. If you listen closely, you'll be able to hear a distorted, dreamy, stretched version of what's playing on his radio when he wakes up.



Of course, this has all involved teamwork! Markus Schmidt did the music, G4F helped me, and Renaud was our Foley artist. SIDE, a London-based recording studio, was in charge of recording all voices.

Call of Cthulhu is narrative-driven, meaning pretty big recording sessions as you can imagine. Everything occurs near Boston, and recreating the 1920's Boston accent wasn't easy.

We focused on the acting of our characters and how the fall into madness affects their tones (panic, anger, confusion, etc...) We also recorded a SoundBank (that we call the "ScreamBank") just for this game: mad wails, sick people, weird women, running madmen, locked prisoners... we recorded all of them.

On my side, I had to integrate all these voices and occasionally modify them. As an example, here is how I did the voice that follows your journey into madness.



We hope you'll enjoy Call of Cthulhu as much as we did developing (and sound designing!) it.
1f419.png


I’m Yoann Drulhe, cinematic artist at Cyanide. I previously worked on the cinematics of Styx: Shards of Darkness, Blood Bowl 2 and I’m currently working on Call of Cthulhu and Space Hulk Tactics.

On Call of Cthulhu, I worked on every aspect of the cinematic creation process, from the first draft to the final cinematic. Therefore, my job included storyboarding, layout, actor direction (we used motion capture to animate our characters), integrating the animations into the Unreal Engine and finally, lighting.

The main challenge during development came from the variety and number of cinematics shown throughout the game. There’s a lot of different sequences, from the creepy ones to story-driven drama scenes developing the characters’ backstories, more action-filled scenes with multiple characters, as well as many variations in between. Every cinematic had its own mood and challenges to face, and this was one of the things that made this production so interesting for me.

One of our key missions in creating the game’s cinematics was to be able to express distinctly Lovecraftian, unspeakable elements, and convey the idea of madness. The ambiguity in Lovecraft’s novels is that he never precisely describes what his characters see, leaving his readers free to imagine the most disturbing horrors! It’s not really the same in a video game, because at some point you simply have to see these things - but we tried to make every appearance of a creature from the mythos a special moment.

We had to show these creatures, but we wanted to keep it both scary and mysterious in some way. There are many ways to do that in a cinematic. We can choose to not show it completely until the end, play with the editing and lighting to not see it in its entirety, or keep it out of frame so they don’t see it when they want to see it most! To achieve that, it made sense to take horror movies as references - which was easy for me as horror is one of my favorite genres for cinematography! To take a specific example, it seemed obvious to me to watch Alien again before thinking about a sequence showing the Dimensional Shambler.



It was a very different challenge to show the inner madness of the main character, Edward Pierce, as it escalates gradually throughout. At the beginning of the game, Pierce’s strange mental state is revealed during visions he has, which are dreamlike and ask more questions than they bring answers. In fact, the issue is the same as in fantastical literature: the player must always wonder about what they have seen, and if what they have seen is real or not.

To succeed in doing this, we used a variety of specific techniques: very tight editing, intentional editing glitches, camera focal length variations, expressionist lighting, and more. Once again: I was strongly inspired by many movies to get these ideas. I don’t want to list them all, but I can’t avoid talking about the dream sequences in Shutter Island, and the movie Jacob’s Ladder by Adrian Lyne. The sound is also really important during these sequences, and they would not work anywhere near as well without the work of our sound designer.



The dream sequence from Shutter Island




The Hospital scene from Jacob's Ladder


We used these same things to show the moments when Pierce goes really crazy, but we were also helped by the work of the actors who made the motion capture, who really understood the intentions of the scenes while shooting and helped to make the sequences what they are now.

I also want to point out something about how we show madness in the game. Apart from Pierce, many of the characters are mad in their own way, and different parts of the game represent madness in many ways. One character evokes the archetype of the mad scientist, while another is an interesting variation of the Frankenstein story - a disgusting but tragic monster, betrayed by those around them and still in love with one that hates them.

One of the important points of the game is that you’re not playing any random character: you’re playing Edward Pierce, a man with his own distinct personality, past and fears. During the gameplay, you’re in a first-person view to maximize the immersion of the player, but during cinematics we’re showing you the character you’re playing and the way he evolves during the events of the scenario.

Many interesting things happened during the motion capture shooting! For example, there is a cinematic in the game that involves a child character. Because this character appears only for a really short amount of time, we chose not to hire a child actor and they were instead hand animated by our team.

The problem was, while shooting, the actors had to interact briefly with this character. Because of that, one of us had to stand in and play as the child. It was not that funny in the moment because we were all focused on the scene, but when we looked at the rushes afterward, it was a very strange sight!

Today, we’re joining Lead Level Designer Romain Wiart as he tells us more about Call of Cthulhu’s environments and investigation mechanics.

Hi everyone! My name is Romain Wiart, and I'm Lead Level Designer on Call of Cthulhu. Level design is about using the rules and scenarios written by the Game Designer and the Narrative Designer to create the user experience.

We work on the pace and challenge of the game to make you experience various flavors and tempos through the game. With the investigation mechanics in Call of Cthulhu, we tried to offer various options for players to explore, depending on the way you develop your character and the choices you make throughout the story.

When developing the story, we laid out a series of scenes usable for the Narrative Designers and easy to read and navigate for the players.

Our main focus was on player perception. What you will see and hear, how we can subtly drive your attention to the things we want you to notice, and how we help mental awareness by building the levels in ways that facilitate navigation, thanks to landmarks and signals for example. And finally, we built the environments to offer challenges, as players shouldn't die countless times but still feel on edge, even when there is only an illusion of challenge.

Call of Cthulhu's investigation mechanics feature three major aspects: exploration, dialogue and skills - we tried to link them together as much as possible.

Player will gather clues and tools through exploration. These will help to resolve the mysteries that fill the story, and open new topics and lines in dialogue. By speaking with the Darkwater locals, you will collect information about the island and its inhabitants. You'll also develop relationships with some of them, opening new paths and closing others depending on your decisions. The team really wanted each player to create their own experience, be it for impactful choices or not.

Our biggest challenge in the development of the game has been to stay as true as possible to the key ideas of Call of Cthulhu. Lovecraft has to be gloomy and oppressive, but not outwardly horrific in an on the nose manner. It has to be fantastic but not fantasy. It has to instill fear through unease, expectation and the feeling of helplessness, not through jump scares, direct confrontation and violence. The biggest challenge was to translate this vision of cosmic horror specific to Lovecraft into a game experience.
 

Beowulf

Arcane
Joined
Mar 2, 2015
Messages
1,963
Why would you preorder?
Legit question. I don't think it's for the great 10% price decrease.
 

Beowulf

Arcane
Joined
Mar 2, 2015
Messages
1,963
Why would you preorder?
Legit question. I don't think it's for the great 10% price decrease.

Because I want to play the game as soon as it's out? I pre-ordered on PS4, btw. The thing will download automatically when it is available.

But wouldn't it be better to wait a couple of days to read the reviews and other players' impressions before buying, even just so they can be the beta-testers for you, and not the other way around.
Not to mention the usual release bugs.
 

Barbarian

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2015
Messages
7,305
Dunno man, haven't played anything for the last couple of weeks. Kind of need to scratch the itch.

Also the last PS4 small studio game I bought and played on release(vampyr) didn't have any impediment in the bugs department. I hope it's the same here,
 

Zombra

An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
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Black Goat Woods !@#*%&^
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But wouldn't it be better to wait a couple of days to read the reviews and other players' impressions before buying, even just so they can be the beta-testers for you, and not the other way around.
Not to mention the usual release bugs.
Some studios are behind the times, they haven't learned that it's OK to release a half-finished product. We've been seeing similar footage on this for years, they've had time to make sure it works. Whatever other flaws this may have, I expect it to be done.
 

sser

Arcane
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Mar 10, 2011
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1,866,661
Why would you preorder?
Legit question. I don't think it's for the great 10% price decrease.

My living costs are pretty low to begin with (no debts) so I can throw money at games if I want. Other than that I sometimes like to just pick a game and play it despite knowing virtually nothing about it. I do the same thing with movies, I'll just look something up and think that looks interesting and go see it. This simplified approach has greatly elevated my enjoyment of entertainment.

This one though is made by Cyanide whose games I virtually always enjoy despite the rough edges + Lovecraft which is probably one of my favorite settings.
 

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