October 24, 2005: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth released
Written in 1926 and published in 1928, The Call of Cthulhu was a short story about a Kraken-like monster by American author H. P. Lovecraft. Since then the Cthulhu mythos has seen several variants in pop culture, and it tread a rocky path to make it into video games.
Development of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, a horror survival game, first started in 1999. Between then and its 2005 release, the development of the game publishers came and went. Call of Cthulhu’s developer, Headfirst Games, had ambitious plans for the game that proved challenging. The final version, released for the Xbox in 2005 and the PC in 2006, met with favorable reviews. But the game was difficult and had a number of bugs that kept sales numbers low. Two sequels to the game were proposed but were never made.
If you got a chance to play Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, what was the experience like? Was it a good game for its time, or did it fail to meet expectations?
Dark Corners of the Earth holds a special place in my heart. It was during my freshman year of college that I really started to sink my teeth into H.P. Lovecraft’s writing; scouring our huge school library for worn-out tomes of his works. Over the summer, a friend and I found this game at a local rental store and immediately brought it home to play.
The visuals and sound design of Dark Corners were excellent, with haunting melodies laid over old seaside towns and musty caverns. The plot was a bit disjointed, as it was trying to include as many of Lovecraft’s stories without overloading the game. The gameplay was above average first-person shooter/puzzle solving game, which worked well but there were some frustrating boss-type encounters that required several replays. Overall, Dark Corners of the Earth was a good game and solid adaptation of Lovecraft’s work that I wish was more readily available today.
We recently went on a Lovecraft kick after seeing a documentary about him — his writings are pretty great…strange, but great. I can only imagine that it would have been difficult then (and even now) to synthesize his works into a game; but it sounds like Headfirst tried their best with decent results.