Here we go again, another Lovecraft game. Did I mention that H.P Lovecraft is one of my most favourite authors? His personal experiences really shaped the genre of ‘cosmic horror’ that he more or less molded if not entirely birthed, as well as his influence in the weird fiction genre, and I think in regards to literary horror his impact cannot be denied, his descriptive writi- oh right, I already did that spiel in the last Halloween month review, Dark Corners of the Earth. Well, tiny recap: H.P Lovecraft was a pretty weird guy who inspired a lot of other horror writers, imitators, and most importantly to this and the last article, video games.
Last time we ventured into the murky and janky waters of a mid-2000s PC game with a really rough development cycle, so this time I figured I’d go further back into the history of Lovecraft video game adaptations with a little game I don’t think quite gets its due.
Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet is a 1993/’94 adventure game of the ol’ point-and-click variety, and one I don’t hear too much talk of. It’s not some truly obscure game or anything, but I think it’s often glossed over in the lengthy annals of early 1990’s adventure-puzzlers for the reason that it’s a very lengthy and storied list. The same year had it released alongside Simon the Sorcerer (developed by some of the the same people as Dark Corners!), the first Gabriel Knight game, mother****ing Myst, Return to Zork, Leisure Suit Larry 6, Day of the Tentacle, and also mother****ing Sam and Max Hit the Road. That’s some pretty stiff competition, not counting Leisure Suit Larry; ‘stiff’ pun not intended, I just really dislike that series. That’s also not accounting for the rest of the adventure games released both before and after as the early 90’s was a wild time for the genre.
Lovecraft(TM)
Shadow of the Comet comes to us from Infogrames, the French game developer put on the map by 1992’s Alone in the Dark. They approached Chaosium, the company that holds the general gaming stake on Lovecraft’s works as granted to them by the larger Arkham House Publishing, on getting the official Lovecraft license for a series of games to be designated with the ‘Call of Cthulhu’ title prefix. Why doesn’t Alone in the Dark have that ‘Call of Cthulhu’ in its title then? Lead developer Frédérick Raynall came to the decision to revoke the official Lovecraft license allegedly due to how he perceived the game moving past its initial Lovecraft beginnings. He thought the game was more akin to its other inspirations of Dario Argento and George Romero than Lovecraft, and so walked back the license to a more general ‘inspired by the works of H.P Lovecraft’. This is kind of strange to me, as Alone in the Dark is about a spooky mansion cursed by black magic and sorcerers that houses an elder god beneath it that drives men insane; that’s Lovecraft if I’ve ever seen it, you can't get more ‘inspired by’ than that.Shadow of the Comet, and also its sequel Prisoner of Ice, were actually foreshadowed in Alone in the Dark. You can find a book in the Derceto Manor’s guest bedroom written by a Lord Boleskine detailing him encountering a New England fishing village with ‘signs of degeneracy’ amongst the townspeople, as well as a strange forest clearing where the stars seem closer and brighter than anywhere else, with a piercing clarity that let you see them in all their hideous glory. In that account, Boleskine writes about how he will return to the clearing the following night to see Halley’s Comet do it’s flyby, with that event greatly influencing Shadow of the Comet if you can’t tell by the name.
The book in Alone in the Dark doesn’t detail it, but spoilers; it doesn’t end too well for Boleskine in Shadow of the Comet.
After the genre defining success of AitD, it was kind of a big deal back in the day, Infogrames was set to follow it up with… something completely different. Where Alone in the Dark was the survival horror genre crawling out of the primordial French muck to be further refined over the years, a true prototype far ahead of its time in some ways, Shadow of the Comet is a simple point-and-click adventure game. This isn’t a knock at the game at all, as I think this kind of genre really befits the Lovecraft style.
Think about it; Lovecraft’s stories tell of cosmos and worlds unaffected by logic, sanity, and rationality, of detached un-emotional writing. The characters are generally always at risk of losing their minds, or dying in some really silly way to a series of contrived circumstances. What else does that sound like? A 90’s era adventure game, with ‘moon logic’ and absurd deaths that are just there to make you save-scum and drive you insane, commanded by the elder gods of the developers.
On an actually serious note, I do think this genre fits the material given how much of Lovecraft’s work is investigatory in nature, with the characters frequently piecing together scattered ramblings of historical information or personal accounts to uncover the horror going on in that particular story. Point-and-clicks as a genre usually feel investigatory since you’re ultimately ‘investigating’ around if you think about it, solving puzzles and gathering information as you go.
Shadow of the Comet was inspired by two specific stories; the again much-adapted Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Dunwich Horror. I’m not going to lie to you, both of those are some of my least favourite Lovecraft stories, but I swear I won’t hold it against Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet. It’s not a 1-for-1 adaptation of either, taking some liberties with them both luckily. I think this was a good idea, as Shadow Over Innsmouth is, again, kind of one of the most famous twists in Lovecraft’s work I think and so changing it up here and dropping the entire real twist keeps it feeling fresh.
The game first launched in 1993 on floppy disks published by Infogrames as well as their US label I-Motion, but 1994 saw it release on CD-ROM with some promised improvements. These included mouse controls as the original game was exclusively keyboard only, more voice acting of better quality over the floppy disk version, a cinematic style intro, and even a sort of game mode called the ‘Lovecraft Museum’, where you can walk around in a mock exhibit featuring various references and objects from various Lovecraft mythos stories, as well as referring to Lovecraft himself as part of his own lore. It’s pretty cute.
Referencing ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’ is a pretty deep cut; it was a story he ghostwrote to glaze up Harry Houdini, and did so almost entirely for the advance paycheque he got from Weird Tales magazine for it. He wasn’t even credited for writing it until an editors note in a reprint 15 years later. Not a bad story, though; Lovecraft almost never phoned anything in.
Shadow Over Illsmouth’s Sadistic Puzzles
The game takes place in a town called ‘Illsmouth’ which is obviously supposed to be the famous Innsmouth from the titular story the game is largely inspired by. Why change it like this? I’m not sure, but maybe to keep it free of any of the established lore and characters is my guess; the towns are very different in just about every conceivable way, other than the obvious similarities anyone familiar with the story will already be able to guess. It’s strange being that this is an official licensed product, is all; they didn’t need to play it coy and fudge specific names like that.There’s also some comical inconsistencies with some of the names here. The main character is referred to as John T. Carter in several spots despite being named John T. Parker in the game proper. One of these inconsistencies is even on the back box cover of the game.
He’s also described as a young astronomer, despite being a photographer/journalist in the actual game.
There’s a few spots in-game where this occurs in the dialogue text, but in the audio he’s always referred to as Parker. Apparently Carter is a leftover from an old treatment of the game script that somehow didn’t get edited after they changed it at some point. Confused yet? People have found through cracking open some hidden files in the game that plenty of other characters have references to old names of theirs that were changed for the final release, but none of them have made it into the actual game. It’s nothing of real consequence outside of some kind of interesting glimpses into the games development, I just wanted to talk about it.
Shadow of the Comet sees you as John T. Parker-Carter in the year 1910, a photographer who having read Boleskine’s earlier report of the town of Illsmouth from 76 years prior has decided to investigate the town to see Halley’s Comet as it makes another flyby, instead of recognizing how terrible and eldritch this **** sounds considering it left Boleskine locked in an insane asylum after. This kind of unbound curiosity has never had any negative effect on anyone in a Lovecraftian story, he’s probably going to be fine. Carter works for the British Scientific News paper, and after convincing his boss to let him investigate the alleged astronomical miracle at play here he sets out for Illsmouth, arriving 3 days before the comet’s next visit. What could go wrong?
You and Carter will soon come to realise that some of the people in the town are maybe just a little off, both in personality and sanity and also physically. You as the player may even recognize some obvious similarities some of them share with some real world people. Your host, Dr. Cobble, bears just a minor resemblance to a certain Vincent Price, for example, complete with his signature mustache.
The similarities don’t stop there; you also meet Jack Nicholson, someone with a faint Sean Connery resemblance, famous Mexican glamour queen Katy Jurado, legendary noir-genre actor Robert Mitchum, and plenty of others I likely didn’t personally recognize. Oh wait, there was one more I did notice. The town gentleman above the post office who knows far more than he appears to bears a vague similarity to a certain Howard Philips Lovecraft.
It’s not a 100% likeness, but he does have the same gauntness and vague ‘I’m a strange man’ vibe.
The game follows the typical point-and-click adventure strappings, being you pointing and clicking around while solving puzzles that generally involve using the right item on the right object. The game does make some personal touches to the formula, mainly in the interface and how you interact with the world around John Carter. As you approach objects you can pick up, a little dotted line will follow Carter’s eyes as he looks at it to point it out to you. It’s a neat little system, and one I’ve never seen in another adventure game. It takes a lot of guess work out of the game with what objects you can pick up which is much appreciated.
Something new to the CD-ROM version, which I’m using here from GOG of course, is the addition of mouse controls. The first floppy release had only keyboard commands, which from what I’ve gathered were just a little unwieldy. The power of CD-ROM lets you use your mouse like in any other PC adventure game to move your cursor around, and I can’t even imagine playing a game like this any other way. Right clicking on something brings up your usual interaction menu, letting you either look at it, pick it up, speak to it if it’s a person, and so on.
The other way Shadow of the Comet differentiates itself over other games is unfortunately not a good one, being its movement controls and general interface. You can move Carter around in one of two ways, using either arrow keys or with your mouse. Neither work quite like you’d expect. The mouse controls don't make Carter move to where you clicked like any other game in this genre, but instead you click and hold the mouse to move him in that direction. Click and hold on the left side of the screen to make him move to the left, to the right to move him that way, and so on. The arrow keys are the more fluid of the two methods, but both the keys and the mouse have a strange thing where you can't move diagonally and instead can only move in 4 rigid directions like you're on tracks.
The biggest issue I routinely had with it was that you have to be close enough to the environmental object you're trying to interact with already for Parker to actually perform the action since he doesn't move there on his own accord, and sometimes you have to be in a really specific spot for it to actually work. It’s most noticeable when trying to talk to people, where you have to be in one certain specific spot close to them for it to work, and I often would have to spend a few seconds awkwardly moving Carter around them and while spamming the ‘Talk’ action to get him to talk to the weirdo. It’s a strange thing for a point-and-click, honestly, and there were plenty of times where I got a little frustrated with the awkwardness of it. It’s not awful, as you can and do get used to it after a while, but it's the one aspect of the game that I’d say is the weakest. Again, why even have this issue in the first place? Just have Parker move on his own to the right spot when you tell him to interact with something.
Being a game in the ‘strange puzzles that often make little to no sense in why they’re necessary’ genre, your time in Shadow of the Comet is going to be spent “collecting” (read: stealing) every item that isn't bolted down and using them to solve various mostly environmental puzzles, occasionally having to use an item instead on some unfortunate soul. The game is sort of broken up into 3 days, the countdown for Halley’s Comet to appear again. Each day you have to complete certain puzzles, talk to certain people, and progress events as you go. The series of flags and triggers you have to set in order to progress the state of the town can get a little dense, and a big part of the game can be often wandering around until something new appears or happens.
If you’re familiar with the Shadow Over Innsmouth story, you'll likely have the right idea as to why some of the townspeople are the way they are, or if you’re familiar with Dark Corners of the Earth at least from the last article. I think the game has taken more of the plot of The Dunwich Horror than Innsmouth, and has more or less taken Dunwich and placed it in the general setting concept of Innsmouth. It works I think, and honestly I think the story is one of the better parts of the game. I’d say it’s like 30% Innsmouth, 50% Dunwich Horror, 20% it's own thing. It’s not up to actual Lovecraft standards of course, but that's to be expected.
The pacing of the game is definitely something that could be improved. It begins well, quickly bringing you and Carter to the town and leaving you to your own devices to try and decipher the puzzles and interactions before you. It's in the ‘ramp up’ that the game occasionally stumbles. Once ‘Ancient Ones’ and R’yleh get namedropped, the game carries a really strong sense of building doom that then gets deflated by a couple of specific disappointing moments. There’s a stretch of the game where it’s really building up the town lighthouse, being related to the central villain and cited as the area where you’ll find answers. You go through a convoluted series of the usual puzzles and interactions to work your way up to it, you climb in through a window and ascend…then immediately leave within seconds, through a strange method we’ll get to later. You learn nothing, see nothing, and it’s never mentioned again. There’s a few times spread through-out the game where it feels like there’s no present and driving goal in front of you and so you must do the dreaded ‘aimlessly wandering around until something happens’ that’s all too common in the genre. It’s some odd pacing for sure, which can at times hold down what is a really interesting and dense story.
What’s Shadow of the Comet’s moon logic rating, the depths of the insane puzzle solutions that often dominate games of this genre? Shadow of the Comet gets a solid ‘eh’ in this category. Most of the puzzle solutions are sane, ironically given the subject matter, with only a few specific spikes into some insanity that are definitely moon-ish in their logic, particularly in the final bits of the game. As for its difficulty rating, this game can be a little ****ed. I’d put it up there with some of Sierra’s output like the King's Quest series. Even with a pretty low moon logic rating, there’s still a lot of really difficult puzzles. It’s a combination of the games lack of contextual information about your environment sometimes, combined with some classic ‘we’re not going to explain even what this puzzles objective is’ from the developers.
Yup, this town is ****ed.
In many other point-and-clicks, your characters ‘look’ command is a really important asset in your toolkit. Using it can give you some context about what’s around you through your character's words, which can come in really handy for figuring things out. In Shadow of the Comet, for whatever reason so very little things are actually observable like this. Parker says absolutely nothing about like 90% of the important things on a given screen, such as puzzle objects or interactables especially. It makes a lot of the puzzling obstacles you have to overcome really undefined and hard to figure out. A great example of this is at the top of the previously mentioned lighthouse section. At the top, you find a pair of Icarus-style wings behind a wall mounted sun dial, for some unexplained reason other than it’s a point-and-click game. If you use them right away to fly off the lighthouse, the wings will collapse and you’ll instantly die, as befitting the set-ups myth inspiration.
I figured it was a direct reference and so looked around for some source of wax before going up the lighthouse, and could find nothing in town. Actually, there’s a lantern right next to the sundial that you’re supposed to open up to take the candle out of. The issue is Carter says literally nothing about it when you tell him to look at it; I had no idea it was even an interactable, as I figured if it was he’d say something about it. You also have to be in a really specific spot to even open it up in the first place like we also talked about earlier, which also made me think it wasn’t something important as the first few times I tried to do anything with the lantern nothing happened.
There’s a point where you interrupt a ritual in the spooky New England forest just after coming out of a screen transition. The camera changes to be a hand drawn shot with Parkers back facing the camera, and suddenly you have to hide. There’s a few issues with it. One, I wasn’t even aware I had to hide to begin with as the mouse cursor showed that it was a dialogue instead of the usual arrows telling me I could move; one death resulted from me just standing there thinking it was a cutscene. Two, I then tried to use the mouse to move behind a tree or something, clicking away on the sides of the screen, to no avail. Another death. I then figured out after 4 attempts that you can only use the arrow keys to move yourself behind a tree. It was maybe just a little silly, and in this case was mostly an issue that I’d only encounter in the CD-ROM version with its mouse movement. Afterwards, I exclusively used the arrow keys to move around.
There’s a few hard puzzles that just don’t really explain what your objective is at all or what you’re supposed to be doing in it. There’s one in a photo dark room where you have to develop some spooky photos you just took, and the game does not explain in any capacity how you’re supposed to go about it. There’s a sink, and some chemicals; do you not know how to do this already? I fussed around for like 20 minutes of trial-and-error before I finally actually Googled the chemical process of developing photos circa 1910, which is something a video game should never ****ing ask of you. I don’t even know what they expected for someone in 1993 who couldn’t search the Internet for that, and this isn’t even mentioning how the game calls some of the chemicals involved a different name. You could presumably just brute force it with trial-and-error eventually, but I would call that some bad puzzle design personally.
Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet also ****ing hates you, and wants you to die for the indifferent enjoyment of its dark masters. There’s a lot of really silly and cheap deaths in this game, where you die from making one bad decision like at numerous points in the spooky cemetery crypt just for going through a door you shouldn’t have, or actual invisible pits you can walk over. I will also give a warning; there are a few specific points where you can inadvertently ‘soft-lock’ yourself where you will be unable to progress, and for reasons that are not at all obvious. One particular point that caused me a ****ing nightmare amount of time to figure out was when the Robert Mitchum look-alike mentions he’s just got the key to the cemetery, and he’s going to head there. You vitally need this key. The trick is that you have to talk to him first to hear all that, then before he leaves the screen you must talk to him again, then he’ll give you the key. If you do not talk to him the second time before he leaves, then you’ve locked yourself. This was not very apparent at all, and I will admit I had to actually look up a walkthrough to even figure this one out.
The game is, for its time, good looking. The actual graphical power of it is a little weak compared to some other games that came out the same year which was a common sentiment from reviews at the time, but the presentation of it all is fantastic. Illsmouth itself has a consistent vibe of underlying decay seen in the crumbling New England buildings and rotting fishing boats, the backgrounds and objects are impressively detailed, and there is some spookiness sometimes to its aesthetic design. There are some successful attempts at setting the atmosphere with the environment around you, like when you first enter the town cemetery. The imagery Infogrames employed here is actually fairly evocative sometimes, even if the character involved does look exactly like Jack Nicholson or someone else which only took me slightly out of it every time. The opening intro movie unique to the CD version I think is particularly a stand out in this regard; it really sets the vibe going forward with its flashing images and pretty impressive score.
The game gets a little wild during the finale.
Another great subjective element of the game that needs mentioning is the voice acting. It is so charmingly varied in quality. Parker sounds like an eloquent Shakespearian stage actor who really projects his voice for the rear seats, but then not-Nicholson sounds like one of the devs’ English cousins who was a little sleepy in the recording booth. They also all really sell every Lovecraftian chant of ‘Iaaaaeeiighuturturghgih f’taghn nyuhluoah!’, they pronounce every single syllable and enunciate every nonsensical consonant, let me tell you; each uttering of the tongues of the ancient gods is astoundingly unique from character to character, but always fascinating. It’s some great entertainment, at least if you’re someone like me who is greatly entertained by really cheesy voice acting. My personal favourite voice actor is the one for Lord Boleskine; he's supposed to be Scottish I think, but falls so short of the mark that it's entertaining every time he speaks.
It may have come off as sounding like I hated Shadow of the Comet earlier with my lengthy but valid complaints, but I do not hate Shadow of the Comet in the end. It’s a flawed game I think looking back with its awkward interface, odd pacing issues and often overly hard puzzles, but it also possesses a quantifiable amount of soul and respect for the source material that I think makes it mostly overcome the dead weight, and it's not any worse than other point-and-clicks of the time. Some of its lesser aspects are common with the early 90’s point-and-clicks in its defence, other than the odd interface decisions which are unique to this game for whatever reason. You can tell that Infogrames had a lot of fun making this though, and I think were some real fans of Lovecraft and his brand of horror. It’s very much of its time given that you need to constantly save scum just to avoid really silly deaths, but the whole presentation of the thing really sells it for me.
I’d recommend Shadow of the Comet for people well versed in and tolerant of the inane sadism of this classic era of point-and-clicks. I think someone who isn't into the genre and its insanity probably isn't going to have a fun time here given the games difficulty, and even fans of the genre may have a rough time with the games clunky interface and controls. If this hypothetical person is also a Lovecraft fan, then maybe the game can make up the difference as it's again a good pastiche story in that regard, and has some solid cosmic horror atmosphere at times. It's obviously not up to the standards of Lovecraft's writing of course, but if you just pretend it was written by one of the many imitators who added stories into his Cthulhu mythos after his death to really mixed results, it can be a good time.
Until next time, when we play the final horror game of the month. It’s not even another Lovecraft game, but related to another author entirely as apparently I really have a horror game type…
Pros
- + Some great imagery and atmosphere.
- + Surprisingly dense story that's an accurate Lovecraft inspired journey.
- + Greatly entertaining voice acting.
Cons
- - Awkward at times interface, even for it's genre.
- - Overly challenging puzzles; you should never have to Google the process for developing photos circa the early 1900's to be able to solve something.
- - Sadistic deaths for the pleasure of the Ancient Ones.
7
out of 10
Overall
Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet is a perfectly serviceable point-and-click adventure game, though with some odd interface decisions and some perhaps overly punishing puzzles because of those odd decisions. The game is made with a lot of love of the Lovecraft inspirational source material however, and it definitely shows in the overall fun final product.
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