I'm down bad for H.P Lovecraft, let's get that out of the way. He's quite easily one of my most favourite authors of all time. His style was defined by many things, some of which are decidedly not good, but it's the sum of all the parts that made him such an objectively monumental writer in terms of genre impact. His very impersonal characters, sometimes never even named and definitely never given much personality, largely served as perfunctory tools to drive often very thin narratives forward, and sometimes by just dumping exposition on you gleaned from newspaper clippings or another character's overly wordy account. His language was very dry, and very long winded. Even for his time he used some archaic and dense language, and he often came off as very rote and mundane, almost clinical. At The Mountains of Madness spent like 8 pages describing just what the walls of the ancient city underneath Antarctica looked like, and that's only slightly exaggerated. But, again, the sum of all the parts.
He was long winded and overly explanatory, but that was because he was such a great descriptive writer. His imagery and sense of tension was phenomenal through his word choices and writing rhythm, and when it came time for the character to actually encounter the terror at the heart of the story, to finally find out what the titular ‘thing’ on the doorstep was, that's when his work shines. His work told stories of elder things, entities so large scale and ancient that we are but insignificant specks of meaningless light to them. These extraplanar horrors frequently drive men to madness just by glimpsing at their impossible forms against any semblance of mankind's understanding of the universe, dormant primordial terrors for whom death can't even reach. As dictated by one of his most famous passages from his perennial story Call of Cthulhu; “that which is not dead can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.” Lovecraft translation: immortal. The sense of occultic awe and terror about his work is immense, often detailing how curiosity can lead to ruin by either by madness or a random lightning bolt hitting the spooky house and killing the main character; The Picture in the House was a strange story. Even if you don’t appreciate his writing on a technical level I think plenty of the ideas he played with can’t be denied as easily. He took what were pulpy science-fiction concepts and inspirations, and extrapolated them into ‘cosmic horror’ as the genre became known.
He's also fascinating on a personal biographical level I think, as by all accounts he was a pretty complicated man and I think his life bleeds into his stories a lot, his anxiety-wracked personal outlook informing a lot of what made cosmic horror what it is. He was a man who seemingly was afraid of almost everything. He allegedly had a severe nervous breakdown when he hadn't even finished high school yet, that left him selectively mute for years afterwards. His family was filled with mental demons, and they no doubt affected him heavily as well. He came to think of himself as an ‘outsider’ to regular people, and thought of himself as ‘hideously ugly’. Yes, some of his personal demons are now rightfully a really big talking point in re-evaluation of him; even for his time he was profoundly racist, which also unfortunately informed a lot of his stories. There’s a distinct theme of ‘aberrations’ in his work, often from the origin of a ‘tainted’ or ‘impure’ bloodline. In the stories he’s referring to ‘eldritch horror blood’ of course, but it’s not hard at all to see what real world beliefs he was mirroring with those elements. I make no defence for any of this, other than saying to his credit that he made some changes and matured later on before his death.
Enough about him though, this is RetroGameTalk not OldWritersTalk, as we’re here for something only related to his work; one of the official video game adaptations of it, Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
Our favourite local breakfast pastry @Waffles beat me to the punch and made an article on much of the history of this game already, so I'm going to shamelessly direct you there- I mean, give credit where it's due and recommend you check it out. Suffice to say, this game had a pretty hectic and messy development cycle, filled with delays and last minute changes and overly ambitious ideas. It was officially announced at E3 2000, but initial development was started a year earlier; the game didn’t actually come out until 2006, by the way. Headfirst Productions had to finish the PC version of the game on their own time, off the clock, due to the closure of their own studio after managing to just squeeze out the initial Xbox version. Wild.
Did I decide to skip my usual longwinded history section by linking to another article just so I could go hard on the Lovecraft glazing intro? Maybe.
Call of Badly Optimized PC Releases
For this review, I’m playing the later PC port of Dark Corners. It was a bit of a mess when it was released, given that Headfirst of course was out of business and even with employees staying behind to finish it, it was a rushjob. It was barely improved over the already jank Xbox version, given that it was a 1-for-1 copy essentially instead of actually being changed and optimized for a PC. At the time it was rough, but factoring in modern operating systems it’s even rougher to play nowadays. The biggest issue is the game will actively attempt to kill itself if it runs at above 60 frames due to modern PC infrastructure, as well as numerous general instability issues and being prone to crashing. Luckily, the GOG version (which I’m specifically using) has had plenty of adjustments and community-made fixes applied to it so it’s essentially ready-to-go out of the box and has fixed these issues…mostly (more on that absolutely later). The Steam version is apparently the original un-modified PC release, so it has none of these patches pre-applied making you have to do it yourself in order to actually play the game.I've started noticing how I seem to be doing GOG propaganda almost in my PC reviews given how I think every single one has been with the GOG version and, well, yes. It's not my fault they're a great preserver of much of the PC games that I tend to go towards. I'll take my influencer check now please, CD Project.
Does Dark Corners of the Earth end up above its very rough technical issues and the fact it's essentially an unfinished game? How many filthy fishmen do we gun down? Do we partake in any bizarre Lovecraftian chants with far too many syllables? I’aaai R’yleh! We’ll find out in part two of the Halloween 2025 reviews.
Happy Halloween everyone.
The Dark Corners of An Almost Immersive Sim
Dark Corners of the Earth is a first-person atmospheric action-horror game, and mostly an adaptation of a story you’ll never guess; Shadow Over Innsmouth. It’s one that’s quite frequently adapted, I’d guess owing to its more exciting subject matter as it was Lovecraft’s attempt at what, for him at least, was an action story. It’s also quite easily his most famous twist ending, so likely that too. Headfirst has expanded on the basic concept of the story for Dark Corners in ways both minor and major, changing up much of the adaptation material and adding in plenty of their own unique elements on top of some ideas from another Lovecraft story, The Shadow Out of Time. I will readily admit that the original Shadow Over Innsmouth story is one of my least favourite Lovecraft stories, but I won’t hold it against the game, I promise.You play as police detective Jack Walters, an up-and-coming gumshoe with an implied drinking problem and who's likely already missing a few of his sanity points at the start of the game. As the game begins, the police have cornered a weirdo cult in their very dramatic looking mansion before the leader asks to see Jack specifically by name. This starts a series of events that ends with him losing 6 years of his memories from that point of the weirdo cult siege, waking up in Arkham Asylum (the Lovecraft one, not the Gotham one of course) with no idea of what he was doing for this missing time. He then becomes a private detective as I guess what else do you do after losing 6 years of your life, and after waxing philosophical all noir-like in his office after definitely taking more hits to his already affected sanity stat, he ends up taking a case to investigate the disappearance of a Brian Burnham from the small town of Innsmouth and its reportedly odd locals, and from there the spooky shenanigans proper begin.
It’s a particularly effective reframing of the Shadow Over Innsmouth concept, and one that I think mostly works. It brings in a lot of other greater Cthulhu mythos ideas, namedropping ‘yiths’ here, and ‘shoggoths’ there and a couple ‘dread Cthulhu’s’ around with little care. It also expands on the city of Innsmouth itself, and adds in some new characters that are either entirely new or were only a passing namedrop reference in the original story. You can absolutely tell when the game goes from original Headfirst writing to directly quoting Lovecraft, but that was mostly entertaining rather than being a real negative. Characters go from dropping perfectly fine and serviceable dialogue to all of a sudden becoming strangely eloquent and old fashioned in their words out of nowhere; then it hits you, oh yeah, this is a section being read directly from Shadow Over Innsmouth, that makes sense.
Without spoiling anything for either the original story or this game, Dark Corners of the Earth doesn’t go at all in the same specific directions of the story's ending and its whole second half or so is something largely unique to the game. I appreciate that Headfirst wasn’t afraid to change things up as much as they did and didn’t balk away from doing their own thing after covering the events of the story, and not just because of my previously mentioned meh attitude towards the story. The game has also taken the entire concept and reveal from The Shadow Out of Time and melded it in, which if you know of then you've guessed it already.
The only real issue I have with the game's writing is really only some stuff about Jack Walters.
Jack has a little more going on for sure over the original Lovecraft story protagonist I can’t even remember the name of, and his whole ‘strange and mystical amnesia’ angle does take the story to some interesting places of the Earth, ones you might even say are ‘dark’ and ‘isolated in the further reaches of the world, like the corners’. As a protagonist he’s a fitting idea, a man of action plagued by terrible dreams and visions, and the growing recollection of the terrible occult research that his supposed ‘alternate personality’ undertook in the 6 long years he can’t remember. There’s plenty of cosmic horror baked into him. Does this great concept work in execution? Eh.
I think the biggest issue with Jack Walters is the games’ kinda uneven presentation of some things, likely due to some obvious issues like the game being barely finished. Some of it is the voice direction. I think the actor himself, Milton Lawrence, whose fairly small voice acting credits include the Viewtiful Joe and Duel Masters anime, does a great job on his own. He really captures the right mix of heroic and yet rakish detective in his delivery. It’s just jarring when he goes from some great affected line delivery, like him shivering and crazily muttering ‘something’s wrong with me…’ after he sees a spooky fishman hybrid and loses sanity points (we’ll get there), and then his next line is him describing the puzzle piece in front of you in the most deadpan and unstated way, like he’s someone reading a label off something in his garage.
On the list of things you never want to encounter in a spooky shrine, a statue to Cthulhu is probably pretty high up there.
The story also suffers a bit from that classic horror trope; the main character is such a profoundly dense skeptic when the story requires it, to an absurd degree that it drags on your suspension of disbelief. Early in Innsmouth, pre the whole ‘literally-everyone-in-this-town-is-trying-to-shoot-you’ thing (spoilers), you’re waiting in a guy's house for him to come home and ask him some questions. His daughter is playing with some crayons, talking about how ‘mommy’ is stuck upstairs in the attic since she bites. She's also drawing a picture of a clear fish monster, labelled ‘mommy’. Jack does what every adventure protagonist would do, and opens the door to the attic just to have the obvious spooky fish monster attack him then run off. Jack's response about what happened a minute later to another character? “Must have been some kind of animal”, again delivered like he's reading the label off of some paint thinner in his garage. I know the guy’s a little affected up top since the 6-year split personality thing, but I mean, come on dude. You know you spent your fugue state looking up magic rituals, and you have to actually be willfully dumb to not put together the several overheard conversations at this point. You saw a literal fish monster slap you around then run away, come on.
I think I’m going to need a bigger revolver.
I often felt confused about what Jack as a character concept is supposed to be, and how he’s actually written and presented in the game. That bit I said earlier about him being an alcoholic is never addressed or brought up in any matter in-game; it’s only mentioned in a journal entry you can read in your inventory. Throughout the game, he’s also plagued by first-person visions of events that are about to happen, or of just general spooky mood things through the eyes of a spooky monster. There is an explanation given…in the last cutscene. Jack himself doesn’t even mention these visions in the game, outside of optional journal entries. Sometimes he was a noir-styled detective who was stubbornly skeptical about things despite his backstory you’d think would make him more likely to buy in, sometimes he was a heroic figure who would sass a villain during his monologue and backtalk J.Edgar Hoover (it gets a little weird); I was never quite sure what Jack was supposed to be, and he comes off an unfocused character.
As you can see by the title header, the game in some ways really reminds me of an immersive sim. While it lacks the non-linearity of the genre, it has the same focus on atmosphere and immersive interface. Like Thief, just minus the additional stealth mechanics and insane attention to details. Like an immersive sim-lite, basically, like a less good cousin.
In the first half of the game, it's entirely an atmospheric stealth game with some puzzles thrown in. You can lean around corners, crouch, and enter into a ‘hiding mode’ that brings your FOV way out and has you move slower, which is something I never entirely figured out the point of as just crouch walking makes you quiet enough to avoid detection. The stealth mechanics are as basic as they come, but they’re functional so the game has already overcome Red Ninja, the saddest of stealth game competition.
Once you do get an arsenal of weaponry, the game continues the immersive vibe in some pretty satisfying ways. You have no reticule, and no ammo counter; you have to aim the old fashioned way, and count your shots yourself. There's no HUD elements at all given the lack of ammo counter, and even your health is shown only through the amount of blood splatter on your screen.
Jack can get just a little ****ed up in this game.
You can suffer locational damage to specific limbs that gives you a specific debuff of course, and the same is true for the more human enemies; shooting one of those damned tainted Innsmouthians in their leg will slow them down as they limp around, and headshots do about what you expect. I personally enjoyed this realistic implementation of gun shooting when it was done sparingly enough that it wasn’t a full blown action game. “Good thing this game doesn’t turn into an action game then, Octopus!”, you may be saying. You sweet summer child, we’ll get there…
Adding to this game's whole atmospheric and immersive vibe is perhaps its greatest strength; the sanity mechanic, and the effects it has on the game itself.
You have a hidden sanity meter in Dark Corners of the Earth, largely inspired by the TTRPG system Call of Cthulhu, that dynamically lowers as you witness terrible and eldritch things and spooky little one-off jumpscare traps, with time slowly restoring any lost sanity points. Keyword being slowly. Apparently madness is only mostly temporary in this game, don't worry about it. Looking at enemies for too long drains your sanity, specific unavoidable events in the story knock your sanity down a few pegs, and the game is also littered with avoidable environmental spooks that will also make you go mad. As you lose sanity, different random atmospheric effects will play out from glitchy visuals and screen warping, to auditory hallucinations, to blurry vision and Jack talking to himself a whole lot about things watching you from just off screen. If you take too much sanity damage, you'll even trigger a game over that occasionally plays a randomized animation; Jack can devolve into maniacal laughter, or start choking himself amongst a few others. Mostly it just fades into black on a game over screen though. The sanity game over is pretty rare outside of a few specific sections, so it's mostly just about playing through the effects rather than having to constantly worry about it killing you.
The biggest drain of your sanity is from looking at the monstrosities you encounter, which is of course a hard task at times. I personally really like this layer to the game; it feels both entirely fundamental to the Lovecraft source material, and it also adds a sort of balancing act to the combat. You're forced into shooting things that should not be (you cannot understand how long I had to stop myself from dropping that reference) once you get your arsenal, but have to also keep in mind that just by looking at them to blast ‘em with lead handshakes, you're losing sanity. Spend too long in a firefight without cowering away from the ooh spooky monsters occasionally, and you're going to start losing it a little bit and having to deal with blurry vision and Jack's shaky hands. It's a fantastic system, just an exquisite idea for a horror game like this and a perfect adaptation of the source material made into a tangible gameplay effect.
Stab fishmen sorcerers in the face with knives. Kick fishmen sorcerers in the crotch with steel toe shoes. Roundhouse kick fishmen sorcerers into trashcans.
There's also plenty of puzzles sprinkled around. Unlike something like last article’s Nocturne with its simple key hunting and maybe single switch flipping, the puzzles are a little more significant this time around. You still find keys and flip switches in Dark Corners, but there's also some actual logic puzzles at play here and even ones that make you have to actually read the notes you find; the absolute terror! The game really likes its combination safe locks, that much is certain. There's a few things that qualify as big boss encounters that are also essentially glorified puzzles.
That being said, some of the puzzles of this game have a bad habit of being mostly unexplained. It will frequently just drop something on you with no clue what your overall objective even is with it. This is really common in the game’s much foreshadowed rough second half, which we will get to proper real soon. The most egregious example of this is when you stumble onto a shrine to everyone’s favourite octopus-dragon-man, dread Cthulhu; you have to move a statue around on a track to a very specific point then hit a switch, only the game conveys literally nothing about this to you at any point. This is particularly the case with most of the puzzle bosses, and especially the final boss. Goddamn, the final boss of this game is a mess.
If you haven't gathered by now, there is a pretty jarring shift from the first half of the game or so into the last half. Once you leave Innsmouth, the game undergoes a startling metamorphosis into much more of an action-horror game, rather than the atmospheric stealth-focused immersive sim-esque experience of the first part. It's also where the games' more rough and unfinished edges make themselves very much known, being what I'm guessing was the most rushed part of the game development wise. I don't mind the immersive combat of Dark Corners, but when it becomes almost the entire game it begins to affect the overall experience; it's not really suited for this kind of thing, and it definitely shows. The second half or so just drags and drags after a while, as you go from one action scene to the next in between puzzles here and there. It's by far the weakest aspect of the game, which is a shame since it's roughly half the game.
The real kicker with this game; it's objectively unfinished. Dark Corners barely made its initial Xbox release, let alone its PC release. You can definitely tell that the game was hotglued together from distinctly separate pieces in order to make it out the door for what was about its 6th projected release date, rushed all to hell. The previously mentioned optional journal entries do a whole lot of heavy narrative lifting of major plot points which I’m attributing to Headfirst not having time to make cutscenes to convey them. There’s a point where a villain character is arrested by your at-the-time federal agent buddies only to then apparently have later escaped, which isn’t seen or mentioned, as the next section picks up with you chasing him again inexplicably. This villain's dastardly plan, let alone the specific role the cult he leads plays, is never really established in a clear way outside of some kinda vague journal entries, and I'm filling in a lot myself through my knowledge of the source material. At one point there's a mention of them trying to unleash some biological threat for the highest bidder which is an odd plot point for sure, and one never brought up again afterwards. I’m attributing this unfocused story to the fact the game isn’t finished. The game's initial story idea was a non-linear RPG going off what Headfirst first described it as, and I think this was them scrambling to attach things together once it became obvious that wasn’t going to work.
Gaining X-Ray vision and being able to see through the ground textures after a cutscene once was pretty cool, really captured the feeling of losing my mind in that final leg of the game.
Even with numerous patches applied like with the GOG version the game is a mess of bugs and glitches, some that in fact still impede your ability to progress. The worst part of the game for this is the last third or so, where I encountered more than just a few issues that cracked through Headfirst’s duct tape job that required full restarts to fix in some cases. There were at least 4 times I can remember where a door I was supposed to go through wouldn't open, requiring a reload. On the final boss and last escape scene alone I encountered no less than 3 separate issues that required me to restart the game each time, or go out of my way to avoid triggering them which got a little frustrating to say the least.
These technical issues combined with the game's often unexplained puzzle sections led to many times where I almost called it quits on Dark Corners, in all honesty. I even got so far as scrambling to find another game to fill its spot in this Halloween game review series before deciding that’s cringe, dude and to go back in and just finish it; you came closer than you know to having an Octopus review of Haunting Ground.
It’s all a shame, as Dark Corners of the Earth has the parts to make a truly great game in it, weighed down by some unfortunate issues like the developers not being able to finish it. I can’t tell you how into it I was for the lengthy Innsmouth half. Its atmospheric and immersive design as your making your way trying to uncover what the **** is going on in this town leads into one of the single greatest extended chase sequences I’ve played in a video game, taken directly from the original Shadow Over Innsmouth story. The game's sound design is exquisite, layering in whisperings and jarring noises as you lose your mind (temporarily) as you gaze upon eldritch contradictions of an insane cosmos. Even parts of the second half action game shift had some good ideas, dragged by a bunch of frustrating things around them. There’s a lengthy bit where you’re making your way through the mansion of the Cult of Esoteric Dagon that I actually enjoyed despite it not feeling like the same game that I was playing in the beginning. When you’re fighting back waves of abominations on an isolated boat as everything/one is being torn apart around you I was locked in; until a door I was supposed to get through wouldn’t open, or my screen would be permanently warping despite my sanity being (mostly) fine at that moment requiring a reload, or Jack would ruin the spooky mood by saying something entirely immersion breaking in a neutral tone like that of a disinterested parent.
That’s a confirmed Lovecraft chant. It’s really all in those I’a’s and the proper use of z’s.
Dark Corners of the Earth is something I have a hard time recommending. One on hand, it captures the source material so well in ways that not a lot of other Lovecraft video game adaptations have with its initial focus on immersion and first-person atmosphere. On the other hand though, it’s an unfinished mess of technical issues and it almost drove me to stop playing it entirely, making it close to the dreadful Red Ninja which will hopefully remain the only game to truly best me. I’d say it’s worth a playthrough for a diehard Lovecraft fan at least, though you will likely get a little frustrated at the rougher edged video game parts of it for sure. I recommend anyone to at least play the first Innsmouth section, then I’d say don’t bother playing anything else other than maybe the first bit of the next refinery section. So, like a 60% recommendation, which unfortunately is my final score for the rushed, uneven and ultimately bittersweet disappointment of Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
Until next time, when the Lovecraft continues as I’m just a bit of a fan…
Pros
- + Great adaptations of the Lovecraft source material.
- + Stellar atmosphere at times, aided by some great sound design.
Cons
- - Severe bugs and technical issues due to being an unfinished game.
- - Frustratingly vague and unexplained puzzles.
- - Uneven story and main character.
- - A tonal shift roughly half way through changes the game in some less than great ways.
6
out of 10
Overall
Dark Corners of the Earth is an unfortunate game. A great core and some truly immersive design ideas are utterly dragged down by a myriad of technical issues and bugs, on top of really rough edges in other areas of the game. It's a shame, as the Dark Corners could have been something much more if Headfirst Productions were able to finish it.
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